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Hunky_not_Chunky t1_jckriy4 wrote

Reply to comment by Killer_Moons in Rolls-Royce secures funds to develop nuclear reactor for moon base by Vailhem

I’m no scientist but in space if our bodies can lose heat by convection and we need special water suits to help how will nuclear reactors work? Will we need a bunch of water?

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ACCount82 t1_jckt8e2 wrote

The issue with cooling in open space is that there's nothing you can dump your waste heat into.

Things like ISS use special radiators to radiate away waste heat - while small things that can generate a lot of heat for their size, like space suits, use water evaporation to mount a compact heat removal system.

On the surface of the Moon, you have the entire Moon that you could dump your waste heat into.

Of course, actually dumping the heat into the ground is an engineering and construction challenge - so early Moon and Mars reactors might opt for radiators, like the ones ISS currently uses. They would need a lot of them, but it's still doable for small reactors.

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PHATsakk43 t1_jckucl6 wrote

These reactors will not use water but work with liquid metal coolant.

The heat sinks are giant radiative arrays. Similar designs were proposed for spacecraft during the SNAP program in the 1960s and 1970s.

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