Future astronauts living and working on the Moon will need robust technologies that store and deliver continuous, reliable energy.

But with no wind, no combustible fuels, no water (as far as we know), and two weeks of darkness at a time — the moon isn’t exactly the best place to set up a solar or wind farm.

The British aviation company Rolls-Royce thinks it has a solution to this riddle: nuclear microreactors.

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) seems to agree. It announced £2.9 million in funding for Rolls-Royce’s lunar microreactor project last week. This follows a £249,000 study funded by the agency last year.

With the new money, the company hopes to have a modular demonstration model of a microreactor ready to be taken to the moon by 2029.

“All space missions rely on a source of energy to support communication, life support and scientific experimentation systems,” said the UK Space Agency in a press release on Friday.

“Solar seems like an obvious choice, but the moon’s rotation results in a two-week day followed by two weeks of darkness or night,” Dhara Patel, a space expert at the National Space Center in England’s Leicester, told me. . CNBC.

A nuclear reactor, on the other hand, could “enable continuous power regardless of location, available sunlight and other environmental conditions,” according to the UKSA. This could “drastically extend the duration of future lunar missions and their scientific value,” as well as provide a source of always-on, clean energy, it added.

Rolls-Royce scientists and engineers will work with a number of organizations to provide the demonstrator, including the University of Oxford, the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Center (AMRC) and Nuclear AMRC.

The project is part of Rolls-Royce’s £500 million small modular reactor (SMR) programwhich received £210 million in government funding last year, and aims to build, scale up and roll out the technology in the UK and beyond.

These reactors would be compact, modular, and factory-built, producing much less energy than typical nuclear power plants, but at a fraction of the cost, proponents say.

“Space exploration is the ultimate laboratory for technologies we need on Earth.

Rolls-Royce expects to complete its first Earth-based unit in early 2030 and build up to ten by 2035, with four potential UK sites already reserved. Once up and running, so is every reactor is expected to produce more than 400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power at least 400,000 homes.

However, commercial viability is still a long way off. SMRs are not cheap to build and, with rising material and energy prices, licensed SMR manufacturers are struggling to keep their projects within budget. Earlier this month, Rolls-Royce said current program funding will expire at the end of 2024, and requested negotiations with the UK government to find new investments, Reuters reported.

Last week, the company got a lifeline when UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt announced the launch of a competition to boost investment in SMRs and financing if the technology proved viable.

While the details of the match are yet to be revealed, they are thought that about six companies or consortia will provide. The race is likely to pit Rolls-Royce, currently the UK’s frontrunner, against contenders such as the London-based startup Newcleowhich recently announced plans to raise €1 billion to deploy SMRs in the UK, and Terra Poweran American startup backed by Bill Gates that is developing a class of ‘travelling wave reactors’.

While the competition is a step in the right direction, it is still a long way from the hard cash Rolls-Royce needs to meet its targets. But perhaps the moon will prove to be an ideal testbed for microreactor scale-up closer to home, and the support of the UKSA, a springboard to the technology’s maturation.

As George Freeman, minister of state at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, points out, “space exploration is the ultimate laboratory for so many of the transformational technologies we need on Earth.”

The UKSA recently made £51 million available to UK companies to develop communications and navigation services for missions to the moon, enabling future astronauts and equipment to communicate, share large amounts of data and navigate the lunar surface safely. All of these technologies require a power source, and nuclear power could be the key.