NASA Races Nuclear Power to The Moon – and Mars

The United States and a Chinese-Russian partnership are racing to put a small nuclear power plant on the moon. The U.S. plan now aims for 2030 while competitors aim for later in the decade. The move is sparking a debate about the plans as if moon-exploration, indeed, space exploration itself, hasn’t been nuclear powered for more than 50 years. Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo and Cassini were all nuclear-powered. There are dozens of fission reactors in Earth orbit and the next one to blast off is planned for 2028.“There will always be a space race going on, and if you enter nuclear power into that mix, then it could take a potentially more dangerous turn,” Edwin Lyman, a nuclear safety expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the New York Times. The group opposes building any nuclear plant anywhere.But the feelings can be found on the right as well. As one-MAGA enthusiastic X poster said Sunday, “A nuclear reactor on the moon sounds like an accident waiting to happen.” No American accident has yet happened, despite the fact that nuclear material used for heating scientific instruments first landed on the moon with 1969’s Apollo 11 along with Neil Armstrong’s one giant leap for mankind. Later that year, on Apollo 12, NASA used nuclear power to generate electricity with advanced batteries for the first time there. All the Plutonium-238-fueled nuclear devices were abandoned on the surface. While the moon’s environment is harsh, temperatures vary by hundreds of degrees over the course of the lunar day and meteorites are a common occurrence, presenting challenges to today’s more advanced nuclear fission plans, the Apollo devices have caused no problems. With a half-life of 88 years, the radioactive material will be on the moon through the next century, steadily emitting heat and relatively innocuous radiation called alpha particles that can be stopped by a single piece of paper.Protests against similar technologies on deep space exploration craft were sparked in the 1980s and 1990s by the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.Americans blasted our first and only uranium fission power plant into space in 1965. Afterwards, the rival Russian space program launched dozens of them. All except one are all still in high Earth orbit where they will stay for centuries. The military recon satellite that fell from orbit in 1978, Kosmos 954, was shredded by reentry into thousands of pieces. More than 100 pounds of highly enriched 90 percent uranium-235 were on the craft, pieces of which landed in the sparsely populated far north of the Northwest Territories, Alberta and Saskatchewan.Afterwards, a nearly year-long search for radiation determined that the most dangerous material had completely disintegrated in the atmosphere during reentry. A single fragment was found emitting enough radiation to kill someone if they were exposed to it for several hours. No one died.The next nuclear power plant to reach orbit is NASA’s poorly-named Space Reactor-1 destined for Mars. According to NASA, it “will demonstrate nuclear electric propulsion and deliver SkyFall to the Red Planet (to) deploy three Mars helicopters” looking for water. It will also prove out the nuclear reactor technology intended for the Moon.The reactor mission dubbed Freedom is, expected to launch in less than two years is the fastest approaching nuclear flashpoint. Takeoff is “when there is a lot of risk,” Leopold Summerer, a United Nations official evaluating nuclear power in outer space, told the New York Times. “We had many launch failures, so we have a lot of data on what can go wrong.” These are “Overstated concerns” since “micro reactors have been used for decades in submarines,” said space exploration advocate Frank Slazer on X. “These are solvable engineering challenges!”The material to be used this time is significantly different than the near-weapons grade material Russia nearly scattered over Canada. New reactors will use High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium in the form of uranium dioxide – roughly 20% enriched, a fraction of past launches. NASA has not released numbers on how much of the uranium will be on the launch but engineers say the low power needed for Moon and Mars uses suggest it will be significantly less than Kosmos 954.Before the nuclear reactor has been turned on, such materials are pretty harmless, Scientific American reported earlier this year. “It’s not particularly radioactive,” Katy Huff, a University of Illinois engineer and assistant secretary for nuclear energy in the Biden administration told the magazine as she gestured to a box. “I have some uranium … right there” on my desk. “You can pick it up,” she said. “It’s toxic more than anything else… so don’t eat it.” NASA’s moon missions are still being mapped out and the technology is under development. One radioactive aspect of the 1969 missions may be returning to the moon. This time the nuclear batteries could power a moon rover with more capabilities than solar-powered designs.Something NASA has in store that may be new to the moon are lasers. In development under a NASA contract, the high-intensity devices are designed to beam power from point to point, eliminating the need to use cables on the rough lunar surface to get the nuclear power from place to place.In any case, don’t get too worried about this prospect. You can take solace in the fact that the Trump administration has planned this all before. Last time they said the plan was for the reactor to already be on the moon by now.

NASA Races Nuclear Power to The Moon – and Mars

NASA Races Nuclear Power to The Moon – and Mars

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