▲ | fuoqi 3 days ago | |||||||
No, it absolutely will be an issue. You need to dispose of ~100 MW of heat energy. Simply dumping it into ground will quickly heat it up, you can't rely on water evaporation for obvious reasons, same goes for convection because of the thin atmosphere. So your only option is radiative cooling, either by using ground or dedicated radiators. But because it's relatively inefficient, you will need a lot of area and materials for it. | ||||||||
▲ | HPsquared 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
High-temperature reactor designs are essential. Radiative heat transfer scales with temperature to the fourth power. So if you reject 100 MW of waste heat at, say, 400°C (750°F), a radiative heat transfer area of 10,000 m^2 (i.e. 100m x 100m square) would be sufficient. That's quite big and hot, but 100 MW is a lot! Radiative heat rejection at 100°C would require 10x as much area. | ||||||||
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▲ | ACCount37 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
...which is why you would want to fabricate as many of those radiators as possible on site, with local materials. And also why one of the key requirements for space base nuclear reactors is "scalable". |