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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
Last August U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who at the time was also the acting administrator of NASA, announced his intention to see a nuclear reactor placed on the moon by 2030. You don’t have to be an expert in nuclear physics or spaceflight to know that his plan is, shall we say, ambitious. But the idea of popping a nuclear power plant on the lunar surface isn’t necessarily the sci-fi disaster movie plotline you might be envisioning. Plenty of experts say it actually makes perfect sense—as long as we take our time.
Here to tell us more is Robin George Andrews. He’s a volcanologist turned science journalist who writes about the earth, space, and planetary sciences. He’s also the author of a feature in Scientific American’s June 2026 issue all about the dream of going nuclear on the moon.
Thank you so much for coming on to chat today.
Robin George Andrews: Thanks for inviting me! It’s such a weird thing to chat about. [Laughs.]
Feltman: For a layperson, I think there are probably a couple of things that feel weird and surprising about this. The very concept of a nuclear reactor on the moon might surprise people, and then also the timeline seems very fast, and we’ll dig into all that. But let’s start with the first one because this isn’t actually a fringe idea, right? Nuclear power on the moon might kind of be inevitable. Could you tell us more about that?
Andrews: Yeah, so solar power has been the way things have gone in space, and that’s been the idea for the moon for quite a while. But the problem is the sun doesn’t shine universally on the moon, just like it doesn’t on Earth, but the lunar south pole, where you have 14-day-long nights, solar power is not gonna be great for keeping astronauts alive, for powering machinery, doing research.
For decades, people have said, like, “Well, you’re gonna need nuclear power.” I mean, it powers deep-space spacecraft, you know, essentially. And it doesn’t need to rely on the sun. So yeah, the concept of having this, like, thing you can hold in your hand, although it’s not recommended, and you could power a small village on the moon
for 10, 20, 30 years, you know, seems like kind of a no-brainer, really.
Feltman: Right. I think a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions about the level of risk and sort of the actual mechanics of nuclear power. Could you give us just a brief overview of, you know, what this actually looks like and why it’s maybe not so inherently frightening?
Andrews: Nuclear power obviously can sound a bit scary. I mean, radiation is the thing we all think about or something like Chernobyl, which is, like, a really specific and hopefully once-in-a-century or longer kind of disaster. But, like, things are more radioactive than we think.
I think, like, there’s this statistic: if you eat a single banana, you get as much radiation as if you lived next to a nuclear power plant for a year, ’cause potassium is radioactive. I mean, you’d have to eat, like, so many bananas that you would die of something more, you know, digestive [Laughs] than anything radioactive, but radiation’s kind of everywhere. There’s, like, acceptable doses of it.
Having a nuclear power plant on the moon is, in many ways, maybe safer than it is having it on Earth because you don’t have just living things everywhere that could get harmed by it, and the amount of power you’d need on the moon is considerably less than you’d need on Earth, and it’s been through decades and decades of sort of safety tests and regulations.
I think the perception of nuclear power as this, like, super sketchy, dangerous thing that’s just waiting to explode is definitely overblown, I’d say. And I think it’s just we have these, like, biases when we think of, like, nuclear disasters and things like Chernobyl. So it’s got a PR problem, I think. [Laughs.]
Feltman: Well, like you said, because the moon is apart from us, in some ways, this is safer. But that being said, you know, even though I think a lot of people tend to sort of think of the moon as this inert rock in the sky, it’s a very dynamic place. And so what are some of the specific challenges to putting a nuclear reactor on the moon?
Andrews: Yeah, so one of the main problems with the moon is that it has a sixth of Earth’s gravity, which means that the main coolant they use for nuclear power plants on Earth, which is water, would not operate in the same way. Also, it has wild temperature swings of hundreds of degrees from day to night because there is no atmosphere to, like, mediate this.
So that’s this huge challenge, so they’d probably have to use air that they would have to, obviously, ship from Earth, which is maybe a nontrivial thing. I mean, it’s a very weird thing to think to ship away. That would be used as a slightly less efficient way of transferring the heat.
Also, nuclear reactors produce so much heat. I mean, they produce so much of it, they actually need to get rid of a lot of it as, like, excess heat. If you don’t get rid of the excess heat, you melt your nuclear reactor. It’s what a—kind of what a meltdown is. And you don’t want one of those on anywhere.
Normally, you’d use water or something like that, or you at least have an atmosphere to kind of radiate the heat into, but the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, so you’d need these giant fins, these big sails, which would, like, radiate the heat into space. It’s really the only way you can do it. That’s a bit tricky to do.
You also have meteorite impacts, and I don’t mean, like, the really big meteorites that could kind of, like, take out—like, hundreds of meters across, which is a problem for Earth as well, but Earth’s atmosphere, like, filters out these, like, one-, two-, three-meter-sized asteroids pretty easily. They’re basically big shooting stars. But the moon has no atmosphere, again, so this will just hit the ground with the force of, like, several tons of TNT. Even small, like, centimeter-sized ones can go through it like bullets, so you’d need to shield your nuclear power plant in a way. You could put it in a lava tube, maybe.
And also, the moon occasionally quakes. You have moonquakes. They’re not as strong as Earth’s, but they last for, like, tens of minutes. It’s not a great idea to just shake a nuclear power plant for tens and tens of minutes. There are nuclear power plants, basically, in nuclear submarines, which get jostled about quite a bit, but it’s not quite the same as the whole environment you’re on just being vibrated for 10 minutes.
There are a lot of things that no one’s tried to design around before. Putting a nuclear power plant on the moon has some challenges that are hard to test on Earth, for sure. So it’s not trivial.
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NASA; Scientific American Illustrations
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