NASA engineers designing the lunar base the agency is planning to build are considering powering it with a small fission reactor. The reactor would be buried underground to protect astronauts from the radiation produced. The engineers say the technology is in hand today to allow such a reactor to operate for eight years without need of maintenance.
The plan up to now has been to establish a base near the lunar south pole, partly because permanently shadowed areas in that region might contain useful quantities of water ice, but partly because some peaks in that region are in virtually constant sunlight. Solar collectors on those peaks could deliver constant power to the base below.
It is true, of course, that on average, a given spot of the Moon has two weeks of sunshine and two weeks of darkness. The trick is powering a base through the darkness. A simple solution might be to build a solar collector system that delivers at least double the energy the base requires and saving half of it, perhaps in fuel cells or batteries, to power the base through the long night. If the Sun didn't reappear at the end of those two weeks, a buried fission reactor wouldn't do anybody any good, anyway.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment