Rolls-Royce is developing a special reactor!!! 💡

🚘When we see the sign Rolls-Royce, we first imagine a luxury car... but did you know that this company also deals in aviation technology and turbine engines on a large scale?

🔹The company announced the development of a small nuclear reactor to help with space travel and building bases on the surface of the moon.. 

🔸The special reactor, which the company called the Micro-Reactor, will be designed to survive the harsh conditions of space travel. Uranium is supposed to be under several layers of protective packaging, and it is supposed to be the most important product of Rolls-Royce's space division. However, it should not only be used for travel, but also for living on other space bodies.

🔹The Rolls-Royce reactors are supposed to function, for example, as power plants for future bases or colonies on the surface of the moon or even Mars. The company has also released an image that shows the potential appearance of such a fission reactor, but for now it is only a preliminary design and it is working with the UK Space Agency on the study. We will wait for the final version.

🔸Such reactors can help space transport, especially in connection with ion propulsion. The latter is mainly used by satellites, or China's new space station or the upcoming Gateway station, which the US wants to place in an orbit around the moon in cooperation with other countries. But the ion drive uses electricity and needs a lot of it to unlock its true potential.

🔹Carrying large solar panels with you is impractical for such drives, as they are dynamically stressed during acceleration, when the electrical energy is consumed the most. This can be solved by fission reactors, which, although heavy, can, after sufficient miniaturization, drive powerful ion drives that are capable of shortening the journey to Mars to just a few tens of days.

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Not just for space🔸Rolls-Royce develops reactors not only for space use, but even for use on Earth. Small reactors working on nuclear fusion - tokamaks - are still the music of the distant future, so I think, this is great alternative.. Specifically, it deals with smaller modular reactors that are supposed to help with the climate crisis by making clean energy available at a much lower cost and with much greater construction flexibility.

🤷‍♂️But would we believe such a technologies? Nuclear fission has a huge number of opponents, even though it is only one of the most cleanest energies.. After all, there are certain risks..

I am curious about your opinion..😉💡

@mmk

See also:

Nuclear energy - intro post