UK backs Rolls-Royce project to build a nuclear reactor on the moon

"The UKSA will now provide £2.9 million (around $3.52 million) of funding for the project."

A nuclear reactor on the moon?

I don't get it.

Meta spent north of $30 Billions to build a "metaverse" that I would not even consider to be alpha-level quality, and some people at Rolls-Royce think they can build a nuclear reactor for how much?

Is there somewhere someone’s done the numbers on bootstrapping industry off world? Like what would make most sense very first, etc. It strikes me that at some point it makes a lot more sense to build the stuff to build more stuff out there.

There's a problem with nuclear power on the Moon. How do you get rid of the heat? Here on Earth, we just use water, of which we have plenty. But on Moon water is extremely scarce. It would make the sci-fi novel Dune look like an oasis. When we'll have some type of an economy on the Moon, it's very likely that water will be more expensive than gold. One thing is absolutely certain: we will not be able to afford to vaporize water and let the steam vent. So, any nuclear reactor on the Moon will need to have some complex array of pipes where steam is circulated through some radiators, then condensed and recirculated. Or, who knows, maybe we'll do this cooling with liquid metals. Among the more abundant metals on the Moon, tin could be a good candidate; there was an experimental reactor at the Oak Ridge National Lab in the 60's that used liquid tin as a coolant.

FAANG spending isn’t the norm, the total program cost of the Mars 2020 rover was $2.7 billion.

Meta spent $30 billion on something that looks like SecondLife on the Wii…

But also this ain’t the total cost just how much money the UK government is funding the project for right now.