The state corporation Rosatom, together with Roscosmos, is developing a nuclear power plant for the Moon with a capacity of up to 10 kW, but is already evaluating the option of building a nuclear power plant an order of magnitude more powerful. CEO Alexey Likhachev told the industry publication Strana Rosatom about this. The current project provides for a mass of no more than 1.2 tons and a fault-free operating life of at least ten years.
The installation must operate under extreme conditions: launch overloads, deep vacuum, harsh cosmic radiation, and temperature fluctuations. The lunar night lasts two Earth weeks, and the equipment must withstand −150°C.
Likhachev recalled that Russian radioisotope sources powered Northern Sea Route beacons for decades and heated the Chinese lunar rover Yutu on the far side of the Moon.
Ten kilowatts are not enough for the industrial development of the satellite. This involves extracting rare earth metals, producing oxygen and rocket fuel from water ice, and manufacturing complex structures directly on site. Therefore, a project for a plant with a capacity an order of magnitude higher is being developed in parallel. As the head of Rosatom emphasized, without powerful nuclear energy, deep space will remain a matter of episodic expeditions rather than a zone of industrial development.