NASA is fast-tracking a plan to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030 under a new directive from the agency’s interim administrator Sean Duffy.
The plan revives a decades-old dream of scaling up nuclear power in space, a shift that would unlock futuristic possibilities and test legal and regulatory guidelines about the use of extraterrestrial resources and environments.
Duffy, who also serves as President Donald Trump’s secretary of transportation, framed being first to put a reactor on the lunar surface as a must-win contest in a new moon race. “Since March 2024, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the Moon by the mid-2030s,” said Duffy in the directive, which is dated July 31.
“The first country to do so could potentially declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States from establishing a planned Artemis presence if not there first,” he added, referring to NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land humans on the moon in the coming years.
The directive laid out a roadmap to design, launch, and deploy an operational 100-kilowatt reactor to the lunar South Pole within five years that would be built with commercial partners (for comparison, 100-kilowatts could power about 80 American households). While the specs are, well, speculative at this point, 100 kilowatts represents a dramatic power boost compared to the basic nuclear generators that fuel Mars rovers and space probes, which typically operate on just a few hundred watts, equivalent to a toaster or a light bulb.
The implications would be transformative, “not just for the moon, but for the entire solar system,” says Bhavya Lal, who previously served as NASA’s associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy and acting chief technologist. Placing a nuclear reactor on the moon would allow the space industry to “start designing space systems around what we want to do, not what small amounts of power allow us to do. It’s the same leap that occurred when Earth-based societies moved from candlelight to grid electricity.”
Could NASA Build a Lunar Nuclear Reactor by 2030?
Establishing a nuclear plant on the moon by 2030 won’t be a lay-up, but many experts believe it is within reach.
“Four-and-a-bit years is a very racy timescale” but “the technology is there,” says Simon Middleburgh, a professor in nuclear materials and co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in the UK.
The issue up to this point hasn’t necessarily been technological readiness, but a lack of mission demand for off-Earth reactors or political incentives to strongarm their completion. That calculus is now shifting.
“We’ve been investing over 60 years and have spent tens of billions of dollars, and the last time we launched anything was 1965,” says Lal, referring to NASA’s SNAP-10A mission, which was the first nuclear reactor launched to space. “I think the big moment of change was last year, when NASA actually, for the first time in its history ever, selected nuclear power as the primary surface power generation technology for crewed missions to Mars.