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.

And if ta rocket explodes carrying erniched uranium...

You don't understand, the moon needs to be liberated from lunar nazis.

Space lasers!!

The moon

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.

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..."

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.

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.

As often as not they were chasing Americans' empty promises (and occasionally achieving the impossible as a result).

The hydrogen bomb, the probe into Venus, the Mirr Space Station... all launched in response to American campaigns.

But the USSR of the 60s/70s was a wildly different place from post collapse Nationalist Russia. They scraped much of their R&D infrastructure for parts under Yeltsin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor

I'd rather be stuck on the moon than deal with the bullshit down here

waves at the sky while thinking about how hungry I am

But not as much as cheese!

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!"