Why would you... Put a thing that gets very hot... In a place with no ambient coolant medium... Like if you are on the moon and there is a radiation leak, there is no atmospheric diffusion. If you have any line of sight, you may as well be stood next to it, barring inverse square law of ray.
Update: This can be done in a non-bonkers way I am now learning because of some very impressive cooling technologies that have little to nothing to do with BWR reactors
I'd like more info on this if you have time!
Now my question is, what’s the benefit of this?
Why would you do this
Where the fuck does the radiation *go* when you are done using it The moon is TINY Its total volume is TINY Its going to get very polluted VERY fast
Hun, this is just noise. /pats her hand and then takes her over to get a boozy cider at the nerd pub. Duffy is saying this because he is trying to distract from something. Whether that something is what he's REALLY doing to the agency, or to run cover for his boss.
Remains to be seen.
You are so smart.
Like here's me getting hung up on technicals and you bypass it and go straight for the office politics and see stuff for what's actually happening. I was baited by the technology, and wanting to feel smart. And that's why I got duped.
And the opposite was the reason why Elon Musk had me fooled for so long. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and it took someone like you to go "no, hun. He's full of shit. Things don't work like that." And you ARE smart, hun.
It wasn't until he started slipping up and going right wing/Nazi crap (back when he bought Twitter) that he finally started tripping my BS meter.
Nah. You're the big brain, hun. Half of what you talk about goes over my head. I've just been trained to know bullshit when I see it.
Detecting bullshit is 10x harder than any amount of math or physics, I promise you.
Seeing through what young Sailors tell you in order to get out of work/avoid trouble is excellent practice. XD
Because America is a very serious country where only the best ideas rise to the top
Turning our moon into a second sun for the funny.
He's PROBABLY actually talking about a really big RTG and he's just an idiot and referring to it wrong That'd be my guess You could do a proper reactor on the moon but you'd need a fully contained unit like a Pebble bed reactor etc
Nah I read it, it's to keep the nuclear rocket proposal on the table long term It's a funding holder to keep research dollars on hand, they won't actually do this, it wouldn't make sense, you can just use solar. it's legit just to keep the nerva rocket for deep space use on the table
He probably thinks solar panels are gay.
apart from ways to cool via thermal sinking or radiative cooling (including possible high temperature ones) for the more than an RTG scale power, space concepts at this time seem focused on stirling cycle reactors rather than coolant loops.
I mean we have an RTG on The Voyager and it’s fine
Yeah that's thermoelectric. They're talking about a full fat water cooled reactor here, with void coeffiency and temperature reactivity coefficiency and heat transfer coefficiency, moderator temperature coefficiencies, etc, etc. Its one hell of a lot more complex than a thermoelectric battery.
off-topic but i believe the abbreviation we use in Russian is superior. we call it RITEG (RadioIsotope ThermoElectric Generator), pronounced ree-tag
I can't speak on it too much but it makes sense. Your only other practical option is solar, which is highly challenging in the lunar environment. Thermal management is very possible with heat pumps, radiators. These concepts have been in development for a long time, plenty of material on NTRS.
Sure but like... A nuclear thermoelectric battery, I 100% get. A nuclear power cell with some xenon voltaic, I get that too. I do not get a full blown water cooled reactor on the moon. That's a hard sell for me.
That said my understanding of nuclear science is like, out of date by some 15 years or so, so there could be some new material process or coolant workflow I'm unaware of that solves all of these problems.
RTGs are far too low power. We're looking for multi-kW sources though, not MW, so the reactors are relatively small. Publicly available concepts are not water cooled - I believe NaK is preferable.
Wait, like lead-bismuth eutectic? That's... Okay yeah that's kinda I mean ngl, the sex appeal alone has me turning my head
Quickly found a ppt, probably better material buried in NTRS if you want to look ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation...
ty ty
This isn't a current administration thing - in-space surface nuclear power has been a goal for long-term exploration for decades.