But then you build a much bigger one on earth. New nuclear power plants are often designed to generate over 1000 MW, NASA has designed small modular nuclear plants to deploy at space bases that generate 10 KW, a completely different scale.
This is a fucking joke. I wish media wouldn't take it seriously.
I recently read this about their "new" spacestation:
The latest concept for the ROS reflects Roscosmos' changing situation in recent years, owing to sanctions and the termination of international cooperation following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to Orlov's announcement, Russia will separate its modules from the ISS once the program is completed in 2030, forming the core of the ROS, with other modules to follow.
In other words, they're just decoupling & rearranging the modules & renaming the result.
Feel free to extrapolate from that how realistic a Russian nuclear plant on the moon is.
Well, you can't put permanent infrastructure on the moon without a plan to power it. So, a power plant has to be the first step, that's why NASA has the kilopower program, even though we don't have a permanent moon base yet.
Well the sun works great for orbit around the moon, but on the surface a day/night cycle lasts a month. So that’s about 15 days of night at a time.
That's why everyone continues to talk about the lunar poles, btw, because you have an eternal twilight there, where continuous solar power might still be doable.
Yeah, theoretically if your positioning is perfect you can get that eternal twilight, where the sun just travels across the horizon in a circle. But you know the moon wobbles a bit, so while you might get a month or two of straight sun, you might get a month or two of straight darkness, where the sun is just below the horizon, just barely out of reach...
Well, at the poles, in deep craters, the bottom of the crater will never get sun, ever. As a result, these polar craters are very cold. This is pretty special because it means that any water ice that may have fallen from comet impacts or other sources will stay frozen on the surface, never melting.
Water is everything on the moon, it can be used for drinking, and as a source of oxygen for breathing, but probably more importantly, it's rocket fuel (hydrogen and oxygen). If you can collect ice on the moon you can refuel a rocket there, on a full tank you can easily make orbit given the moon's low gravity, and still have enough gas in the tank to go literally anywhere in the solar system. The moon becomes a launching point to anywhere.
I was thinking solar + battery energy storage for when the sun is 'unavailable'. It's not like having like 1k MW capacity and nothing to power makes any sense, but an area with panels and storage can definitely get things started, at least....
For sure, and that can definitely work. But, you will need three times the number of solar panels (since half the time the panels are doing nothing and if you're storing a lot of energy, that means there's a proportional amount of storage losses.)
And I honestly don't know how much mass in batteries would be needed for 15 days worth of storage, but my instincts say too much.
Keep in mind that total mass to deliver can sometimes be the biggest cost limitation. A nuclear generator that gets delivered in one launch could be cheaper than otherwise much simpler solar panels and batteries if that solution requires two or three launches.
Now I might be talking shit, but isn't there a problem with dust on the moon that means solar panels wouldn't work very well? Though I may be thinking of Mars. Or something else. Uranus?
Russia's got more of a space program than the US at this point. And they've continued to build and modernize their nuclear infrastructure, with the youngest plant coming online as recently as 2020 and seven in the pipe.
They're two industries the country has keep in relative working order while the rest of the economy was scrapped for parts back in the '90s/'00s.
Insane to think they are in a position to colonize the moon when they're quagmired in Ukraine and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of young men to keep at it. But they have the kit to try in a way no other county - except maybe China or India - could hope to.
Also, nuclear power plants are steam powered. Good luck. They /might/ drop a nuclear battery, like the kind in some old satellites or apace probes, on the moon, generating a couple hundred watts with 1970s technology.
I guess they might have old soviet stockpiles, so it'd be just the matter of dropping one on the moon. Then, maybe they could blackmail the americans to send it there.
So... The US has plans to build nuclear generators on the moon too, kilopower has been an ongoing project for the past decade and I have no doubt we'll be ready to deploy one of these reactors as soon as we start building infrastructure on the moon again in the near future.
Nuclear power is not new for space, it's an obvious choice, one of only two choices in fact. And for what it's worth, Russia/USSR has had far more nuclear powered space probes over the years than the US has, so this isn't exactly new for them either.
As for cooling, yeah, if you generate power you need to dissipate that heat. Your generator will put out heat which needs to be dealt with and then using that electricity will also generate heat which needs to be dissipated. That said, one kind of power is not harder than another, dissipating a megawatt of solar power is just as complicated as a megawatt of nuclear. So the real question is: how much power do you need? The complexity of the project will scale relative to that.
All in all, we've used nuclear power in space before and we will need to do it again, radiators are not all that hard.
Jesus fuck, Russia can barely build a coal-fired plant in Moscow these days. They're barely holding their own against a country they invaded that had virtually no preparation for being invaded because they thought a treaty protected them, so a bunch of farmers and housewives took up arms.
Good fucking luck, Vlad. Russia is a country of drunks and weaklings that can't tie their own shoes and has been embarassed on the international stage since the 19th century. You're a joke country that happens to have nuclear weapons, it's like an autistic child with a molotov cocktail.
Also, I kinda feel for Russian folks. Propaganda is a hell of a drug, and from what I’ve seen in some gaming chats many aren’t swallowing it, and seem aware of their situation.
They also planned to overrun Ukraine in three days.
Given the usual level of Russian corruption, they will notice when they want to draw power from that reactor that someone had already sold off the nuclear fuel and replaced the rods on the reactor with lead.
There's only two sources of power on other planets/outer space, and that is nuclear and solar.
Wind and water and biomass and geothermal and fossil fuels are out of the question, because of lack of said things or lack of oxygen to burn anything.
That being said, "nuclear" only works if it's steady-state and does not use water/air input. That excludes steam engines and such, and basically only leaves RTGs (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator).
These are solid-state devices (meaning they have no moving parts) and convert the heat directly into electricity using TEGs (Thermoelectric Generator). They don't need water or air input.
RTGs have an overall fuel efficiency of around 3-5%, meaning they translate around 3-5% of the radioactive decay heat of the nuclear material into electric power output.
Reactors on earth are huge and built to run at 100% all the time because that's the most economical way to do it. That is not a physics requirement, it's just the most profitable for the current economic environment. You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to and many small modular reactors currently in the licensing approval process include this ability.
Nevermind the fact that a "large" RTG only puts out about 100 watts of electricity and it's nuclear fuel must be bred in reactors beforehand. There is only enough RTG fuel for maybe 20 large units on the planet right now.
You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to
yeah i've been thinking about these reactors a lot. problem is, to make a reactor regulatable like that, the material must be fissable. I.e. you can't use PU-238 (which has a half-life of 87 years and is typically used in RTGs today), instead you'd use U-235 or sth (which is used in big nuclear reactors today). Problem is, that material is fissable (i.e. it undergoes chain reaction and runs at or just below criticality) and that is why you can build bombs out of it. Then, to bring such a reactor into space, you'd have to lift it off with a rocket, and there's your problem: You'd have to transport (large amounts of) fissable material with a rocket across earth into the sky. And that's how you provoke international nuclear conflict.
Reactor fuel and bomb fuel are very different things. Current reactors use U-235 enriched to between ~2-5% with some of the new SMR designs using fuel enriched to ~20%. Bombs use ~90% enrichment. You can't make a bomb with less than that enrichment. The physics just don't work. No one is going to think that your rocket carrying a reactor bound for the moon is secretly a bomb headed to a city.
Also the total amount of fuel you would need for something like a 100MW reactor would be on the order of 100kg. Maybe up to 500kg depending on design. A tiny fraction of a rockets payload. You could easily let international inspectors look at it before launch to ease any fears.
Current reactors use U-235 enriched to between ~2-5% with some of the new SMR designs using fuel enriched to ~20%. Bombs use ~90% enrichment. You can’t make a bomb with less than that enrichment. The physics just don’t work.
What i don't get, then, is why can nuclear power plants explode at all?
Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Basically due to a poor cost cutting design, and not training the operators in the failure modes introduced by that design, the operators were able to accidentally raise power levels faster than the automatic systems could compensate. This made a ton of heat which flash boiled the cooling water. The resulting high pressure steam blew the top off the sheet metal building. The fuel never exploded, it got hot and melted. Total death count: ~100
Three Mile Island was only a meltdown. A lot of things lined up to go wrong at the same time and the operators didn't recognize what was happening so they accidentally let the water in the core slowly boil until the fuel was uncovered and started to melt. When the next shift showed up they immediately saw what was wrong and fixed it but by then half the core had melted. (This led to a ton of lessons learned and improvements to equipment, procedures, and training) Total death count: 0
Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion. The plant lost all power from the tsunami and the back up generators were flooded. Eventually the core boiled off its water coolant. High temperature steam interacting with the zirconium cladding on the fuel started to convert into free hydrogen and oxygen and floated to the roof of the containment building. Eventually it found an ignition source and exploded. Total death count: 0 from radiation/explosion. ~50 from the unnecessary evacuation. (Evacuation deaths were mostly from people already in the hospital for other reasons that were then moved several hours away and died on route or shortly after. )
Just something to note, this is the full list of commercial nuclear power disasters. All of them. ~150 dead over ~70 years. Nuclear is by far the safest energy source.
Wait, why would wind and water be rare on other planets? Finding good places to do water-based renewables is probably gonna be difficult on most planets, but shouldn't most planets with atmospheres have wind?
yeah you're right, air can be used on mars for example. (not wind though because wind is too weak at only 6 mbar atmospheric pressure, so it can barely move anything, and especially not a heavy rotary blade from a wind turbine.) but you could use the air to drive a stirling engine or sth, maybe, if you compress it first.
but the engine has to be really low-maintenance, because repairing it is basically out of the question. repairing something very far away from any larger civilization is really difficult. and typically, things that have no moving parts (steady-state) are much less likely to break, so have much longer lifetimes.
Posting something "as a joke" makes the propaganda less propaganda?
That's how things are spread. Ofc eveyone will pretend not to take this seriously. But despite you pretending I can't understand what "Not the onion" posts are about, we're probably gonna end this with you avoiding answering me to why Russia has committed so many crimes against humanity.
First you'll pretend not to know what I'm talking about and "how does that even" or some annyoing bullshit I've seen a million times.
Just like [email protected] claims to be an American while clearly being Russian, just like MicroWave pretends he's an actual user and not a pathetic propaganda shill, you'll pretend something along those lines as well, I'm guessing.
This is a place if ridicule, not admiration. I don't know why Russia commits atrocities, and da comrade totally Russian yes, my indigenous heritage and Welsh ancestors were obviously Russian spies sent to infiltrate America during the Ice Age and 1600s and I am the culmination of this plan. Not everyone that disagrees with you is a Russian botfarm
As often as not they were chasing Americans' empty promises (and occasionally achieving the impossible as a result).
The hydrogen bomb, the probe into Venus, the Mirr Space Station... all launched in response to American campaigns.
But the USSR of the 60s/70s was a wildly different place from post collapse Nationalist Russia. They scraped much of their R&D infrastructure for parts under Yeltsin.
If they make some kind of Moon base with China, of course they’re going to put an RTG or something there; that’d make a lot of sense.
Also, even the legacy of the Soviet space program is no joke. There’s a reason Soyuz delivered astronauts around the world (including US ones) to space forever… that being said, China would definitely be the leading partner here.
Honestly putting nuclear waste on the moon is probably the best option for it. I wonder how they would hope to cool it though? Maybe just run it when the sun isn't hitting it?
But we do, we do a lot. Russia does it more. It's why the Voyager probes are still working and sending back data. It's why the curiosity and perseverance rovers persevere to this day.
I'm sorry, it seems like you think anybody is suggesting that launching nuclear waste to space should be a means of disposal for it. Clearly that's not a workable solution for a dozen reasons.
A common (and reasonable) objection to nuclear powered spacecraft is the question of "what happens if the rocket explodes?" That's really what I was responding to.
The solution for nuclear waste is frustratingly simple, bury it. It's only a political problem because of misguided nimbyism.
I agree with burying it as the best solution. I found the articles of how we mark those locations interesting as well. You need some marking that will outlive common languages. There’s even talks about breeding cats that change color when exposed to radiation.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
I mean, the surface of the moon, Mars, or any other body in the solar system without an atmosphere and magnetic field is already heavily irradiated. So ya know, dump some radioactive waste there and really it's no worse than it was before.
Would this be efficient enough without air circulation? I am not a physicist. I get that it radiates rather than making use of convection but surely radiative heat loss isn't so efficient? Radiators on earth make use of airflow right?
Basically, yeah it works. One aspect that makes it easier is that the hotter something is, the more effective radiative cooling methods are. A nuclear reactor like this is designed to run in the area of 1000 F, and it turns out that you can pump liquid salt through a radiator that size, and it can take the salt from 1200F to 700F.
Your right though, convection does make radiators far more effective, air or water just work a whole lot better than relying on radiative cooling. But regardless, you can still make radiative methods work. Every satellite in orbit has to do it, the ISS has to do it (and you can see the big grey radiators on it). And every space base will probably need to do it too.
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Translation: russian government is out of ideas on how to embezzle even more budget money.
Sees article about a new and innovative embezzlement method. Concludes that they're out of ideas.
Lol it often takes longer than a decade to build one on earth
But then you build a much bigger one on earth. New nuclear power plants are often designed to generate over 1000 MW, NASA has designed small modular nuclear plants to deploy at space bases that generate 10 KW, a completely different scale.
That's right, my friends. Tonight, we are going to Chernobyl..
And if ta rocket explodes carrying erniched uranium...
If the rocket is high enough it's not their problem. If it's low enough, they don't care about Kazakhstan
This is a fucking joke. I wish media wouldn't take it seriously.
I recently read this about their "new" spacestation:
In other words, they're just decoupling & rearranging the modules & renaming the result.
Feel free to extrapolate from that how realistic a Russian nuclear plant on the moon is.
To power what?
Well, you can't put permanent infrastructure on the moon without a plan to power it. So, a power plant has to be the first step, that's why NASA has the kilopower program, even though we don't have a permanent moon base yet.
The sun, right over there: "um, hello?"
Well the sun works great for orbit around the moon, but on the surface a day/night cycle lasts a month. So that's about 15 days of night at a time.
Obviously there's no wind on the moon and burning things makes no sense. So literally the only options left are nuclear or lots and lots of batteries.
That's why everyone continues to talk about the lunar poles, btw, because you have an eternal twilight there, where continuous solar power might still be doable.
Yeah, theoretically if your positioning is perfect you can get that eternal twilight, where the sun just travels across the horizon in a circle. But you know the moon wobbles a bit, so while you might get a month or two of straight sun, you might get a month or two of straight darkness, where the sun is just below the horizon, just barely out of reach...
yeah you're right actually, now i'm confused. then why does everybody keep talking about the lunar poles?
Well, at the poles, in deep craters, the bottom of the crater will never get sun, ever. As a result, these polar craters are very cold. This is pretty special because it means that any water ice that may have fallen from comet impacts or other sources will stay frozen on the surface, never melting.
Water is everything on the moon, it can be used for drinking, and as a source of oxygen for breathing, but probably more importantly, it's rocket fuel (hydrogen and oxygen). If you can collect ice on the moon you can refuel a rocket there, on a full tank you can easily make orbit given the moon's low gravity, and still have enough gas in the tank to go literally anywhere in the solar system. The moon becomes a launching point to anywhere.
I was thinking solar + battery energy storage for when the sun is 'unavailable'. It's not like having like 1k MW capacity and nothing to power makes any sense, but an area with panels and storage can definitely get things started, at least....
For sure, and that can definitely work. But, you will need three times the number of solar panels (since half the time the panels are doing nothing and if you're storing a lot of energy, that means there's a proportional amount of storage losses.)
And I honestly don't know how much mass in batteries would be needed for 15 days worth of storage, but my instincts say too much.
Keep in mind that total mass to deliver can sometimes be the biggest cost limitation. A nuclear generator that gets delivered in one launch could be cheaper than otherwise much simpler solar panels and batteries if that solution requires two or three launches.
Now I might be talking shit, but isn't there a problem with dust on the moon that means solar panels wouldn't work very well? Though I may be thinking of Mars. Or something else. Uranus?
There is no wind in the vacuum of space.
Pro: nothing's ever gonna kick dust on your panels except space debris or ourselves.
Con: nothing's ever gonna wipe dust off our panels.
engages windshield wipers
Vacuum... everywhere?
Dyson furiously trying to replicate this phenomenon for their next vacuum
Yeah it was Mars that I was thinking about, not the Moon.
Space lasers!!
The moon
The dark side of
Sure, and I plan to win the lottery.
Russia's got more of a space program than the US at this point. And they've continued to build and modernize their nuclear infrastructure, with the youngest plant coming online as recently as 2020 and seven in the pipe.
They're two industries the country has keep in relative working order while the rest of the economy was scrapped for parts back in the '90s/'00s.
Insane to think they are in a position to colonize the moon when they're quagmired in Ukraine and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of young men to keep at it. But they have the kit to try in a way no other county - except maybe China or India - could hope to.
The next day: "well ho-ly shit..."
They can't even handle the nuclear power plant on the territory they occupied
You don't understand, the moon needs to be liberated from lunar nazis.
Iron Sky intensifies
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Ship_Galileo which is an interesting fragment of it's time.
They also planned to take Ukraine. See how well their plans work out for them?
And that was supposed to take 3 days, so a decade here means at least a thousand years.
Yeah, that sounds doable.
The only thing that has worse cooling problems than data centers in space, is a nuclear power plant in space
Also, nuclear power plants are steam powered. Good luck. They /might/ drop a nuclear battery, like the kind in some old satellites or apace probes, on the moon, generating a couple hundred watts with 1970s technology.
I guess they might have old soviet stockpiles, so it'd be just the matter of dropping one on the moon. Then, maybe they could blackmail the americans to send it there.
On the moon isn't really "in space" in terms of temperature distribution because the heat actually has somewhere to go, the moon.
Would only be cool enough at night though.
So... The US has plans to build nuclear generators on the moon too, kilopower has been an ongoing project for the past decade and I have no doubt we'll be ready to deploy one of these reactors as soon as we start building infrastructure on the moon again in the near future.
Nuclear power is not new for space, it's an obvious choice, one of only two choices in fact. And for what it's worth, Russia/USSR has had far more nuclear powered space probes over the years than the US has, so this isn't exactly new for them either.
As for cooling, yeah, if you generate power you need to dissipate that heat. Your generator will put out heat which needs to be dealt with and then using that electricity will also generate heat which needs to be dissipated. That said, one kind of power is not harder than another, dissipating a megawatt of solar power is just as complicated as a megawatt of nuclear. So the real question is: how much power do you need? The complexity of the project will scale relative to that.
All in all, we've used nuclear power in space before and we will need to do it again, radiators are not all that hard.
Suuure russia. Ofc you are still a big mighty strong power that can beat up anyone especially all of NATO at once. Now here is cookie
Jesus fuck, Russia can barely build a coal-fired plant in Moscow these days. They're barely holding their own against a country they invaded that had virtually no preparation for being invaded because they thought a treaty protected them, so a bunch of farmers and housewives took up arms.
Good fucking luck, Vlad. Russia is a country of drunks and weaklings that can't tie their own shoes and has been embarassed on the international stage since the 19th century. You're a joke country that happens to have nuclear weapons, it's like an autistic child with a molotov cocktail.
Autistic child joke is not cool.
Also, I kinda feel for Russian folks. Propaganda is a hell of a drug, and from what I’ve seen in some gaming chats many aren’t swallowing it, and seem aware of their situation.
They also planned to overrun Ukraine in three days.
Given the usual level of Russian corruption, they will notice when they want to draw power from that reactor that someone had already sold off the nuclear fuel and replaced the rods on the reactor with lead.
Ah, so I have a joke about Soviet corruption that applies to modern Russia too
A brand new apartment building in Moscow collapses. Investigators are sent to interrogate the suspects.
First they ask the sand. The sand defends itself: "How could you even suspect me? I'm so white, pure of heart!"
Second they ask a brick. The brick replies: "Look at me, so red. An exemplary communist, how could you suspect me?"
Last, they ask the cement. The cement goes: "Why are you blaming me? I wasn't even there!"
It, like the moon, will be made of cheese.
There's only two sources of power on other planets/outer space, and that is nuclear and solar.
Wind and water and biomass and geothermal and fossil fuels are out of the question, because of lack of said things or lack of oxygen to burn anything.
That being said, "nuclear" only works if it's steady-state and does not use water/air input. That excludes steam engines and such, and basically only leaves RTGs (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator).
These are solid-state devices (meaning they have no moving parts) and convert the heat directly into electricity using TEGs (Thermoelectric Generator). They don't need water or air input.
RTGs have an overall fuel efficiency of around 3-5%, meaning they translate around 3-5% of the radioactive decay heat of the nuclear material into electric power output.
Reactors on earth are huge and built to run at 100% all the time because that's the most economical way to do it. That is not a physics requirement, it's just the most profitable for the current economic environment. You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to and many small modular reactors currently in the licensing approval process include this ability.
Nevermind the fact that a "large" RTG only puts out about 100 watts of electricity and it's nuclear fuel must be bred in reactors beforehand. There is only enough RTG fuel for maybe 20 large units on the planet right now.
yeah i've been thinking about these reactors a lot. problem is, to make a reactor regulatable like that, the material must be fissable. I.e. you can't use PU-238 (which has a half-life of 87 years and is typically used in RTGs today), instead you'd use U-235 or sth (which is used in big nuclear reactors today). Problem is, that material is fissable (i.e. it undergoes chain reaction and runs at or just below criticality) and that is why you can build bombs out of it. Then, to bring such a reactor into space, you'd have to lift it off with a rocket, and there's your problem: You'd have to transport (large amounts of) fissable material with a rocket across earth into the sky. And that's how you provoke international nuclear conflict.
Reactor fuel and bomb fuel are very different things. Current reactors use U-235 enriched to between ~2-5% with some of the new SMR designs using fuel enriched to ~20%. Bombs use ~90% enrichment. You can't make a bomb with less than that enrichment. The physics just don't work. No one is going to think that your rocket carrying a reactor bound for the moon is secretly a bomb headed to a city.
Also the total amount of fuel you would need for something like a 100MW reactor would be on the order of 100kg. Maybe up to 500kg depending on design. A tiny fraction of a rockets payload. You could easily let international inspectors look at it before launch to ease any fears.
What i don't get, then, is why can nuclear power plants explode at all?
They can't. Not in a nuclear explosion anyway.
Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Basically due to a poor cost cutting design, and not training the operators in the failure modes introduced by that design, the operators were able to accidentally raise power levels faster than the automatic systems could compensate. This made a ton of heat which flash boiled the cooling water. The resulting high pressure steam blew the top off the sheet metal building. The fuel never exploded, it got hot and melted. Total death count: ~100
Three Mile Island was only a meltdown. A lot of things lined up to go wrong at the same time and the operators didn't recognize what was happening so they accidentally let the water in the core slowly boil until the fuel was uncovered and started to melt. When the next shift showed up they immediately saw what was wrong and fixed it but by then half the core had melted. (This led to a ton of lessons learned and improvements to equipment, procedures, and training) Total death count: 0
Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion. The plant lost all power from the tsunami and the back up generators were flooded. Eventually the core boiled off its water coolant. High temperature steam interacting with the zirconium cladding on the fuel started to convert into free hydrogen and oxygen and floated to the roof of the containment building. Eventually it found an ignition source and exploded. Total death count: 0 from radiation/explosion. ~50 from the unnecessary evacuation. (Evacuation deaths were mostly from people already in the hospital for other reasons that were then moved several hours away and died on route or shortly after. )
Just something to note, this is the full list of commercial nuclear power disasters. All of them. ~150 dead over ~70 years. Nuclear is by far the safest energy source.
interesting. TIL!
Wait, why would wind and water be rare on other planets? Finding good places to do water-based renewables is probably gonna be difficult on most planets, but shouldn't most planets with atmospheres have wind?
yeah you're right, air can be used on mars for example. (not wind though because wind is too weak at only 6 mbar atmospheric pressure, so it can barely move anything, and especially not a heavy rotary blade from a wind turbine.) but you could use the air to drive a stirling engine or sth, maybe, if you compress it first.
but the engine has to be really low-maintenance, because repairing it is basically out of the question. repairing something very far away from any larger civilization is really difficult. and typically, things that have no moving parts (steady-state) are much less likely to break, so have much longer lifetimes.
"Good news, Comrade! Putin need you for high paying job at nuclear plant! Bad news, you will relocate, and is permanently!"
I'd rather be stuck on the moon than deal with the bullshit down here
Are there nuclear power plants that don’t use water now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
Ah look at that. I’ll be damned.
Again with this propaganda bullshit. Don't you people get tired of swallowing Putler's cum?
This is nottheonion. You understand the point of this place right?
Posting something "as a joke" makes the propaganda less propaganda?
That's how things are spread. Ofc eveyone will pretend not to take this seriously. But despite you pretending I can't understand what "Not the onion" posts are about, we're probably gonna end this with you avoiding answering me to why Russia has committed so many crimes against humanity.
First you'll pretend not to know what I'm talking about and "how does that even" or some annyoing bullshit I've seen a million times.
Just like [email protected] claims to be an American while clearly being Russian, just like MicroWave pretends he's an actual user and not a pathetic propaganda shill, you'll pretend something along those lines as well, I'm guessing.
This is a place if ridicule, not admiration. I don't know why Russia commits atrocities, and da comrade totally Russian yes, my indigenous heritage and Welsh ancestors were obviously Russian spies sent to infiltrate America during the Ice Age and 1600s and I am the culmination of this plan. Not everyone that disagrees with you is a Russian botfarm
By reposting something Russians bots have been using, you are part of their propaganda though.
Shit like is what led to trump.
"no bad pr"
Trump is the result of many things, the people not being listened to by the establishment had as much to do with it as Russia.
One of them is definitely the electoral college.
That's why most countries, democracies especially, prefer direct presidential elections.
Anything but blame the Democrats shit candidates huh?
They used to do this shit all the time to trick America into wasting time and resources trying to keep up with them
As often as not they were chasing Americans' empty promises (and occasionally achieving the impossible as a result).
The hydrogen bomb, the probe into Venus, the Mirr Space Station... all launched in response to American campaigns.
But the USSR of the 60s/70s was a wildly different place from post collapse Nationalist Russia. They scraped much of their R&D infrastructure for parts under Yeltsin.
waves at the sky while thinking about how hungry I am
Oh yes, moon nazis intensifies.
No they don't
They can plan it all they want
We know how new year's resolutions usually turn out
shit I'm more likely to put a nuclear power plant on the moon guarded by state of the art Mobile Suits piloted by Jedi Knights than Russia is.
Because Russian time estimates have been so very reliable the last few years
Ok
we like the moon
But not as much as cheese!
Is this before or after they conquer all of Europe?
We'll see how much of Russia still exists in its present form in a decade.
Hopefully none
Hey at least if they screw this one up it (probably) wont irradiate half the planet.
Clickbait headline.
If they make some kind of Moon base with China, of course they’re going to put an RTG or something there; that’d make a lot of sense.
Also, even the legacy of the Soviet space program is no joke. There’s a reason Soyuz delivered astronauts around the world (including US ones) to space forever… that being said, China would definitely be the leading partner here.
LOL. Are they going to build it with their robot?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LbrROeymtKw
Honestly putting nuclear waste on the moon is probably the best option for it. I wonder how they would hope to cool it though? Maybe just run it when the sun isn't hitting it?
The problem with launching nuclear materials into space is sometimes space ships blow up and that would scatter nuclear material everywhere.
That’s why we don’t do that already.
USA and the USSR already did that in the 50’s and 60’s https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=High-altitude_nuclear_explosion&wprov=rarw1
But we do, we do a lot. Russia does it more. It's why the Voyager probes are still working and sending back data. It's why the curiosity and perseverance rovers persevere to this day.
I’ve read about those too. It’s a solution for fully utilizing a here materials. Progress.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being best)
How do you feel the voyager probes affected nuclear waste stockpiles?
There is uses buts it’s unfair to say we are anywhere close to a solution.
My argument is we don’t have a solid solution and “send it to space” isn’t a solution.
Do you disagree?
I'm sorry, it seems like you think anybody is suggesting that launching nuclear waste to space should be a means of disposal for it. Clearly that's not a workable solution for a dozen reasons.
A common (and reasonable) objection to nuclear powered spacecraft is the question of "what happens if the rocket explodes?" That's really what I was responding to.
The solution for nuclear waste is frustratingly simple, bury it. It's only a political problem because of misguided nimbyism.
Oh I see. Sorry I was drinking.
I agree with burying it as the best solution. I found the articles of how we mark those locations interesting as well. You need some marking that will outlive common languages. There’s even talks about breeding cats that change color when exposed to radiation.
It’s fascinating stuff
Holy shit yeah that would be awful. Idk how I didn't consider that
A lot of people don’t think of that. I didn’t think of it until I listened to a podcast about nuclear waste.
[Citation needed]
No humans or other animals around to eat it as long as the moon doesn't come crashing down.
Or nothing hits the moon and sends said waste into space/our general direction.
The moon, angered by our disrespect, changes course and velocity to impact earth, killing us all.
Moon: "damn right"
I mean, the surface of the moon, Mars, or any other body in the solar system without an atmosphere and magnetic field is already heavily irradiated. So ya know, dump some radioactive waste there and really it's no worse than it was before.
A big radiator, that's all.
Would this be efficient enough without air circulation? I am not a physicist. I get that it radiates rather than making use of convection but surely radiative heat loss isn't so efficient? Radiators on earth make use of airflow right?
Basically, yeah it works. One aspect that makes it easier is that the hotter something is, the more effective radiative cooling methods are. A nuclear reactor like this is designed to run in the area of 1000 F, and it turns out that you can pump liquid salt through a radiator that size, and it can take the salt from 1200F to 700F.
Your right though, convection does make radiators far more effective, air or water just work a whole lot better than relying on radiative cooling. But regardless, you can still make radiative methods work. Every satellite in orbit has to do it, the ISS has to do it (and you can see the big grey radiators on it). And every space base will probably need to do it too.
That's rad as hell wtf
I'm betting it would be underground