India considers joining Russia, China to build nuclear plant on Moon.

Later:
Ukraine’s controversial but wildly successful fledgling domestic space program has successfully landed exo-atmospheric tactical drones on the moon and destroyed crucial construction components of Russia’s moon reactor facility, forcing many to question if it’s feasible to continue the project
- Onion worthy
- Fledgling? They're an ESA member and have been building rockets since there's been space programmes. Ignoring that drone part for a second the only thing they'd have to figure out is how to strap a warhead to one of their rockets, clear a launch site, do some maths, and press the button.
  
  it was pretty obviously a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the ingenuity of Ukraine and the ineptitude of Russia
  I am an NCD enjoyer

It's to serve as a power source for a potential moon base, apparently.
- Ohh, I was confused because I assumed the power would somehow be transported to Earth, which seems rather inefficient.
- I like the idea personally
  
  As an infrastructure project its conceptually pretty sick. A nuclear power plant would be fairly ideal for the first long-term human presence on the moon.
  The problem is that it's Russia and China doing it.

I'm sure that money couldn't be better spent. It's not like there are hundreds of millions of Indians living in horrific levels of poverty.

how would you even start with the cooling? that sounds like a nightmare
- ... That's a very good point actually. Vacuums are rather insulating. Without convection cooling from a fluid, you're relying on radiative heat transfer for cooling, and that's piss poor.
- Lots of radiators.
  
  No wind...
- I suspect you would dump the heat into the Moon itself. You wouldn't need that much power up there.
- Only operate when your side of the moon is dark or even near the poles where it can be coldest? I'm not sure what the plan is for daytime operations since it apparently gets really hot.
  No atmosphere up there to insulate so the temperatures fluctuate to extremes
  
  No atmosphere means very little thermal radiation is pulled from radiators.
  I imagine the best bet would be to drill into the surface of the moon and sink your radiators into the ground, fill the gaps with a material that transfers heat well.
  Easiest version of that would probably be to lay the radiators on or just below the surface and bury them in a regolith concrete mixture of some sort. Probably not as efficient as drilling straight in, but way less complicated I imagine.
  
  Unfortunately you can't really turn off a nuclear reactor.
- If you have enough ice, you evaporate it.
  If not, heat pump/ sink into basalt probably.
- I suppose the regolith itself could be used as a heat sink. I don't know what its thermal properties are like?
  But yeah, I imagine heat dissipation is a limiting factor. Everything I've read suggests the 1st gen reactors will put out something on the order of 10s of kilowatts, so rather modest by nuclear standards but still plenty for a nascent Moon base I imagine?
- Heat pipes running to radiators in vacuum is how you do it in space. It's efficient and scaleable, though it hasn't ever been done on an industrial scale. Definitely doable though. Considering the temperature on the moon is a balmy -270°C
  
  It's extremely difficult to cool things in space, as everything is basically insulated in a vacuum.
- you could use space that shit is called as balls
  
  Dissipating heat in space is actually one of the major issues that comes up in designs for space applications. It's... not easy.
  
  The temp is low but it is a vacuum. Vacuums are bad at dissipating heat. Think of the vacuum walled drinking vessels. They are so efficient at keeping beverages hot/cool because the vacuum insulates the majority of the surface area that heat can move across.
  Likewise a cooling tank of water (typical nuclear reactor design) itself surrounded by vacuum, will not cool efficiently at all. Presumably they'd have to use piping to circulate the water over a large surface area of some other medium like the moon rock itself.
  
  Cooling is the process of offloading heat from one atom to another. In space and the moon, there's very little....anything. You can't transfer heat onto nothing - so an "air cooled" heat vent doesn't work. Another user suggested they use the moon itself or moon dust as a heat sink, and you could do that in theory.

Considering India and China are nuclear armed geostrategic rivals, with ongoing territorial disputes, and not too distant history of hot wars, I think this type of cooperation can be a good thing.
But that's also why I'm skeptical about how much dual use technology they'd be willing to share with each other. And when you're talking about space travel, or moon bases, practically everything is dual use technology.
If anyone is unclear why Russia would be involved, it's their rocket and nuclear technology. Or rather, the Soviet legacy of R&D that is still useful.

I'm not sure this is a great idea.

... why tho
That sounds like a maintenance nightmare.
- Why do any space exploration?
  While the west sells off space to billionaires and the private sector, we need players doing actual science.
  
  Why do any space exploration?
  The issue isn't space exploration or the concept of a base on the moon. The issue is a nuclear plant on the moon. There's a reason solar cells are so universal in space applications near the Earth, and it isn't because the space industry is obsessed with being green.

For what purpose??? Solar power makes the most sense on the moon. No atmosphere.
- But it would require a stable power supply – which only a nuclear reactor can provide, as the Moon’s lengthy lunar nights make solar energy unreliable.
  
  Just put 4 solar stations equidistant around the moon and wire them together. Boom, stable solar power!
  
  And batteries are heavy. It would take a lot of lifts to get enough capacity up there.
  
  Just put them at the poles??
- The trouble with solar on the moon is that the day-night cycle is a month long. You have to figure out what to do during the 2 Earth weeks worth of night.
  I suppose with a polar base, you could have several solar farms strategically placed so that at least one of them is operational at any given time, but that's a lot of infrastructure and this is early days.

Of all the things to kick-start industry on another planet, isn't a nuclear fucking plant the most complex?
- Yes but also no, might be significantly easier to cool for instance and no environmental concerns.
  I got downvoted by people without critical thinking skills. A plant on the moon isn't in space, it's on the moon, a large cold rock, I don't understand why no one charitably understood you can dissipate heat into the actual moon which is not warm and quite cold.
  
  It is notoriously hard to cool things in space. There's no water or air to dump the heat.

- We've been launching nuclear reactors into space for decades (mostly RTGs) they're just much smaller. There isnt any chance of them exploding or anything when exposed to radiation, but yes the chance of the rocket failing, exploding and showering radioactive material over the ocean is why this has to be done incredibly carefully if it is done.
  
  According to my searches, while a RTG uses radioactive material weighting in the scale of kilograms (average of 5 Kg across missions such as Voyager and Cassini), a nuclear power plant requires several tonnes worth of plutonium and enriched uranium. The minimal critical mass for plutonium is 10kg, the double of how many fuel RTGs hold (that's why RTGs don't blow while ascending and/or on space). It's a large difference of mass/weight between RTG fuel and rods for nuclear power plants. They'd need to carry the whole tonnes worth of radioactive material split across very small quantities (which would require a lot of lead walling and/or launches)

Cold War II: Lunar Nuclear Boogaloo

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