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On the Moon you could also use the Moon itself as a heat sink. But yeah, any near-term solutions would use giant radiators.
by dotnet00 2y ago
On the Moon you could also use the Moon itself as a heat sink. But yeah, any near-term solutions would use giant radiators.
- gus_massa 2y agoSolids don't conduct too much heat. I think most of the cooling in a nuclear plant is generated by evaporation of water.
- dotnet00 2y agoYes, what I mean is that theoretically you could do something like have a very very wide base to passively dump heat into the ground (since we're still only looking at kW scale reactors in space), or actively cycle large amounts of regolith through the cooling loop (say, via a heat exchanger from a closed water loop) and dump it out. Depending on how much heat the system can handle, you could maybe even extract stuff boiling off from the regolith.
- mcculley 2y agoThe nuclear plant nearest to me uses sea water, which is put back into the ocean.
- gus_massa 2y agoInteresting. I had to look for more details. I found this link https://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2013/11/13/why-don-t-all-nuclear-plants-have-cooling-towers https://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2013/11/13/why-don-t-all-nuc... Oversimplifiying: All new plnats have cooling towers, so the water they return to the environment is not too hot.