this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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What’s the coolant??? What is this plant meant to power anyway?
They mention in the article that the plant would need to be built by robots because of a lack of personnel there. So why build it?
I feel like this is several steps ahead of practical. Wouldn’t a permanent science base with human staff be a much higher priority?
There are large deposits of water on the moon, so presumably the idea would be to mine it and use it for coolant. Seems like it would be expensive to ship it from the Earth. And the article mentions that Russia and China presented a road map for building a scientific station on the moon by the end of 2035. So, that's what's going to be powered by the reactor. I very much imagine that the plan is to build the base first, but it will require energy to operate. Hence why the reactor is needed.
It's kind of weird to immediately jump to the assumption that Chinese and Russian space agencies haven't thought such basic things through before announcing these plans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume they know what they're doing and they have a long term plan for building a permanent base on the moon.
If you look at the history of Chinese space program, it's very well structured and they tend to set up milestones for decades in advance. So this is nothing new.
I was just curious, mostly because I like to follow space related news and the most I’ve heard of the Chinese missions were related to putting a man on the moon by 2030, so a jump to a full reactor with no news of a base seemed surprising. Especially since the Russian space agency has not been making many moon based plays recently, as their focus has been in satellites and earths orbit.
Also I had to dig further, but the coolant is not water based. Mining and processing the water from the moon would be extremely impractical and would use more energy then the reactor could create, and there would be no way to mine enough to sustain a reactor in general. The planned coolant is liquid sodium based on what the Chinese agency has stated, which will be shipped from Earth.
The planned design also seems to be a fast breeder reactor, which haven’t been used since the 60’s because of uranium enrichment processes, and breeders having a significantly reduced energy output compared to light water reactors. Meaning the plan is probably to mine the uranium directly from the moon.
Also China has been very diligent with their claims, but they too haven’t been completely blameless from making a grandiose claim here or there, or cancelling projects. The Russian agency is far more guilty of this (at least they’re not as bad as nasa lmao) but they constantly cancel plans, or have them stagnate, to a level that raises a question of I’d like to see some progress first. Especially since the moon has not been Russia's main focus for quite a while. I am very excited for this project though! Can’t wait!
If it was just Russia saying it, I'd dismiss it as well as they do have a pretty spotty history of delivering in post Soviet days. China has been a lot better at sticking to the targets they set, and things do move around and get cancelled. That's just how it goes when you're doing something that's never been done before. I'd say it's mostly noteworthy that they are thinking of this at all, but I wouldn't hold my breath on the specific date.
I'm excited to see projects like this being considered as well. My view is that as a civilization, we took a huge detour with the whole internet thing. People used to dream big back in the 70s, we were planning to start making large space stations, moon colonies, etc. And we have the technology necessary to start doing all that stuff, but instead we chose to start focusing on bullshit like chat apps, social media platforms, and so on. So many brilliant people have wasted their lives figuring out how to make more intrusive ads or how to track users across different sites. All of this stuff provides no actual value to society and doesn't advance civilization forward. Internet sort of became like a roach motel for us.
So, seeing countries actually building ambitious real world projects is incredibly exciting to me. Maybe this sort of stuff will rekindle the spark of genuine exploration and pushing the boundaries of humanity forward.
I guess we'll see how this develops. Again, I'm sure many experts involved in the project have considered the pros and cons involved here.
From my calculations you would need at most a few hundred kilograms per year for such a reactor, perhaps even less than 100kg/year if they can use higher enrichment than normal.
At that weight they might be able to carry it in a manned craft to avoid it blowing up and being spread all over the place since manned crafts have a lot of safety features, including an ejection system to launch the people (and the uranium in this hypothetical case) safely away from an exploding rocket.
A fission reactor and a fusion reactor are completely different things but you would need power to turn a fusion reactor and that could come from a fission one.
As far as I know a lot, if not the vast majority, of the coolant you need is for sending the unusable heat away and that is basically the same between all turbine using power plants (from coal to nuclear), unless the fusion reactor doesn't need it.
Radiating it to the vaccum is a lot harder than transfering the heat through heat exchangers from the inside water to outside water so being in a vacuum without rivers to use for cooling is much harder to get rid of heat than on Earth. They would probalby need pipes going deep underground or running across the surface with hot water to be cooled by the ground, which would need to slowly radiate it to space requiring a lot of piping if you produce a lot of power, before the water inside the pipes cool enough to be usable to cool the reactor again.
The air is so cold you can just let the heat escape in space there's enough room :)
That is very kind of China, the moon has been very cold for a very long time since separating from Earth, so putting in a heater is a very nice gesture! The moon people will be very happy!
But I am assuming your comment is a /s lol
Maybe they should have called up the writers of "For All Mankind" and got some ideas from them.
Is that the show with the space M4's and nukes on the moon?
Yeah. It's the alt history show where the space race never ended and the USSR was beating us to every milestone including landing people on the moon.
Isn't it only the first man and woman to the moon? I watched season 1 and it was really interesting, but then it fell of hard once the state department got their hands on the show. It flew off the rails it seems, and nothing seemed to ever go anywhere.
North Korea won the mars race too! China is conspicuously absent from the show.
Eh, I could see it honestly. In a world where the Soviet Union became increasingly stronger, the Chinese gambit of allying to the United States would most likely fail and they would either remain a “colonial holding” like India today, or sputter along as a regional power at best; lagging decades behind China’s real world development.
North Korea is a bit silly though, unless they somehow managed to reunify, but then, still silly.
To be fair, the industrial power of the DPRK before the dissolution of the Soviet blok was only really rivaled by Japan in EAsia. Total capeshit but it's less impossible than it'd seem on it's face.