One plotline to be found in “Expedition” is using Martian resources to build nuclear reactors to power a Mars base and, in fact, a Mars Colony.
It is possible to survive on Mars, but all the things you need to do on Mars require power. A lot of power. Wind and solar power are marginal even here on Earth. They don’t begin to cut it on Mars.
NASA has realized this, and they have tackled the problem with the Kilopower Reactor project. This is, by the way, an illustration of how easy it is to design a nuclear reactor if the designer isn’t being micro-managed by bureaucrats who don’t know a neutron from a proton.
It is certainly well worth the fuel and cost to haul such a key enabler to Mars. Better still would be if you could build your own with local resources. This would also be a long step toward independence for the Martian colony. If you don’t have to go cap in hand to Earth to keep the lights on and the air circulating, you can be more indifferent to what Earth wants.
To build a nuclear reactor, the first and most critical requirement is fuel, closely followed by coolant and moderator materials. What’s available on Mars?
Reactors have been built using uranium and thorium. Uranium deposits on Mars are very likely, but there is no available data to to say how much, where or how rich. It would require a lot of boots on the ground prospecting to find them, followed by the non-trivial problem of refining the ore.
Thorium, however, does look rather more promising. Orbital data from the NASA satellite (?) has revealed the presence of thorium in the surface layers over a wide area, covering most of Acidalia Planitia.
Guesstimating from the map, the major area of thorium enrichment is about 600 km across. The actual level of enrichment is not specified, and there’s no way to know how deep the deposits are. For my novel I assumed approximately 1%, which may be a little high. Still, the numbers are impressive.
A circular area 600 km across and a metre deep, even at a tenth of 1%, gives a total deposit of approximately 280 million cubic metres of thorium, or 2.8 billion tonnes. That would power a planetary economy for a long time.
The thorium being spread over such a wide area suggests very strongly that it’s in powder form, distributed in the soil. Refining it would be a less intractable problem. There are a number of ways to do it. Shaker tables can be built easily. Dry panning for gold is a known technique, too. It would still require an industrial grade effort. It would take a lot of soil to yield enough thorium to build a reactor.
Graphite is a common moderator, and it is of course available in unlimited quantity from Mars’ atmosphere. Native water on Mars is enriched in deuterium, so the production of heavy water would require distilling, but is again possible.
Given these, is it possible? According to Edward Teller, it is. More in another post.
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