<font color="yellow">Let's take 1000 solar panels. At about 25% efficiency, that will be about 1.2 has. of space on the surface, after installation, of course. That will give about 340KW output, but only for about 45% of the time, more or less. <br /><br />And a 50 MW reactor would fit inside pretty much the same space, and give 50,000 KW output. That's the difference in energy density, in real terms. About 150 fold.</font><br /><br />Um steve, you keep using the following unit: 'has.' Is that hectares? With solar at 1360 W / sq meter * 25% = 340 W / sq meter, to generate 340 KW then your 1000 panels are 1 meter square? So 1000 m^2 = 1.2 'has', but a hectare is 10000 m^2 so I think you slipped a decimal. Are the panels going to take up 10% of the area they are deployed in then?<br /><br />BTW, I think most folks would agree that real estate on the moon is cheap, once you get there. IOW, we pay no more for the land as the solar field gets larger.<br /><br />Does anybody have any kind of estimate of the mass of a space-rated nuke power plant of any size?<br /><br />I know we have to do some calcs on what our actual power needs are, but it seems to me that 50 MW is way, way, way more power than we need for what we've talked about here. Sure it would be fabulous to be super-rich in available energy, but we can't have everything we want.<br /><br />I just don't see construction equipment needing that much power. Just as a rough gauge, 1 MW is equivalent to 1341 horsepower, so that's a lot of motive force to do our construction tasks. We could get a lot done with an electric motor power budget of maybe 250 horsepower. <br /><br />BTW, in my vision the bulk of the construction is done before people show up, so energy for life support needs would be zero during that phase. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>