• TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    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.

    Yeah… Sounds pretty expensive to send a manned mission to the moon a couple times a year, just to deliver fuel.

    While manned missions are safer, it’s still not very feasible considering you would have to be doing it a couple times a year. What is it, like 1 in a hundred chances to have a catastrophic failure?

    you would need power to turn a fusion reactor and that could come from a fission one.

    I mean, you would just need power, not necessarily from a fission reactor.

    As far as I know a lot, if not the vast majority, of the coolant you need is for sending the unusable heat away

    In fission reactors the water acts as a radiation sink as well. They typically are set up on two loops, with the primary loop Taking some up some short term radiation from the reactor.

    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

    It probably more efficient, but I think finding vacuum on the moon would be a lot easier than finding water. And heat transfers a lot easier in vacuum than in an atmosphere.

    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

    Why…? The moon is generally a pretty cold environment unless you’re in direct sunlight.