The dark side of reactors on the moon

As Beyond Nuclear’s Linda Pentz Gunter warns in her new book — No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War — there are lunatic plans afoot to send nuclear-powered rockets to Mars, using the moon as a launching pad. On March 24, NASA announced plans “to launch robotic landers on a monthly basis starting in 2027 and to establish a lunar outpost,” according to an article in Aerospace America. 

NASA plans to establish a “base” on the moon by 2030, in answer to one of President Trump’s many ambitious and ominous executive orders.

As reported earlier, nuclear reactors would be transported to the moon to support this endeavor, including building launch pads, dwellings, roads, high-voltage lines and to mine minerals, all with the intent of building a a permanent human presence on the moon from which to send missions to Mars.

But, as Linda writes in her book, “The news stories that first announced this were replete with all the usual excitement about space exploration, while ignoring the huge costs and bellicose implications. Meanwhile, there was not one single mention of the radioactive waste these reactors would produce.

“The problem, like the waste itself, will simply be kicked into some invisible crater on the dark side of the moon.”

Rockets of course also have an unfortunate habit of sometimes blowing up on or shortly after launch, threatening to rain down radioactive materials onto Earth. 

And as Linda also points out, these reactor projects, backed by the usual coterie of billionaire tech bros who dream of traveling to Mars, “could be fueled with highly enriched uranium, a weapons-grade material that suggests a potentially more ominous agenda than just the creation of a cosmic club for crazy rich astro-explorers.”

(ESA image of a moon base: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

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