CNN’s Brianna Keilar introduced nuclear policy analyst Joe Cirincione to discuss the Trump administration’s big plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon.
She mentioned Cirincione’s book, “Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the world before it is too late,” before segueing into the subject at hand.
“Speaking of nuclear nightmares, last we spoke to you, it was about nuclear wasps, radioactive wasps,” Keilar said. “Now we’re talking about a nuclear reactor on the moon, which raises some safety concerns.”
“Well, if the purpose of this announcement was to distract attention from the Epstein files, it briefly succeeded,” Cirincione quipped as Keilar and co-host Boris Sanchez cracked up. “Sean Duffy was trending on social media for the last 24 hours right behind Ghislaine Maxwell.”
He continued, “But if it’s to propose a serious plan for the human colonization of Mars, I think it fails the test.”
Cirincione said that a small, modular, launchable nuclear reactor has been in the cards for a while, but Duffy’s announcement “actually resets the timeline that NASA set just five years ago of being able to have a nuclear reactor ready to launch by 2026,” Cirincione said.
“Now, he’s proposing 2030 for a bigger reactor, about 10 times the size of the one that was originally proposed several years ago. I just don’t see the technology available. I don’t think we’re going to be able to make this technological leap, but we are certainly going to spend billions of dollars trying to do so, probably at the at the expense of other vital NASA missions.“
Cirincione said that such a mission would “require a launch vehicle that doesn’t yet exist, require a reactor that doesn’t yet exist, and pose some serious safety hazards themselves, like the risk of failure of the system, the explosion of the system, or another launch failure as they try to put this in orbit and then onto the moon. I don’t think the risks are worth it,” Crincione said.