Translation: russian government is out of ideas on how to embezzle even more budget money.
Sees article about a new and innovative embezzlement method. Concludes that they’re out of ideas.
Lol it often takes longer than a decade to build one on earth
But then you build a much bigger one on earth. New nuclear power plants are often designed to generate over 1000 MW, NASA has designed small modular nuclear plants to deploy at space bases that generate 10 KW, a completely different scale.
That’s right, my friends. Tonight, we are going to Chernobyl…
And if ta rocket explodes carrying erniched uranium…
If the rocket is high enough it’s not their problem. If it’s low enough, they don’t care about Kazakhstan
This is a fucking joke. I wish media wouldn’t take it seriously.
I recently read this about their “new” spacestation:
The latest concept for the ROS reflects Roscosmos’ changing situation in recent years, owing to sanctions and the termination of international cooperation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to Orlov’s announcement, Russia will separate its modules from the ISS once the program is completed in 2030, forming the core of the ROS, with other modules to follow.
In other words, they’re just decoupling & rearranging the modules & renaming the result.
Feel free to extrapolate from that how realistic a Russian nuclear plant on the moon is.
To power what?
Well, you can’t put permanent infrastructure on the moon without a plan to power it. So, a power plant has to be the first step, that’s why NASA has the kilopower program, even though we don’t have a permanent moon base yet.
The sun, right over there: “um, hello?”
Well the sun works great for orbit around the moon, but on the surface a day/night cycle lasts a month. So that’s about 15 days of night at a time.
Obviously there’s no wind on the moon and burning things makes no sense. So literally the only options left are nuclear or lots and lots of batteries.
I was thinking solar + battery energy storage for when the sun is ‘unavailable’. It’s not like having like 1k MW capacity and nothing to power makes any sense, but an area with panels and storage can definitely get things started, at least…
For sure, and that can definitely work. But, you will need three times the number of solar panels (since half the time the panels are doing nothing and if you’re storing a lot of energy, that means there’s a proportional amount of storage losses.)
And I honestly don’t know how much mass in batteries would be needed for 15 days worth of storage, but my instincts say too much.
Keep in mind that total mass to deliver can sometimes be the biggest cost limitation. A nuclear generator that gets delivered in one launch could be cheaper than otherwise much simpler solar panels and batteries if that solution requires two or three launches.
Well the sun works great for orbit around the moon, but on the surface a day/night cycle lasts a month. So that’s about 15 days of night at a time.
That’s why everyone continues to talk about the lunar poles, btw, because you have an eternal twilight there, where continuous solar power might still be doable.
Yeah, theoretically if your positioning is perfect you can get that eternal twilight, where the sun just travels across the horizon in a circle. But you know the moon wobbles a bit, so while you might get a month or two of straight sun, you might get a month or two of straight darkness, where the sun is just below the horizon, just barely out of reach…
yeah you’re right actually, now i’m confused. then why does everybody keep talking about the lunar poles?
Well, at the poles, in deep craters, the bottom of the crater will never get sun, ever. As a result, these polar craters are very cold. This is pretty special because it means that any water ice that may have fallen from comet impacts or other sources will stay frozen on the surface, never melting.
Water is everything on the moon, it can be used for drinking, and as a source of oxygen for breathing, but probably more importantly, it’s rocket fuel (hydrogen and oxygen). If you can collect ice on the moon you can refuel a rocket there, on a full tank you can easily make orbit given the moon’s low gravity, and still have enough gas in the tank to go literally anywhere in the solar system. The moon becomes a launching point to anywhere.
Now I might be talking shit, but isn’t there a problem with dust on the moon that means solar panels wouldn’t work very well? Though I may be thinking of Mars. Or something else. Uranus?
There is no wind in the vacuum of space.
Vacuum… everywhere?
Dyson furiously trying to replicate this phenomenon for their next vacuum
Pro: nothing’s ever gonna kick dust on your panels except space debris or ourselves.
Con: nothing’s ever gonna wipe dust off our panels.
engages windshield wipers
Yeah it was Mars that I was thinking about, not the Moon.
Space lasers!!
The moon
The dark side of
Sure, and I plan to win the lottery.
Russia’s got more of a space program than the US at this point. And they’ve continued to build and modernize their nuclear infrastructure, with the youngest plant coming online as recently as 2020 and seven in the pipe.
They’re two industries the country has keep in relative working order while the rest of the economy was scrapped for parts back in the '90s/'00s.
Insane to think they are in a position to colonize the moon when they’re quagmired in Ukraine and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of young men to keep at it. But they have the kit to try in a way no other county - except maybe China or India - could hope to.
The next day: “well ho-ly shit…”
They can’t even handle the nuclear power plant on the territory they occupied
You don’t understand, the moon needs to be liberated from lunar nazis.
Iron Sky intensifies
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Ship_Galileo which is an interesting fragment of it’s time.
They also planned to take Ukraine. See how well their plans work out for them?
And that was supposed to take 3 days, so a decade here means at least a thousand years.
Yeah, that sounds doable.
The only thing that has worse cooling problems than data centers in space, is a nuclear power plant in space
Also, nuclear power plants are steam powered. Good luck. They /might/ drop a nuclear battery, like the kind in some old satellites or apace probes, on the moon, generating a couple hundred watts with 1970s technology.
I guess they might have old soviet stockpiles, so it’d be just the matter of dropping one on the moon. Then, maybe they could blackmail the americans to send it there.
On the moon isn’t really “in space” in terms of temperature distribution because the heat actually has somewhere to go, the moon.
Would only be cool enough at night though.
So… The US has plans to build nuclear generators on the moon too, kilopower has been an ongoing project for the past decade and I have no doubt we’ll be ready to deploy one of these reactors as soon as we start building infrastructure on the moon again in the near future.
Nuclear power is not new for space, it’s an obvious choice, one of only two choices in fact. And for what it’s worth, Russia/USSR has had far more nuclear powered space probes over the years than the US has, so this isn’t exactly new for them either.
As for cooling, yeah, if you generate power you need to dissipate that heat. Your generator will put out heat which needs to be dealt with and then using that electricity will also generate heat which needs to be dissipated. That said, one kind of power is not harder than another, dissipating a megawatt of solar power is just as complicated as a megawatt of nuclear. So the real question is: how much power do you need? The complexity of the project will scale relative to that.
All in all, we’ve used nuclear power in space before and we will need to do it again, radiators are not all that hard.
Suuure russia. Ofc you are still a big mighty strong power that can beat up anyone especially all of NATO at once. Now here is cookie
Jesus fuck, Russia can barely build a coal-fired plant in Moscow these days. They’re barely holding their own against a country they invaded that had virtually no preparation for being invaded because they thought a treaty protected them, so a bunch of farmers and housewives took up arms.
Good fucking luck, Vlad. Russia is a country of drunks and weaklings that can’t tie their own shoes and has been embarassed on the international stage since the 19th century. You’re a joke country that happens to have nuclear weapons, it’s like an autistic child with a molotov cocktail.
Autistic child joke is not cool.
Also, I kinda feel for Russian folks. Propaganda is a hell of a drug, and from what I’ve seen in some gaming chats many aren’t swallowing it, and seem aware of their situation.
It, like the moon, will be made of cheese.
They also planned to overrun Ukraine in three days.
Given the usual level of Russian corruption, they will notice when they want to draw power from that reactor that someone had already sold off the nuclear fuel and replaced the rods on the reactor with lead.
Ah, so I have a joke about Soviet corruption that applies to modern Russia too
A brand new apartment building in Moscow collapses. Investigators are sent to interrogate the suspects.
First they ask the sand. The sand defends itself: “How could you even suspect me? I’m so white, pure of heart!”
Second they ask a brick. The brick replies: “Look at me, so red. An exemplary communist, how could you suspect me?”
Last, they ask the cement. The cement goes: “Why are you blaming me? I wasn’t even there!”
