Again with this propaganda bullshit. Don't you people get tired of swallowing Putler's cum?
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Jesus fuck, Russia can barely build a coal-fired plant in Moscow these days. They're barely holding their own against a country they invaded that had virtually no preparation for being invaded because they thought a treaty protected them, so a bunch of farmers and housewives took up arms.
Good fucking luck, Vlad. Russia is a country of drunks and weaklings that can't tie their own shoes and has been embarassed on the international stage since the 19th century. You're a joke country that happens to have nuclear weapons, it's like an autistic child with a molotov cocktail.
Autistic child joke is not cool.
Also, I kinda feel for Russian folks. Propaganda is a hell of a drug, and from what I’ve seen in some gaming chats many aren’t swallowing it, and seem aware of their situation.
Translation: russian government is out of ideas on how to embezzle even more budget money.
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Ok
There's only two sources of power on other planets/outer space, and that is nuclear and solar.
Wind and water and biomass and geothermal and fossil fuels are out of the question, because of lack of said things or lack of oxygen to burn anything.
That being said, "nuclear" only works if it's steady-state and does not use water/air input. That excludes steam engines and such, and basically only leaves RTGs (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator).
These are solid-state devices (meaning they have no moving parts) and convert the heat directly into electricity using TEGs (Thermoelectric Generator). They don't need water or air input.
RTGs have an overall fuel efficiency of around 3-5%, meaning they translate around 3-5% of the radioactive decay heat of the nuclear material into electric power output.
Wait, why would wind and water be rare on other planets? Finding good places to do water-based renewables is probably gonna be difficult on most planets, but shouldn't most planets with atmospheres have wind?
yeah you're right, air can be used on mars for example. (not wind though because wind is too weak at only 6 mbar atmospheric pressure, so it can barely move anything, and especially not a heavy rotary blade from a wind turbine.) but you could use the air to drive a stirling engine or sth, maybe, if you compress it first.
but the engine has to be really low-maintenance, because repairing it is basically out of the question. repairing something very far away from any larger civilization is really difficult. and typically, things that have no moving parts (steady-state) are much less likely to break, so have much longer lifetimes.
Reactors on earth are huge and built to run at 100% all the time because that's the most economical way to do it. That is not a physics requirement, it's just the most profitable for the current economic environment. You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to and many small modular reactors currently in the licensing approval process include this ability.
Nevermind the fact that a "large" RTG only puts out about 100 watts of electricity and it's nuclear fuel must be bred in reactors beforehand. There is only enough RTG fuel for maybe 20 large units on the planet right now.
You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to
yeah i've been thinking about these reactors a lot. problem is, to make a reactor regulatable like that, the material must be fissable. I.e. you can't use PU-238 (which has a half-life of 87 years and is typically used in RTGs today), instead you'd use U-235 or sth (which is used in big nuclear reactors today). Problem is, that material is fissable (i.e. it undergoes chain reaction and runs at or just below criticality) and that is why you can build bombs out of it. Then, to bring such a reactor into space, you'd have to lift it off with a rocket, and there's your problem: You'd have to transport (large amounts of) fissable material with a rocket across earth into the sky. And that's how you provoke international nuclear conflict.
Reactor fuel and bomb fuel are very different things. Current reactors use U-235 enriched to between ~2-5% with some of the new SMR designs using fuel enriched to ~20%. Bombs use ~90% enrichment. You can't make a bomb with less than that enrichment. The physics just don't work. No one is going to think that your rocket carrying a reactor bound for the moon is secretly a bomb headed to a city.
Also the total amount of fuel you would need for something like a 100MW reactor would be on the order of 100kg. Maybe up to 500kg depending on design. A tiny fraction of a rockets payload. You could easily let international inspectors look at it before launch to ease any fears.
Current reactors use U-235 enriched to between ~2-5% with some of the new SMR designs using fuel enriched to ~20%. Bombs use ~90% enrichment. You can’t make a bomb with less than that enrichment. The physics just don’t work.
What i don't get, then, is why can nuclear power plants explode at all?
They can't. Not in a nuclear explosion anyway.
Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Basically due to a poor cost cutting design, and not training the operators in the failure modes introduced by that design, the operators were able to accidentally raise power levels faster than the automatic systems could compensate. This made a ton of heat which flash boiled the cooling water. The resulting high pressure steam blew the top off the sheet metal building. The fuel never exploded, it got hot and melted. Total death count: ~100
Three Mile Island was only a meltdown. A lot of things lined up to go wrong at the same time and the operators didn't recognize what was happening so they accidentally let the water in the core slowly boil until the fuel was uncovered and started to melt. When the next shift showed up they immediately saw what was wrong and fixed it but by then half the core had melted. (This led to a ton of lessons learned and improvements to equipment, procedures, and training) Total death count: 0
Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion. The plant lost all power from the tsunami and the back up generators were flooded. Eventually the core boiled off its water coolant. High temperature steam interacting with the zirconium cladding on the fuel started to convert into free hydrogen and oxygen and floated to the roof of the containment building. Eventually it found an ignition source and exploded. Total death count: 0 from radiation/explosion. ~50 from the unnecessary evacuation. (Evacuation deaths were mostly from people already in the hospital for other reasons that were then moved several hours away and died on route or shortly after. )
Just something to note, this is the full list of commercial nuclear power disasters. All of them. ~150 dead over ~70 years. Nuclear is by far the safest energy source.
interesting. TIL!
No they don't
They can plan it all they want
Suuure russia. Ofc you are still a big mighty strong power that can beat up anyone especially all of NATO at once. Now here is cookie
Clickbait headline.
If they make some kind of Moon base with China, of course they’re going to put an RTG or something there; that’d make a lot of sense.
Also, even the legacy of the Soviet space program is no joke. There’s a reason Soyuz delivered astronauts around the world (including US ones) to space forever… that being said, China would definitely be the leading partner here.
They also planned to overrun Ukraine in three days.
Given the usual level of Russian corruption, they will notice when they want to draw power from that reactor that someone had already sold off the nuclear fuel and replaced the rods on the reactor with lead.
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!"
To power what?
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.
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They also planned to take Ukraine. See how well their plans work out for them?
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This is a fucking joke. I wish media wouldn't take it seriously.
I recently read this about their "new" spacestation:
The latest concept for the ROS reflects Roscosmos' changing situation in recent years, owing to sanctions and the termination of international cooperation following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to Orlov's announcement, Russia will separate its modules from the ISS once the program is completed in 2030, forming the core of the ROS, with other modules to follow.
In other words, they're just decoupling & rearranging the modules & renaming the result.
Feel free to extrapolate from that how realistic a Russian nuclear plant on the moon is.
Because Russian time estimates have been so very reliable the last few years
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They can't even handle the nuclear power plant on the territory they occupied
You don't understand, the moon needs to be liberated from lunar nazis.
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The only thing that has worse cooling problems than data centers in space, is a nuclear power plant in space
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Oh yes, moon nazis intensifies.
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