Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite.
You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to
yeah i’ve been thinking about these reactors a lot. problem is, to make a reactor regulatable like that, the material must be fissable. I.e. you can’t use PU-238 (which has a half-life of 87 years and is typically used in RTGs today), instead you’d use U-235 or sth (which is used in big nuclear reactors today). Problem is, that material is fissable (i.e. it undergoes chain reaction and runs at or just below criticality) and that is why you can build bombs out of it. Then, to bring such a reactor into space, you’d have to lift it off with a rocket, and there’s your problem: You’d have to transport (large amounts of) fissable material with a rocket across earth into the sky. And that’s how you provoke international nuclear conflict.
yeah i’ve been thinking about these reactors a lot. problem is, to make a reactor regulatable like that, the material must be fissable. I.e. you can’t use PU-238 (which has a half-life of 87 years and is typically used in RTGs today), instead you’d use U-235 or sth (which is used in big nuclear reactors today). Problem is, that material is fissable (i.e. it undergoes chain reaction and runs at or just below criticality) and that is why you can build bombs out of it. Then, to bring such a reactor into space, you’d have to lift it off with a rocket, and there’s your problem: You’d have to transport (large amounts of) fissable material with a rocket across earth into the sky. And that’s how you provoke international nuclear conflict.