For Mars, the Nuclear Option is the Only Option
As we established in Solar Power Is Never Going to Work on Mars, a Martian base operating at reasonable levels of exploration and in particular producing the propellant necessary for a return trip to Earth was going to require about 2.75 Mw. As many issues as nuclear [pwer runs into on Earth, there is a reasonably mature reactor design which can be further developed in the next five years to provide this power budget: NASA’s KiloPower reactor:
Kilopower Basics
Kilopower is a simplified nuclear reactor designed expressly for space exploration, that is to say, requiring the bare minimum of human intervention combined with a great number of failure modes. In short, it’s a set-and-forget power solution that is very, very difficult to have an accident with.
In 2018, Kilopower underwent a battery of tests in the KRUSTy program (Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology), a follow on from the DUFF ( Demonstration Using Flattop Fission) program in 2012. If you guessed that the team were fans of the Simpsons, you would not be wrong. KRUSTY had…
