The race to put nuclear power on the Moon

China and Russia have teamed up to put nuclear power on the Moon by 2036. NASA says they’ll get there first, by 2030. The current space race has echoes of the Cold War, with the rush on both sides posing a risk to the rest of us hanging out down here underneath them. Whoever wins the nuclear moon race will control the gateway to space, with all of its strategic advantage and resources. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.

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  Join me for ABC News Daily. Find us on ABC Listen.

• 0:35Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabikal, Gadigal and Warundrie Woiwarung people.

• 0:43Matt Bevan?

  Just before dawn on the 24th of January 1978, a Canadian woman named Marie Roman looked up into the sky and noticed something strange.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  I saw something that appeared to me like a jet up in the air. And it was a very bright object. And behind this was a stream of fire.

• 1:09Matt Bevan?

  She wasn't the only one. A number of people in her town of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories saw the same thing.

• 1:16Speaker 05

  It was seen by a number of residents in the predawn darkness.

• 1:20Matt Bevan?

  This was no shooting star. It was a Soviet spy satellite called Cosmos 954.

• 1:26Speaker 05

  The Russian satellite lit up the sky over the town as it came back to Earth, burning up on the way in.

• 1:34Matt Bevan?

  Oh, yeah, it wasn't just any spy satellite, by the way. It was a nuclear powered spy satellite.

• 1:40Speaker 05

  The Cosmos came in over the Canadian west coast, passed over Yellowknife and finally disintegrated over the wilderness. That's where Canadian aircraft and ground search teams are checking for radiation in the atmosphere or debris on the ground.

• 1:56Matt Bevan?

  Cosmos 954 fell out of the sky at the height of the first space race. And this nuclear powered space junk put a spotlight on what exactly was being sent up into the sky. It was one of more than 30 nuclear fission powered satellites the Soviets sent up during the Cold War. And Cosmos 954 also wasn't the last one to fall back to Earth.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  Europe was studying Cosmos 1402's orbit. On a map in Paris were plotted what will probably be the last passes over France. Outside Brussels, 12 senior officials took refuge in a radiation proof underground bunker. Though the chance of its falling here is small, Europe is treating the fall of the rocket portion as a potentially dangerous event.

• 2:41Matt Bevan?

  Fortunately, shooting stars made of radioactive satellite debris haven't been a big concern for a few decades now. When the Cold War ended, the US and Russia chilled out a bit and largely set aside the space race. But over the last 10 years, things have been ramping up again.

• 3:00Matt Bevan?

  No one is chilling out anymore. In fact, the space race is more charged than ever before. And it seems that much like the era of Cosmos 954, this time around, it's going to be charged with nuclear power.

• 3:23Matt Bevan?

  China and Russia have teamed up and aim to put a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2036. The United States plans to beat them and have one running by 2030, which is really soon. So what can we learn from the first space race about what all this means for the rest of us here on Earth? And is a nuclear powered moon base really possible before the next Winter Olympics? I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

• 4:03Matt Bevan?

  In space, electricity is very, very important.

• 4:08Speaker 05

  This is Houston. Say again, please.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  Houston, we've had a problem.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  We've had a main B bus on a volt.

• 4:19Matt Bevan?

  When the Apollo 13 astronauts had the most famous problem in the history of space travel, the one which forced the astronauts to return to Earth and spawned a very good Tom Hanks movie, the problem they actually had was primarily an electrical one.

• 4:34Speaker 06

  He's got fuel cells one and three are offline. We've got main A volts, we have no main B volts.

• 4:41Matt Bevan?

  The oxygen tank that exploded on board wasn't just their source of water and air, but the fuel which they burned in a fuel cell to create electricity.

• 4:51Speaker 06

  Fuel cells one and three are offline.

• 4:54Matt Bevan?

  They were left with only their batteries and were forced to spend three and a half days shivering in the dark without heating, lighting or navigation computers so they could conserve enough electricity to get home.

• 5:08Speaker 06

  Dick says to tell you, you'll have some time on the beach and survive a fire after this cold experience.

• 5:19Matt Bevan?

  Pretty much everything in space needs electricity, but you can't make it using traditional generators.

• 5:28Matt Bevan?

  Most electricity in the 60s and 70s used a source of heat, like burning coal, to boil water to make steam. Steam is lighter than air, so it pushes upwards against gravity through a turbine, creating electricity. Now, feel free to fact check me on this, but my understanding is that in space, gravity, water and coal are hard to come by. Sunlight, on the other hand, is in abundance, which is why solar panels do work pretty well. Since its inception, the International Space Station has been powered by large, heavy and complex solar panels. But keeping life support systems running requires massive solar arrays,

• 6:10Matt Bevan?

  stretching out like massive wings on each side of the space station. And no matter how big they are, they don't work when they're not in sunshine. The space station is in darkness for half of each 90 minute orbit. It spends 45 minutes in sunlight, then 45 minutes in darkness, then repeats. It gets through the dark period using batteries. But in some parts of the solar system, these dark stretches of time last much longer. On the moon, for example, the night time lasts for two weeks at a time. The US and Soviet Union knew this when they were racing for the moon the first time.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  Landing men on the moon will be a truly great achievement, but only the beginning of a new era in space exploration.

• 6:56Matt Bevan?

  But they still didn't have a solution for what to do about that two week night time problem. Plus, the moon was only ever meant to be the beginning.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  No one can predict the exact missions that will follow in the years and decades ahead.

• 7:11Matt Bevan?

  Relying on sunlight can only get you so far. If you want to explore deep space, once you get past Neptune, there's barely any sunlight at all. So the two superpowers deduced pretty quickly that the key to unlocking wider solar system travel was to generate their own electricity in space. And the easiest way to do that was using a nuclear reactor.

• 7:40Matt Bevan?

  The Americans got there first, sending a nuclear reactor called Snap 10A out into orbit.

• 7:47Speaker 05

  April 3rd, 1965, liftoff at 1:24pm Pacific Standard Time. Snap 10A was launched southward over the Pacific Ocean. 62 minutes after launch, the Snap satellite was in orbit.

• 7:59Matt Bevan?

  Four hours after launch, during Snap 10A's second orbit around the Earth, the team on Earth sent a radio command signal to activate the reactor startup circuits.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  Upon command, two control drums were rotated inward immediately. The other two drums were turned slowly inward until a controlled fission reaction was sustained in the reactor core.

• 8:20Matt Bevan?

  This kind of nuclear power works by controlling nuclear chain reactions in the core of the reactor. The reactions create heat through a process called fission, which is where atoms split and give off energy. This is also how normal nuclear power stations work on Earth, though on a much larger scale, of course. But on Earth, this is really just an alternative to burning coal. It still needs water and steam and gravity, which in space you don't have. Snap 10A solved this problem using the chemical compound sodium potassium.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  Heat was produced in the reactor core and the heat shield was ejected. The heat was removed from the reactor by a liquid sodium potassium metal called NAC flowing through the core.

• 9:05Matt Bevan?

  Extremely counterintuitively, the chemical symbols for sodium and potassium are Na and K, hence NAC. So the heat from the nuclear reactor passed into the NAC and then?

• 9:19Speaker 05

  In the converter, heat from the NAC flowed through small thermoelectric elements. The flow of heat through the elements produced electric current. Electric power was produced from the combined thermoelectric elements.

• 9:29Matt Bevan?

  And this complicated process actually worked.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  At the beginning of the ninth orbit, a little more than eight hours after reactor startup, the Snap 10A system was at full power, producing more than 500 watts of electricity.

• 9:44Matt Bevan?

  500 watts is less than the, if you're listening, basement air conditioner unit uses, but it's not nothing. Snap 10A did its thing up there in orbit for 43 days before an electronic malfunction in a different part of the spacecraft shut the whole thing down. It had nothing to do with the nuclear power generation, though. That bit was going great.

• 10:09Matt Bevan?

  SNAP 10A proved that power could be generated by a nuclear reactor in space. It was a big breakthrough.

• 10:15Speaker 06

  The successful launching and operation in orbit of the SNAP 10A represents a notable achievement in both our space and atomic energy programmes.

• 10:23Matt Bevan?

  This is Glenn T. Seaborg. He was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time.

• 10:28Speaker 06

  I think it forecasts a growing role for nuclear energy in space in supplying electrical power for deep space probes and manned missions.

• 10:37Matt Bevan?

  It did not, at least for America. For the first of their missions at least, there were easier sources of energy that sounded less scary to the public. Putting a nuclear reactor on the Apollo missions was considered insane, which was probably a good call considering what happened on Apollo 13. If their nuclear reactor exploded instead of their oxygen tank, it would have been Houston, we have a very, very, very big problem. Apart from a couple of space probes sent out to explore the distant reaches of the solar system, where there's barely any sunlight, the Americans basically lost interest in nuclear reactors in space. Nuclear reactors are not particularly popular anywhere, and NASA decided to focus on solar-powered stuff.

• 11:22Matt Bevan?

  The Soviets, though, didn't really care about the popularity of nuclear reactors and kept developing them, quickly becoming the world leaders in firing nuclear reactors into orbit. They saw it as a potential way to put high-powered spy equipment in orbit without having to give the satellite giant and very visible solar panel wings. They deployed a fleet of what they called RORSATs, compact, four-tonne, nuclear-powered satellites, which would be harder for the Americans to track. It turns out, though, they weren't actually that much harder to track.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Here, at the North American Air Defence Command Headquarters, inside Cheyenne Mountains, near Colorado Springs.

• 12:06Matt Bevan?

  The Americans aren't good at everything, but satellite tracking is one of the things that they are good at.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  Officials, by pressing buttons, can chart the exact position of any one of the 4,500 objects orbiting the Earth.

• 12:21Matt Bevan?

  The Cosmos 954 RORSAT satellite was launched in September of 1977, and the Americans had been closely watching it ever since. By December of that year, they noticed that all was not well. Cosmos 954 had begun to droop, getting closer to Earth with every orbit. But the Soviets had planned for this. After all, they didn't want their nuclear material or their spy secrets falling out of the sky directly into the enemy's lap. The satellite was designed to kind of burst apart, sending the nuclear core higher up into space and the rest of the satellite down to burn up in the atmosphere. But when they sent the command for a Cosmos 954 to burst apart, it didn't work.

• 13:05Matt Bevan?

  It continued to droop. By early January, the Americans had worked out that the satellite was likely to land somewhere on their continent. They summoned the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrinin, to the White House. They asked him to share any information that could help mitigate potential disaster should the satellite crash into an American city. The Soviets admitted that they had lost control of the satellite and that there was a nuclear power source on board, but they didn't give much more detail than that, which wasn't particularly reassuring for the Americans, who specifically wanted to know a lot more about the enrichment level of the uranium doing loop-de-loops closer and closer to Earth.

• 13:48Matt Bevan?

  They wanted to know, for instance, if it was the type of uranium that could cause a nuclear explosion as it re-entered the atmosphere or collided with the Earth. The Soviets assured them it would be fine. And then, on the 23rd of January, they told the Americans that Cosmos 954 would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere the following day.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  The search teams are still out, flying over the permafrost of Canada's northwest territories and looking for traces of the Russian satellite.

• 14:16Matt Bevan?

  Now, this time, the satellite did what it was designed to do. Cosmos 954 did break up into tiny pieces as it entered the atmosphere over Arctic Canada. The northern lights were possibly a little more glowy that morning. A search began, but it wasn't for a nuclear reactor the size of a small bus. It was for bits of radioactive debris scattered across an icy wilderness.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  It's not a matter of great concern because the population density in the area is about 1 in 100 at the most, 1 in 100 square miles.

• 14:50Matt Bevan?

  Now, on the pure numbers, it's not a bad place for the pieces of a nuclear-powered satellite to land. But in practice, it was pretty scary for the people who actually lived there.

• 15:00Speaker 06

  Baker Lake is an isolated hamlet of about 1,000 people, most of them Inuit, which, like most northern communities, relies on airplanes for its supplies most of the year.

• 15:09Matt Bevan?

  In this small community of mostly indigenous people, there were rumours that the entire town would need to be evacuated. Yeah, I've heard generally that something has fallen out of the sky or something that belongs to the Russians. But exactly what it is, what it means... Search teams were dispatched and began finding pieces of the satellite.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  These are the pictures released today. They show pieces of the Russian satellite, chunks of metal, some of it blackened by the heat of re-entry.

• 15:36Matt Bevan?

  Sometimes the locals found them first, and because the pieces were still radioactive, they had to be flown to Yellowknife for medical assessment.

• 15:43Speaker 05

  Search teams have determined that radiation is only hazardous about 100 feet around the crater.

• 15:49Matt Bevan?

  Two guys did get that close. They went right up to the edge of a giant crater and had a little squiz inside because they were two guys and that's what two guys do. We turned up a channel of the river and observed off to our right something that we didn't exactly know what it was. It looked like a crater, or say, moose or musk ox or something like that had been pawing away at the ice. Yeah, that didn't make sense. And when we got over there, then of course we saw these metal struts kind of sticking up out of the ice, and that didn't make sense either. That's no moose. Nope, that's no moose.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  They were flown to Edmonton for observation, but doctors say their heavy clothing apparently protected them.

• 16:34Matt Bevan?

  Canada and the United States spent nine months scouring more than 100 square kilometres of the icy northwest for radioactive debris. The Canadians sent the Soviets an itemised invoice for the cleanup for $6,41,174 and 70 Canadian cents. Got to get the 70 Canadian cents, that's very important. In the end, they settled for $3 million. This incident was the biggest Cold War fight over nuclear power in space, and it prompted the only real regulation we have as the second space race, the one that's happening right now, heats up.

• 17:16Matt Bevan?

  It gave the United Nations the kick it needed to develop and adopt a resolution governing nuclear power in space. The Non-Binding Principles recognise that nuclear power might be essential for certain types of space exploration. It lays out a few important rules: that reactors should only be generating power at a high enough orbit, that they won't cause any harm if things go wrong, that countries have to tell one another if they're about to get smashed with radioactive debris, and that liability for any fallout lies with the country that launched the nuclear material. We haven't needed those principles since, but that may change soon.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Now we are approaching the moon's surface.

• 18:01Matt Bevan?

  The world's superpowers are once again all racing to the moon.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  We just realised that we have our out window one and moon out window two.

• 18:11Matt Bevan?

  Amaze, amaze, amaze. Thank you, Reid. As we've discussed on this show before, a part of that is about a desire to build a refuelling station on the moon for deep space exploration, but that's not all it's about.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  Spacecom will defend America's vital interests in space, the next warfighting domain.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  Space is one of our vital national interests, and it is becoming a contested warfighting domain.

• 18:40Matt Bevan?

  Back in 2018, the first Trump administration created a new branch of the US military.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Today, I'm thrilled to sign a new order, taking the next step to create the United States Space Force. So important.

• 18:54Matt Bevan?

  The Space Force has been mostly the source of mockery over the last eight years. The mockery is mainly because they seem to be stealing all their ideas from sci-fi, from their logo looking like it was stolen from Star Trek, to their soldiers being called guardians like the Guardians of the Galaxy. They haven't quite nailed the "we're just as serious as the Marines" vibe. But in September 2026, it all got a bit less funny. The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.

• 19:35Matt Bevan?

  The heads of the US Air and Space Forces told a conference in Maryland that they had weapons in orbit. Today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cis-lunar space. So that is why we don't just monitor the domain, we stand ready to defend it. So let me be crystal clear. Today, guardians operate on orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks. That last guy is Chief of Space Operations, General Doug Shice. And he was only a couple of weeks into the job. He told the Space Force Association's podcast that the announcement was carefully planned, and the words they used were very deliberately chosen.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  We were basically looking at what is deterrence. And so we believed, especially because of the threat, that it was time to talk about the capabilities that we did have. And so that's why we decided to make this declaration.

• 20:33Matt Bevan?

  He admitted that the space weapons situation was kind of an open secret, but that it was time to announce it properly, because what was the point of having all the weapons spinning around up there at all?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  This was kind of a natural evolution of getting to the next thing to say, hey, we do have on orbit weapons to be able to protect the joint force from space-enabled attacks.

• 20:53Matt Bevan?

  And they're not alone. The United States is building up its space force. I believe the same thing is happening within China to make sure that China is not only catching up, but also in some areas might overtake the United States. China formed its own aerospace force in 2015, three years before the US, and brought it under the control of Beijing's Central Military Commission in 2024. Russia has always seen space as a place where wars could be fought and takes national pride in its military space programme. But in recent years, it's been underfunded and increasingly privatized.

• 21:35Matt Bevan?

  So joining up with China to take on the US in space makes sense for them.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think I go through a day without seeing an intel brief that we don't see about something that some of our potential adversaries, and specifically China and Russia, that are trying to put things on orbit to make sure that we can't do the things that we need to do, take away our ability to have space superiority.

• 21:58Matt Bevan?

  The thing is, when everybody is fighting for space superiority, it's inevitable that the threats are going to increase. In 2021, China and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to explore the moon together and build a base there. Space weapons and moon bases all require a lot of electricity, and they all seem to have decided that nuclear reactors are the most reliable way to generate that electricity.

• 22:27Matt Bevan?

  In early 2026, it was announced that Russia was developing a nuclear reactor for the moon base called Selina. This seems to be Russia's main contribution to the joint base with China. The New York Times reports that nuclear power appears to be the only core task that China has delegated to its partner in the lunar project. The Russians are the experts in this field. But the US wants to catch up. They've announced plans to install a nuclear reactor on the moon by the end of 2030. Now, experts are skeptical that the deadlines that the superpowers have set for themselves will actually be reached. 2030 is really just around the corner, and basically every deadline that they've set

• 23:10Matt Bevan?

  for themselves so far have been kind of shown to be aspirational at best. It seems likely that it will happen at some point. And whichever country establishes a base on the moon first will have a great deal of control over what is considered the gateway to space. It's called cislunar space, the space between Earth and the moon. You have to pass through that space to get anywhere else in the solar system, and it's also where all of the satellites supporting the flow of information all around the world are situated. Every advanced military in the world relies on those satellites in cislunar space to operate.

• 23:53Matt Bevan?

  Remember what the guardians of the Space Force were told at that important conference? Today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space. Building a high-powered moon base would give you a massive advantage if you ever felt the need to blow up enemy satellites in cislunar space. So whichever superpower successfully generates nuclear power on the moon first doesn't just secure a strategic advantage up there in space, it secures a strategic advantage in every conflict down here on Earth, too. Remember, all of the militaries all rely on satellites. So we're going to be looking at that whole situation next time on If You're Listening.

• 24:46Matt Bevan?

  This episode of If You're Listening was written by Jess O'Callaghan and me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adey Sheppard and Jess O'Callaghan. I'll catch you next week.