May 20, 2026

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Putting a nuclear reactor on the moon: big promise, bigger challenges

Nuclear power could enable long-term lunar missions, but NASA’s timeline may be too ambitious

By Rachel Feltman, Robin George Andrews, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura

NASA; Scientific American Illustrations

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Last August U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who at the time was also the acting administrator of NASA, announced his intention to see a nuclear reactor placed on the moon by 2030. You don’t have to be an expert in nuclear physics or spaceflight to know that his plan is, shall we say, ambitious. But the idea of popping a nuclear power plant on the lunar surface isn’t necessarily the sci-fi disaster movie plotline you might be envisioning. Plenty of experts say it actually makes perfect sense—as long as we take our time.

Here to tell us more is Robin George Andrews. He’s a volcanologist turned science journalist who writes about the earth, space and planetary sciences. He’s also the author of a feature in Scientific American’s June 2026 issue all about the dream of going nuclear on the moon.

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Thank you so much for coming on to chat today.

Robin George Andrews: Thanks for inviting me! It’s such a weird thing to chat about. [Laughs.]

Feltman: For a layperson I think there are probably a couple of things that feel weird and surprising about this. The very concept of a nuclear reactor on the moon might surprise people, and then also the timeline seems very fast, and we’ll dig into all that. But let’s start with the first one because this isn’t actually a fringe idea, right? Nuclear power on the moon might kind of be inevitable. Could you tell us more about that?

George Andrews: Yeah, so solar power has been the way things have gone in space, and that’s been the idea for the moon for quite a while. But the problem is the sun doesn’t shine universally on the moon, just like it doesn’t on Earth, but the lunar south pole, where you have 14-day-long nights, solar power is not gonna be great for keeping astronauts alive, for powering machinery, doing research.

For decades people have said, like, “Well, you’re gonna need nuclear power.” I mean, it powers deep-space spacecraft, you know, essentially. And it doesn’t need to rely on the sun. So yeah, the concept of having this, like, thing you can hold in your hand, although it’s not recommended, and you could power a small village on the moon for 10, 20, 30 years, you know, seems like kind of a no-brainer, really.

Feltman: Right. I think a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions about the level of risk and sort of the actual mechanics of nuclear power. Could you give us just a brief overview of, you know, what this actually looks like and why it’s maybe not so inherently frightening?

George Andrews: Nuclear power obviously can sound a bit scary. I mean, radiation is the thing we all think about or something like Chernobyl, which is, like, a really specific and hopefully once-in-a-century or longer kind of disaster. But, like, things are more radioactive than we think.

I think, like, there’s this statistic: if you eat a single banana, you get as much radiation as if you lived next to a nuclear power plant for a year ’cause potassium is radioactive. I mean, you’d have to eat, like, so many bananas that you would die of something more, you know, digestive [Laughs] than anything radioactive, but radiation’s kind of everywhere. There’s, like, acceptable doses of it.

Having a nuclear power plant on the moon is, in many ways, maybe safer than it is having it on Earth because you don’t have just living things everywhere that could get harmed by it, and the amount of power you’d need on the moon is considerably less than you’d need on Earth, and it’s been through decades and decades of sort of safety tests and regulations.

I think the perception of nuclear power as this, like, super sketchy, dangerous thing that’s just waiting to explode is definitely overblown, I’d say. And I think it’s just we have these, like, biases when we think of, like, nuclear disasters and things like Chernobyl. So it’s got a PR problem, I think. [Laughs.]

Feltman: Well, like you said, because the moon is apart from us, in some ways this is safer. But that being said, you know, even though I think a lot of people tend to sort of think of the mo