nuclear-news

The tech was successfully demonstrated between November 2017 and March 2018 as part of NASA’s Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology (KRUSTY) experiment……….

Why do we need nuclear power on the moon?

Before you say something like ‘we shouldn’t be polluting space with nuclear waste’, know that almost every single space mission you’ve even heard of has used radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which have Plutonium-238 as their electricity source. That’s true for everything from Apollo and Voyager to New Horizons and Cassini…………

Marc Gibson, lead Kilopower engineer at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “When we start sending astronauts for long stays on the Moon and to other planets, that’s going to require a new class of power that we’ve never needed before.”

Can’t we use solar power on the moon?

…….. Japanese company Shimizu has a concept to construct a massive belt of solar panels a few kilometres wide around the moon’s entire 11,000-kilometre-long equator. It reckons that half of this ‘solar belt’ would always be in sunshine, and given that the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, so is never cloudy, solar power generation would theoretically be five times more efficient than it is on Earth.

Is NASA going to the Moon or not?

It’s an on again, off again commitment that keeps changing with every new US president. The Trump administration’s Space Policy Directive 1 proposes robotic missions on the lunar surface ahead of crewed missions, as well as a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway to help astronauts on missions beyond the moon, either going to Mars or to asteroids. NASA is asking private companies to develop new tech to deliver payloads to the Moon………https://www.techradar.com/news/why-nasa-wants-to-build-a-nuclear-reactor-on-the-moon