I was thinking we’ll have the apocalypse foretold by the classic cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian, except it’s the Republican nuclear reactor rather than a comet that causes it.
Even worse, what if the moon woke up? (Link is to a short cosmic horror movie).
Personally, I think the republican admin should put their nukular reactor on the far side of the moon. Then go there, and stay there.
I cannot be the only one thinking “Space: 1999!”.
Probably not, but whenever I envision a GOP space program, I always think of the Marching Morons. Send every motherfucking last one to Venus. it’s a paradise! And totally not woke.
You aren’t.
Missed that one-Thanks!
If you build it there, yeah, but both NASA and the USSR were shooting nuclear devices into space since the 1960’s. The Voyager spacecraft, both still working to some degree fifty years after launch, are nuclear powered because solar just isn’t an option once you get that far out.
I don’t know why they suddenly have a bug under their butts about nuclear reactors on the Moon all of a sudden. Arguably such reactors are safer on the Moon than on Earth.
But the powerline costs are ridiculous!
That is just silly!
You will need to ship rechargable batteries back and forth, is all.
Aw, c’mon, I really want a space laser.
500 billion dollars can buy many space lasers.
Just put a mirror on a satellite and get a strong laser pointer you can aim at it from the ground. “Pew pew!”
Sound stupid? We kinda did that already.
But are they Jewish?
Not stupid. It lets you measure the distance to the moon with great accuracy. And they’re retroreflectors, which automatically send the light back parallel to the path it came on, without anyone or anything having to adjust it, not just a simple mirror. Ya gotta admire the elegance and simplicity of the device.
Except, an RTG is not what could be described as a nuclear reactor, as such. It relies on the heat generated by the radioactive decay of 238PuO2 to drive current flow in thermocouples – relatively low current flow. And NASA is faced with a major shortage of 238Pu to put into RTGs for new deep space probes – it is produced in breeder reactors, of which we have very few operating.
Building nuclear reactors in space is a challenge because space is full of vacuum, and the notable property of vacuum is that it is naturally insulating. Reactors rely on heat transfer out of the core, which is not particularly easy in an environment that resists heat transfer. A nuclear reactor on the moon sounds a lot easier than it would actually be.
I do! Space lasers FTW!
This is what I was going to mention. How the hell would you cool it?
Heat transfer in space is all radiative (infrared light). You have to use an enormous sphere, to maximize radiative surface area. It is doable, but the radiator has to be almost unimaginable large if you need to shed megawatts of waste heat.