Translation: russian government is out of ideas on how to embezzle even more budget money.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
243 points (94.5% liked)
Not The Onion
19224 readers
1071 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This is a fucking joke. I wish media wouldn't take it seriously.
I recently read this about their "new" spacestation:
The latest concept for the ROS reflects Roscosmos' changing situation in recent years, owing to sanctions and the termination of international cooperation following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to Orlov's announcement, Russia will separate its modules from the ISS once the program is completed in 2030, forming the core of the ROS, with other modules to follow.
In other words, they're just decoupling & rearranging the modules & renaming the result.
Feel free to extrapolate from that how realistic a Russian nuclear plant on the moon is.
To power what?
Space lasers!!
Well, you can't put permanent infrastructure on the moon without a plan to power it. So, a power plant has to be the first step, that's why NASA has the kilopower program, even though we don't have a permanent moon base yet.
The sun, right over there: "um, hello?"
Well the sun works great for orbit around the moon, but on the surface a day/night cycle lasts a month. So that's about 15 days of night at a time.
Obviously there's no wind on the moon and burning things makes no sense. So literally the only options left are nuclear or lots and lots of batteries.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
The moon
The dark side of
Sure, and I plan to win the lottery.
Russia's got more of a space program than the US at this point. And they've continued to build and modernize their nuclear infrastructure, with the youngest plant coming online as recently as 2020 and seven in the pipe.
They're two industries the country has keep in relative working order while the rest of the economy was scrapped for parts back in the '90s/'00s.
Insane to think they are in a position to colonize the moon when they're quagmired in Ukraine and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of young men to keep at it. But they have the kit to try in a way no other county - except maybe China or India - could hope to.
load more comments
(1 replies)
They can't even handle the nuclear power plant on the territory they occupied
You don't understand, the moon needs to be liberated from lunar nazis.
They also planned to take Ukraine. See how well their plans work out for them?
And that was supposed to take 3 days, so a decade here means at least a thousand years.
Yeah, that sounds doable.
The only thing that has worse cooling problems than data centers in space, is a nuclear power plant in space
Also, nuclear power plants are steam powered. Good luck. They /might/ drop a nuclear battery, like the kind in some old satellites or apace probes, on the moon, generating a couple hundred watts with 1970s technology.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Suuure russia. Ofc you are still a big mighty strong power that can beat up anyone especially all of NATO at once. Now here is cookie
Jesus fuck, Russia can barely build a coal-fired plant in Moscow these days. They're barely holding their own against a country they invaded that had virtually no preparation for being invaded because they thought a treaty protected them, so a bunch of farmers and housewives took up arms.
Good fucking luck, Vlad. Russia is a country of drunks and weaklings that can't tie their own shoes and has been embarassed on the international stage since the 19th century. You're a joke country that happens to have nuclear weapons, it's like an autistic child with a molotov cocktail.
load more comments
(1 replies)
There's only two sources of power on other planets/outer space, and that is nuclear and solar.
Wind and water and biomass and geothermal and fossil fuels are out of the question, because of lack of said things or lack of oxygen to burn anything.
That being said, "nuclear" only works if it's steady-state and does not use water/air input. That excludes steam engines and such, and basically only leaves RTGs (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator).
These are solid-state devices (meaning they have no moving parts) and convert the heat directly into electricity using TEGs (Thermoelectric Generator). They don't need water or air input.
RTGs have an overall fuel efficiency of around 3-5%, meaning they translate around 3-5% of the radioactive decay heat of the nuclear material into electric power output.
Reactors on earth are huge and built to run at 100% all the time because that's the most economical way to do it. That is not a physics requirement, it's just the most profitable for the current economic environment. You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to and many small modular reactors currently in the licensing approval process include this ability.
Nevermind the fact that a "large" RTG only puts out about 100 watts of electricity and it's nuclear fuel must be bred in reactors beforehand. There is only enough RTG fuel for maybe 20 large units on the planet right now.
You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to
yeah i've been thinking about these reactors a lot. problem is, to make a reactor regulatable like that, the material must be fissable. I.e. you can't use PU-238 (which has a half-life of 87 years and is typically used in RTGs today), instead you'd use U-235 or sth (which is used in big nuclear reactors today). Problem is, that material is fissable (i.e. it undergoes chain reaction and runs at or just below criticality) and that is why you can build bombs out of it. Then, to bring such a reactor into space, you'd have to lift it off with a rocket, and there's your problem: You'd have to transport (large amounts of) fissable material with a rocket across earth into the sky. And that's how you provoke international nuclear conflict.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Wait, why would wind and water be rare on other planets? Finding good places to do water-based renewables is probably gonna be difficult on most planets, but shouldn't most planets with atmospheres have wind?
yeah you're right, air can be used on mars for example. (not wind though because wind is too weak at only 6 mbar atmospheric pressure, so it can barely move anything, and especially not a heavy rotary blade from a wind turbine.) but you could use the air to drive a stirling engine or sth, maybe, if you compress it first.
but the engine has to be really low-maintenance, because repairing it is basically out of the question. repairing something very far away from any larger civilization is really difficult. and typically, things that have no moving parts (steady-state) are much less likely to break, so have much longer lifetimes.
It, like the moon, will be made of cheese.
They also planned to overrun Ukraine in three days.
Given the usual level of Russian corruption, they will notice when they want to draw power from that reactor that someone had already sold off the nuclear fuel and replaced the rods on the reactor with lead.
Ah, so I have a joke about Soviet corruption that applies to modern Russia too
A brand new apartment building in Moscow collapses. Investigators are sent to interrogate the suspects.
First they ask the sand. The sand defends itself: "How could you even suspect me? I'm so white, pure of heart!"
Second they ask a brick. The brick replies: "Look at me, so red. An exemplary communist, how could you suspect me?"
Last, they ask the cement. The cement goes: "Why are you blaming me? I wasn't even there!"
"Good news, Comrade! Putin need you for high paying job at nuclear plant! Bad news, you will relocate, and is permanently!"
I'd rather be stuck on the moon than deal with the bullshit down here
Again with this propaganda bullshit. Don't you people get tired of swallowing Putler's cum?
They used to do this shit all the time to trick America into wasting time and resources trying to keep up with them
load more comments
(1 replies)
Oh yes, moon nazis intensifies.
No they don't
They can plan it all they want
Because Russian time estimates have been so very reliable the last few years
load more comments
(1 replies)
shit I'm more likely to put a nuclear power plant on the moon guarded by state of the art Mobile Suits piloted by Jedi Knights than Russia is.
We know how new year's resolutions usually turn out
Ok
view more: next ›