The moon has very long days and night, so for the first power plant something that will work all the time instead of working for 2 weeks and having no power for another 2 is better. You can get a lot of power from solar panes on the moon but because of the longer nights batteries become even more of a problem.
And not having much of it.
The only question I have is how much of it is what you would expect from capitalists trying to squeeze the proletariat and how much is due to AI advancements reducing available jobs…
Interesting ideas but it doesn’t take into account the extremelly expensive AI chips, and the new AI designed chips as well to a lesser extent I guess.
If they can make enough money with the AI chips, or if the government invests heavily, they could keep their position for longer, but if it doesn’t make them enough or if they just distribute this to the shareholders they could indeed face a lack of sales leading to falling income and possible crashes.
Another one is sensors that could be cheap and extremely precise. Their applications could range from being used inside nuclear fusion reactors, to finally make them possible or at least make them more efficient, to medical and space needs.
The nice thing about this, if it’s true, obviously, isn’t even so much about the SC they found but the possibiliy of a true room temperature SC with a similar chemical makeup. It would be quite nice if we can have a good SC for power transmission, or anything else really, by the end of the year.
I wonder how this could change the world.
First of all, AI is a tool. But unlike a nuke the workers can have access to it, at least to some degree, allowing people to use it to deal with capitalists’ AI.
The real issue is not only that AI doesn’t work as advertised, but the impact it will have before this becomes painfully obvious to everyone.
The impact on manual labor will take a while though (because it takes time to build all the robots that will be needed), so as everyone that can WFH gets automated forever all these people can be brought to our side to revolutionize society. It’s eitheir that or hunger after all…
From my calculations you would need at most a few hundred kilograms per year for such a reactor, perhaps even less than 100kg/year if they can use higher enrichment than normal.
At that weight they might be able to carry it in a manned craft to avoid it blowing up and being spread all over the place since manned crafts have a lot of safety features, including an ejection system to launch the people (and the uranium in this hypothetical case) safely away from an exploding rocket.
A fission reactor and a fusion reactor are completely different things but you would need power to turn a fusion reactor and that could come from a fission one.
As far as I know a lot, if not the vast majority, of the coolant you need is for sending the unusable heat away and that is basically the same between all turbine using power plants (from coal to nuclear), unless the fusion reactor doesn’t need it.
Radiating it to the vaccum is a lot harder than transfering the heat through heat exchangers from the inside water to outside water so being in a vacuum without rivers to use for cooling is much harder to get rid of heat than on Earth. They would probalby need pipes going deep underground or running across the surface with hot water to be cooled by the ground, which would need to slowly radiate it to space requiring a lot of piping if you produce a lot of power, before the water inside the pipes cool enough to be usable to cool the reactor again.