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Developing Nuclear Power Plant Tech For the Moon and Mars
With his first accepted Slashdot submission, Zandamesh sends this excerpt from ZDNet: "On earth, nuclear reactors are under attack because of concerns over damage caused by natural disasters. In space, however, nuclear technology may get a new lease on life. Plans for the first nuclear power plant for the production of electricity to be used by manned or unmanned bases on the Moon, Mars and other planets have been unveiled at the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. 'The reactor itself may be about 1 ½ feet wide by 2 ½ feet high, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There are no cooling towers. ... The team is scheduled to build a technology demonstration unit in 2012."
While possibly a good idea, be prepared for the protesters. Specifically the group that complains every time a rocket blasts off carrying fissile material. What if it explodes on launch?
Also, expect a few wingnuts who complain about ruining the pristine landscape of the moon.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
In order to get a reactor to the moon you have to launch it on a rocket, and rockets do not have a really great safety record. The risk/benefit trade-off of launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere does not seem to be worth it, not when solar energy on the Moon is a readily available alternative.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The same people that won't allow a reactor anywhere near their backyard will never allow a launch with radioactive materials onboard. It's a political non-starter, unless they can come up with some really creative spin that avoids using the words "nuclear", "radiation", "reactor", etc.
Nerd Rock In Progress
If they would just cover Mars where the Sun shines, with Solar power facilities, they would generate as much energy, if not more, and they wouldn't have to worry about any messy nuclear waste or negative press. So the interesting part of this discovery is that back in the 1950's when there were all the sci-fi movies about Martians attacking us and sending probes up our you-know-whats, the reality is we will be likely sending an army of robots to Mars to do our bidding!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
We talked about it, we need technology like this here, on earth. We need private sector to get heavily involved and to make a nuclear plant that can be used in a car, in a truck, in an airplane and in a house.
Everything needs to go nuclear - if you care about the environment for real, this is the only way to go. Government subsidized systems cannot be scaled down to this level, we need private money and private hands in this and until the FUD about nuclear power stops we won't get this.
Of-course if they do design a power plant this small for other planets, the next logical step is to use it on this planet instead.
You can't handle the truth.
So, in case of an accident we remove the possibility of nuclear radiation poisoning, but now we have the threat of General Zod, Ursa, and Non.
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no wonder the aliens might be miffed, & should be feared along with everything else. taking out the solar system, one reactor/space quake at a time? we could do better. the never ending corepirate nazi chosen ones military-industrial holycost just keeps making less & less sense every minute. a royal pain in the galaxy?
Yeah, most environmentalists won't care about operating a nuclear reactor on Mars (some will of course. Loonies are loonies), but many (very, very many) will bitch and moan to no end about launching nuclear material on rockets in case they explode. Right now it isn't so much of an issue (because, well, most people don't know we do it and we don't do it often) but if it enters public consciousness you can expect a massive backlash against it, and no set of statistics about how safe the rockets are will stop it, just like no set of statistics convinces them nuclear reactors are one of the safest power sources in existence and cause far fewer health issues than coal (hell, even solar has more deaths than nuclear, simply because of rooftop installations. source)
I'm not saying launching massive amounts of nuclear material on rockets is necessarily a good idea, but no matter how safe it'll never get off the ground once people hear about it. So unless we start mining Uranium or Thorium off planet, don't expect this to become a widespread source of power on Mars anytime soon.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Didn't you just love this series?
There's already quite a bit of radiation in space, couldn't that be somehow harvested to provide power?
~Syberz
I don't see how traditional cooling towers would work for anything in a vacuum, as they're designed as heat exchangers against ambient air, and use convection to draw fresh air in for dumping waste heat into, exhausting it out the top...
If anything, they'd need to do a geothermal-style ground-loop system, where they drill several boreholes, plumb them with loops, and then fill in the extra space with the regolith they originally bored out. Use the ground as a heatsink for the hot water from the secondary exchanger, possibly switching between several ground loops depending on how well the heat dissipates and how quickly a given area is saturated.
On the other hand, if this technology can be developed, then we'll have the vaunted suitcase nuke always talked about, albeit with a significantly different function than normally ascribed...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The lack of air means they are going to have trouble dumping heat. From the picture I'm guessing big radiative heatsinks will be used. The temperature gradient will be much less than could be easily obtained on earth via water or even convective cooling. I am not a nuclear engineer but having had thermo I suspect that this difference in heat dumping ability would work its way back into the reactor design as well. I also remember from thermo that heat engines are always more efficient as they get bigger, so the size and weight constraints this design has would make for a very wasteful use of our resources here on earth.
I do however think that we need to have next-gen nuclear plants in our array of power sources.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I was going to post a witty Starcraft reference, but how are we going to *safely* extract and enrich (or ship in a rocket) uranium in outer space?
There are no cooling towers. ...
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Even if you get your nuclear stuff to another planet or moon and you set up your power station what happens when there's an accident? On Earth the conditions can be controlled (eventually) or the area quarantined and while weather comes into play with either distribution or dampening of material distribution, in no or little atmosphere there is an opportunity for nuclear material to travel far further. Is this really any easier or safer if there are plans for humans to ever be on that body again?
They are looking for Radon gas on Mars. They are doing it to detect water but there is a better use. Radon detection is used to find Uranium. It is kind of the hard way of doing it but... If there are deposits of Uranium on Mars this would stifle the doom sayers that believe shielded containers of radioactive material (that have been used for years to send radioactive material into space) are not safe.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3968-radon-leaks-could-reveal-water-on-mars.html
http://www.earthexplorer.com/2009-11/Detecting_Deeper_Deposits_of_Uranium.asp
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
No atmosphere = no natural disasters my ass.
It's always confirmation bias!
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsCold
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Yeah, I got that part. I was marveling that anyone would even reasonably expect cooling towers, AT ALL in a vacuum. Slashdot is a fairly educated crowd, and I'd figure that most readers would know that they wouldn't work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I wondered about this, but I'm concerned that the rock types might not be very conductive, or even have a very high specific heat in the absence of water. Pumice for instance would make a terrible heat sink.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
This is exactly what is needed. Not just for space, but to help restart American innovation.No, lets do more like this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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A nuke plant the size of a CARRY-ON SUITCASE. I don't see any problems with that getting into the wrong hands...
Before we even think about a permanent lunar settlement we need to think about lunar mining to extract iron, aluminum, copper, and uranium ore.
Then we need to work on solar (parabolic or fresnel) furnaces to melt the ore and process it into metal. The lack of oxygen will make some of the traditional smelting techniques more difficult however. We may have to live with metals with inferior properties because we have to invent a whole new metallurgy up there.
Having a working nuclear reactor there in the beginning would make everything a lot easier. I don't know if photovoltaics could supply enough power for things like earth (regolith) moving machinery.
In the beginning we could limit ourselves to collecting the loose regolith with solar powered bulldozers, backhoes, and more specialized mining equipment. For the heavier minerals underneath we'd have to wait for a higher power density solution.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It's from the article, where they discuss how different this reactor is from the public stereotypes of a nuclear reactor.
(Although as we all know, cooling towers are hardly unique to nuclear reactors.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"Slashdot is a fairly educated crowd, and I'd figure that most readers would know that they wouldn't work."
Really? THIS Slashdot, or another, secret one? As soon as you get outside of software, the average Slashdotter is as clueless and ignorant as any average person. Worse yet, since they are good in one tiny field of knowledge that happens to be technical, the Slashdotter now feels compelled to bring up every delusion, fantasy or sci-fi series as if it were settled, real engineering.
Space Elevators! 3D printing of food! Space is so so cold! See the stupidity?
So if you know of another Slashdot, kindly link to it.
I think that we should do some more R&D into using beta- emitters. In particular, if there is a lot of nuclear waste that can provide this power. And heat can be use for local heating. The big issue is that neutrons are emitted and have to be dealt with. However, if this is done, then we are looking at a nice way to provide power for even VASIMR, and perhaps for ships, larger earth movers, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think I remember something about those in Snow Crash...
I think you are figuring wrong. Slashdot has a nice group of subject matter experts for most of the topics they post, but the general population here isn't really all that sharp.
You just wait until the space quakes hit, and all that radiation is released, contaminating space with radiation for years to come.
That said, this is very old news. This type of thing has existed and has been in use for half a century. However these are pretty low powered devices (unless this is supposed to be different), that only produce like 500W of power over a period of 80 years or so. So depending on what you plan on using these for power at these "bases", it is not like they are going to power everything. Perhaps they mean the idea is to use multiple of these, which might make sense for redundancy reasons.
The real merit of TFA is it state for the large audience there is no energy source out there strong enough to sustain human life beyond nearer planets. So, we can conclude that old dream to colonize the space beyond the solar system is extincted once and for all, provided a trip to the nearest solar system is a 40000 years journey and even if we can manage to protect the life from the cosmic rays on an hypothetical ship, we still have the energy problem to sustain life, even in hibernation state.
Also, is there a benefit to export energy sources from Earth to Moon and Mars in an hypothetical scenario where we believe something worth to be exploited there?
Don't we have an energy problem here in the forthcoming years? On a small scale, that may be acceptable for the stake of science, on a large scale for resources digging it is a completely other matter.
Achille Talon
Hop!
TFA is remarkably light on details. The ZDnet article refers to the SNAP-10A satellite, which had a 45 kWt reactor that produced 650 watts of electrical power via thermoelectric converters, which is not much for a device that's about the same size as this new proposal. If they want to produce 40 KWe from a small package, some other technology may be needed.
This is beginning of something far more important than nuclear power: Microwave Transmission.
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No I don't mean did they put one of these on the moon (and certainly not mars, I don't think any of their landers made it).
No, I mean didn't they have a bunch of high powered satellites in earth orbit that used reactors (NOT just RTGs, they wouldn't produce enough power). I believe they were radar satellites that scanned the oceans looking for American carrier groups to kill. (The U.S. really has a HUGE advantage in its many bases and allies worldwide, this is something that required the soviets to create satellites like this. It is an advantage that will also take the Chinese a very long time, if ever, to match). In fact didn't one of their satellites COSMOS I think it was, crash in Canada spewing plutonium all over the place and costing millions to clean up?
That said, if the design is sound (the spacecraft malfunctioned not the reactor right?), wouldn't it be easy to adapt their zero-gee design to work on the moo or mars? Should actually be easier, gravity will let convection work and (on mars) the thin atmosphere will help the purely radiative cooling.
Isn't it something like -200 degrees F outside of direct sunlight in space? I'm not an engineer, but do you really need anything more than passive cooling of circulating coolant and a big reflector?
While I am a fan of nuclear power in general, the article seems to downplay solar considerably. Am I crazy, or shouldn't the permanently sun-illuminated, cloudless, almost atmosphere-free side of the moon produce solar power at a nearly 100% capacity factor? Wish we could get that on earth.
Yeah let's put a reactor on the moon. Though it has a lot to do with the gravitational pull on our oceans and our tides what could possibly go wrong? (cut to the earth being sling shot into the sun or worse out of orbit. Would I rather burn to death, freeze to death or drown?)
This thing better come bundled with FIOS... There's not much to do up there, and I will need to get mah Counterstrike on!
LFTRs advantages:
There are also abundant levels of Thorium on the lunar near-side
The base concepts of the LFTR were desinged in the late 50's by Alvin Weinberg for a nuclear airplane design. Further refinements of the molten salt concept were tested very successfully for four years (1964-1969) at Oak Ridge National Lab.
The project was eventually discontinued because the molten-salt reactors can't be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium and they are very safe relative to almost any other reactor and made fast breeder reactors look bad. LFTR reactors could be mass produced and delivered on trucks, from 100kw to multi-gigawatts.
A LFTR the size of an 18 wheeler should deliver at least 100kw.
The quantity of Thorium on Earth is thought to be enough to power the planet at the current rate for approximately 100,000 years.
Why not fund LFTR research at NASA while they are at it? The Chinese have already restarted all of our original research. If they create a good reactor and patent it we will feel like total idiots.
Energy From Thorium: here
On why more of the stuff is not being sent off world. If you are not in complete denial about how bad Fukushima is, then the prospect of doubling the number of reactors, many of which will be controlled by the likes of India and China, makes you a bit pessimistic about life on Earth.
Might as well use the same technology to place some flags on the outskirts of the solar system that can be discovered by other civilizations and warn them not to go near the radioactive hell hole, or what will be left of it, on the 3rd rock from the sun . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
See above and likely below. Space isn't hot or cold, it's vacuum (pretty much). You only have radiative cooling.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Haven't we learned anything?
Just watch Destination Moonbase-Alpha, a 1978 TV serie
The temperature of space has little to do with it. But yes, that's one way to deal with waste heat. You run coolant or a heatpipe or whatever to a heat-sink and the heat eventually gets radiated away as blackbody radiation. It doesn't actually need to be too large, because the rate of radiation is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. So you just need a heatsink that won't melt before it reaches equilibrium between radiation and waste heat input. There are many factors to consider. First, you want a high melting point. Second, you want a high emissivity (all materials radiate the same wavelengths at the same temperature, but not the same amount). Third, you don't want it to warp due to thermal shock, so it needs to be thin, so it needs to be rigid and (somewhat) strong at operating temperatures. Fourth, you don't want it to sublimate away into space too fast or you'll need to replace it often. (All materials will sublimate into space, it's just usually extremely slow unless they're very hot) I don't know offhand which material is usually considered the best balance between those things. But usually spaceship and such don't get THAT hot to require a very hot heat-sink, so concerns over sublimation and melting can be ignored and you just make it out of copper or something.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Sorry, no. There are 3 types of heat transfer: radiation (infrared), mass transfer, and physical contact. In space mass transfer and physical contact are out of the question but radiation works quite well.
Blackbody radiators are used in most satellites. The inside of the Space Shuttle payload bay doors are radiators of this type and work quite well. That's why the Shuttle doors are always open in space.
This is all pretty interesting, but one thing you said has me stumped:
"waste heat can be used to purify water (important on moon)" ... If there's much water on the Moon, what microbes are contaminating it? ... If there's water on the Moon that we brought there via space rocket, why didn't we purify it beforehand? Why would we ship non-potable water to the Moon? ... and, important why? What are we going to need purified water for? I guess there are some instruments and chemical reactions that require purified water, but aside from scientific purposes what would we need purified water on the Moon for in the first place? Not like people are actually going to live on Moon bases. They'll be populated by machines.
I really wish people would stop dreaming after sci-fi and escapist fantasies and put their amazing intellectual abilities to solving real problems that face us on Earth.
We're never going to live on other planets. It's not going to happen. At the most, we're just going to send autonomous, robotic mining operations to those places. Considering the complexity of designing the autonomous space faring systems we'd need to get the refined products back to Earth, it's likely there'll still be space cadet rocket-man jobs for people to enjoy, if being sterilized and living in a efficient, tiny metal pod for months at a stretch is your idea of fun. Again, reasons why we'll probably either come up with ways to automate space-faring or just give up on it entirely.
I'll never understand how people older than eight are so ridiculously excited by the idea of living on another planet, and would so readily waste significant portions of Earth's remaining resources on these pursuits.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Save the Whales no nukes on the moon!!!!
It's not that there's another Slashdot. It's that the general public is MUCH stupider than you realize. By comparison, Slashdotters are brilliant.
Didn't anybody watch where all that nuclear waste is stored on the Dark side of the moon which causes a chain reaction blowing the moon out of orbit??!!!.....
There isn't a problem building cooling systems in space. They just aren't efficient.
You don't get convection cooling (so not "cooling towers" as we use here), but anything with a large surface area can be used to radiate heat away (black body radiation).
Iran could offer up these types of "Backyard New Clear Reactors" to anyone for a "Wal-Mart" price. Then Iran could sit back and watch the U.N.Security Council cough up a world class hair ball.
wtf why would you do that when the sun is shining 24 7.
Have these guys never seen SPACE:1999.
(I'm actually a little surprised to find someone so under informed on Slashdot.
The aliens are really going to blow us up now! LOL These pinheads that are against nuke power (or just about anything other than rubbing two sticks together) just need to STFU! That Voyager probe we launched when I was in high school, and we just recently lost contact with...what do you think it was powered with D-cells from a flashlight (torch)? It has a nuke powerplant, and ran for over 30 years, and is STILL providing power. Nuke power is reliable, IF the design is correct, and PROCEDURES followed to a T. Three Mile Island? Procedure ignored. Chernobyl? Old style reactor not produced anywhere but there. Japan's problem? Placing the stupid backup power generator where it could be flooded. See a common problem? Stupidity. In the case of the Japanese problem, the designer/builder told them not to do it that way. Unless they discover a more robust supply of dead dinosaurs/trees somewhere to extract the oil from their decay, you anti nuke types better get use to the idea of NUCLEAR power. The wind does not always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine. In the USA, we've had nuke power on ships & subs for over 50 years without ANY problems.
I would like to see the techincal details on this, in particular the damage the neutrons and gamma rays escaping the reactor would do to the alloys. Many become brittle in reactors with water to moderate most of the neutrons and some of the energy form the gamma rays.
I am guessing that these guys have information on this, and Im not implying that they didnt take this into account, I am just curious how they plan to account for it and how it might change the maintenance and life cycle of the plants parts.
Seriously, why not build a decent size magnifying glass and focus the suns rays into a small area? With little to no atmosphere this would work amazingly well.
I'd totally have one in my back yard! It'd be more than enough to power my house, and run some back to the grid as well.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Space Whackjob alert!
Exactly. Some months ago there was an article about an errant satellite in geostationary orbit, and the submitter suggested sending the shuttle up to fix it. The submitter obviously hadn't considered the fuel requirements to put something as heavy as a crewed space shuttle to that high of an orbit, nor had the submitter accounted for the lack of launch vehicle to even put something that massive into that orbit.
But, on the other hand, a lot of people immediately pounced, citing the relevant math and why this wasn't going to work. Had this been talking heads on a 24 hour news station, they would have figured they'd solved the world's problems that day, while failing to understand the most basic problems in attempting what they'd be discussing. And, the viewers would have started bugging their congresscritters about why they hadn't sent the shuttle to do that thing that the talking heads brought up.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Missions to other planets seem perfect opportunities to power with solar satellites. Orbit the planet with the vehicle that got there from Earth, with comms relays and telemetry for sensing/guiding expeditions on the planet's surface. Spread out huge solar collector surfaces in orbit, and beam the energy down to the surface in microwaves to ground based collectors. A lot of these materials can be gathered on the surface of the remote planet, its moons, the Earth's Moon, asteroids, etc.
It's a great way to power the mission at the other planet. And it's a great way to research the technology to use back in Earth orbit. Why launch heavy, dangerous, irreplaceable materials all the way out of our gravity well, when we can get really good at using what's plentiful out there - and around here.
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make install -not war
You're stupid. No one's against "just about anything other than rubbing two sticks together". Some people are against taking ever more excessive risks with nukes. They get into the hands of bad guys (Pakistan, N Korea, the Soviets, who knows who else), cause lots of serious pollution even when being "responsibly and peacefully" industrialized, and occasionally poison a quarter of Japan or Europe. The same people you admit are stupid are the people who will continue to deliver the nukes for this mission, and for nuke power or weapons around the world.
I'm not going to bother shooting down each of your tired, trite nuke fetish talking points. I'll just point out that you're stupid, and that you should shut the fuck up.
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Indeed.
NASA is gaming and gearing up its old cold war disinformation apperattii in the ISS debacle and the running Japan-GOV TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi debacle.
However, the prognosses from the NASA Accountents Department will be ill received just as all was going so well.
Now that the current crew on ISS is unreachable, no Progress and no Shuttle, the crew will be abandoned to fend for themselves as their rations dindle to nothing.
And add to that a heavy mass piece of junk ... probably a reactor core from a "test" hiting a bullit with a bullit by China, might just cross their orbit on a late day in October 2012, just in time for Obama's assendency to the throne of Earth and for their deaths, the ISS crew, through rapid de-orbit. And Obams's Regime was going so well with his new style of rasim and all.
Obama should never have been born.
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Why are we in such a rush to go out into space and colonize the moon and mars....really, let's work on ending world famine, and making the world pollution free first, are my thoughts....spending all this money makes it sound, desperate, and if there is desperation to get off this rock, then I guess an asteroid hitting earth is not far along too....
There are also abundant levels of Thorium on the lunar near-side
"Abundance" is, of course, a relative term. Average abundance of thorium in Earth's crust is around 7 ppm; most of it, however, is in much richer deposits, so that a handful of dirt from my backyard is essentially free of thorium. (I hope.)
The abundant levels on the Moon that you quote peak (not average) at around 13 ppm. Not trivial, but we won't be scooping it up in buckets and shoveling it into reactors either. The chemistry to extract and refine it using minerals and elements available on the Moon would have to be developed.
Why is this important:
Exactly because water is scarce on the moon. Some form of purification step is needed to turn pee into drinking water.
Here on Earth most of the water is unusable for non-biological reasons. Salt in sea water. Carbonates in well water. Various contaminants such as heavy metals, H2S.
Water is also a source of oxygen (breathing) and Hydrogen (rocket fuel) and is the easier way to store both. With a large energy source on the moon it will be a lot cheaper to ship liquid (or frozen) water than to ship LOX and LH2
***
Whether people live on the moon will depend on the economics. Bad idea to say 'never' to an economic notion. See G. Harry Stine's book "The Third Industrial Revolution" for details.
Consider right now the economics in the oil patch. Compare the cost of a mobile platform deep water rig to the costs of the crew. lf there is a sufficiently valuble product people will go there to produce it.
As an example, consider some of the Near Earth asteroids. What is the value of a cubic kilometer of a nickle iron asteroid moved into above synchronous (> 40,000 km) orbit?
1 cubic km = 10*9 cubic meters. = 5 E12 kg of what amounts to impure stainless steel. At $100 per pound that's worth 500 trillion dollars just because it is mass in orbit. (And right now no one can do $100/pound to orbit.)
Ni-Fe meteors assay out at significant amounts of gold and the platinum group of metals. Something like 0.1% Even a 1 km3 rock has more of these metals than we have ever mined.
***
During the age of colonization, colonies died. Not just people. Whole colonies. This was new technology. It was expensive. Compare the cost of sending exploration/colonization ships to the governmental budget.
I don't expect to go there next Tuesday. But after seeing the changes in the last 50 years, I am reluctant to say that it can never happen.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
"the submitter suggested sending the shuttle up to fix it. "
This is what I meant by "bring up every delusion, fantasy or sci-fi series as if it were settled, real engineering."
The problem is that any nuclear-based power source needs some kind of cooling apparatus, or else it simply won't work. We don't yet know of a way to convert nuclear fission into electricity directly, so we have to use a thermal cycle to do it. This relies on being able to exhaust heat into the environment somehow. On earth, we do it with cooling towers and rivers. On the moon, there's no atmosphere and certainly no large bodies of liquid water, so you have to rely on radiative heat transfer, which is horribly ineffective and means you'll need some kind of giant panels to radiate this heat away. There's absolutely no way a suitcase-size nuclear device can generate power on the moon, without having some way of radiating the heat away, presumably through some type of panels that unfold from it.
If you're going to build something with giant panels, why not just send solar panels up there?
Sorry, no. There are 3 types of heat transfer: radiation (infrared), mass transfer, and physical contact.
The normal terms are radiation, convection, and conduction. Convection requires a moving liquid or gaseous medium to transfer heat, and conduction only requires physical contact.
In space mass transfer and physical contact are out of the question but radiation works quite well.
Nope. It works, but I wouldn't call it "quite well", because radiation is by far the least effective of the three types of heat transfer. To generate a serious amount of power, you'll need some kind of giant cooling apparatus to radiate the heat away. There's no way a suitcase-size reactor can generate any power on the Moon, without some kind of huge radiative panels attached to it which are much, much larger than the suitcase.