I like that joke 
there is no real difference between a heat pump and an AC. It just depends on which direction you are “pumping the heat”.
No pun intended, but until its so hot outside that most metals are melting, its only a matter of “degree” and available power.
Looking at that rover/probe example, if they can AC a probe with only a puny couple hundred watt plutonium generator, I’d imagine you could cool a fair sized volume with a big wattage nuclear reactor.
I deserve that.
Even so, I still wonder how technically possible this would really be. I think we would have lots of failures before we made it, but maybe we could eventually get a long lasting rover.
We’d have to take into account the amount of heat produced by the nuclear reactor itself. I think for the same reason you can’t use the temperature gradient to power the air conditioner you would have to have the cooling mechanism radiating its heat into the venusian atmosphere. Of course that means that the nuclear reactor itself has to be even hotter than the venusian atmosphere. How hot can nuclear fuel get? Would the fuel be a liquid or even a gas at that temperature? I have no idea how much power the refrigeration unit would take, but I’d be suprised if a small nuclear reactor could do it.
Nuclear Reactors can run prettttty hot.
They built one (NERVA?) that was a basically a reactor that heated hydrogen to rocket engine exhaust temps to make a nuclear rocket. Rocket engine exhaust is HOT.
And if you are worried about moving parts, there is a type of ac/refrigeration unit that works by just supplying heat to part of the fluids cycle, with pretty much no moving parts in the whole thing besides the liquids/gases (no pumps etc).
Old old refrigerators worked that way. You had some fancy plumbing that was heated in one spot by typically burning kerosene. Other parts of the plumbing got even hotter still and other parts got colder.
Now whether that type of heat pump can work even remotely practical at the temps and pressures we would need it to work at I have no idea.
Venerean is probably used less because it sounds too close to venereal… Does that mean if there had been a species on Venus they died out because of social diseases? And how did that happen if men are from Mars & women are from Venus?
BTW, someone said what’s the difference between colonizing the moon & colonizing Venus… I think the best answer is that its easier to replace a nearly non-existent atmosphere as opposed to reversing a hostile one.
I just did a calculation. Assuming the rover has 200 watts for AC. A naval ship/sub nuclear reactor is about 600 megawatts, or 3 million times more power. Assume the rover is cooling a mere cube 2 inches on a side.
The nuclear reactor could cool a cube 300 feet on a side. Assume half that volume is taken up by pipes, equipment, hallways…
Thats still leaves the living space of 6000 houses with 2000 square feet per “house”.
Also note, for various engineering reasons, that the large scale cooling would most likely be significantly more efficient than the probe scale level cooling, so the amount of area/volume you could cool might be significantly higher still.
Sounds big enough to be “colony” sized to me.
Opps, more like a 1000 houses. But still not shabby.
It wouldn’t even be a metal plate, I’m sure. Probably more likely a large series of plastic or mylar sheets, sectional to ease repair and the anchor points having small jets to allow them to stay in their orbital plane.
It would be expensive, far more expensive than anything we’ve done to date, but I can’t see any reason right now it couldn’t be done.
The big stopping point on exploiting space right now is not inability, but cost.
Although I mostly agree with you and not wanting to mince words too fine, there is a point where a technology that does a little cannot be multiplied to do a lot. Whether we want to think it as a shortcoming of technology or economy is debatable.
The Wright brothers had the technology to fly a man several yards, flying thousands of men over miles was not a problem of scaling what they had.
Launching a planet sized solar shield into space with our current technology would probably destroy Earth in exhaust fumes alone, let alone need a workforce larger than the population of Earth working full time. It is not a decision of economy, we just don’t have what it takes.