Lunar Nuclear Power plant

James E.Werner at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), says that they are going to build a model of nuclear power plant to meet the needs of power on the Extra-terrestrial surfaces for manned or unmanned bases those will be built in the near future. Seems this project is going to be started by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) by 2012. DOE is going to look after fuel development and fabrication. Then the development of a small electrical pump for the liquid metal cooled system will be done by the same DOE. Werner says, "this is not going to be totally a nuclear power plant, rather a Fission power system with a reactor  about 1 ½ feet wide by 2 ½ feet high".

Originally, it was believed that the power could be generated using any of the three things: Photovoltaic panels, Nuclear reactors and Solar dynamic generators. But now the trend has sloped to the Nuclear power, owing to its flexibility to be used even in the night times and harsh environments. In fact these fission power reactors are expected to produce more power during the nights, due to the colder thermal sink. Regarding this, Werner said that this nuclear power reactors they are going to design can even be used in craters and lava tubes, which are expected to be the future bases. Relative to comparable solar power systems, FSP offers significant mass and volume savings. May be the working process and physics that's going to be used is same as that used in the normal terrestrial reactors but Werner added that these reactors are going to have a complete difference in power levels and the manufacturing weight.

Whatever it is, the transportation method is still a question mark to the scientists working on this and I guess its going to be a radio transmission, like for any other. And one more thing thats worrying the experts is if this method of nuclear power generation is going to harm the environment of the Lunar environment in a span of 20 years or so after the start. But what I seriously wanna suggest is we shouldn't be too strict at such kinds of things at the initial stage because we will never know if we are going to find a slution to decay this nuclear waste in the mean while. Thus wasing time on thinking such sort of things is completely ridiculous and lets focus on the main production thingy.

AUGUST 29, 2011.

Ref: Science Codex

Pranu :)