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.

And that was supposed to take 3 days, so a decade here means at least a thousand years.

Yeah, that sounds doable.

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 moon

Space lasers!!

But then you build a much bigger one on earth. New nuclear power plants are often designed to generate over 1000 MW, NASA has designed small modular nuclear plants to deploy at space bases that generate 10 KW, a completely different scale.

As often as not they were chasing Americans' empty promises (and occasionally achieving the impossible as a result).

The hydrogen bomb, the probe into Venus, the Mirr Space Station... all launched in response to American campaigns.

But the USSR of the 60s/70s was a wildly different place from post collapse Nationalist Russia. They scraped much of their R&D infrastructure for parts under Yeltsin.

I'd rather be stuck on the moon than deal with the bullshit down here

You don't understand, the moon needs to be liberated from lunar nazis.

And if ta rocket explodes carrying erniched uranium...

On the moon isn't really "in space" in terms of temperature distribution because the heat actually has somewhere to go, the moon.

Would only be cool enough at night though.

So... The US has plans to build nuclear generators on the moon too, kilopower has been an ongoing project for the past decade and I have no doubt we'll be ready to deploy one of these reactors as soon as we start building infrastructure on the moon again in the near future.

Nuclear power is not new for space, it's an obvious choice, one of only two choices in fact. And for what it's worth, Russia/USSR has had far more nuclear powered space probes over the years than the US has, so this isn't exactly new for them either.

As for cooling, yeah, if you generate power you need to dissipate that heat. Your generator will put out heat which needs to be dealt with and then using that electricity will also generate heat which needs to be dissipated. That said, one kind of power is not harder than another, dissipating a megawatt of solar power is just as complicated as a megawatt of nuclear. So the real question is: how much power do you need? The complexity of the project will scale relative to that.

All in all, we've used nuclear power in space before and we will need to do it again, radiators are not all that hard.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor

But not as much as cheese!