My friend Julia was working on this project over the summer, where they’re designing "trashcan-sized" fission piles for powering the NASA moon-bases that will never happen.
You will notice that one of the final designs involves a stirling engine generator. There are two things that spell the kiss of death for any project design: stirling generators and ion drives. I have nothing against them personally, I just think they’re too neat to survive off the drawing board. Not like ugly old internal combustion.
She told me some of the design details that they don’t mention in the article, like plans to put them on tracks and make them mobile (too neat for words) and the big problem with the electrical generators was getting the radiators to shed waste heat efficiently in a vacuum. Yeah, vacuum is an insulator. So it’s like trying to dump nuclear waste heat through the layers of a thermos bottle?
