India's vision for the BRICS Space Exploration Consortium seems to be materialising, as Rosatom hints at a joint endeavour between countries to deploy micro modular reactors on the Moon.
During the recently held 2024 Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, a riveting public statement from Alexey Likhachev, the General Director of Rosatom, made news worldwide: “The new solution that we are being asked to implement is a version of a lunar nuclear power plant with an energy capacity of up to half a megawatt. By the way, with the involvement of the international community, our Chinese and Indian partners are very interested in this. We are trying to lay the foundation for several international space projects.” The statement led to speculation about whether India, Russia, and China are for sure coming together for a space mission. Whether this is a detente mechanism in the India-China bilateral, mediated by Moscow. And how this proposal is a step towards taking small modular reactors on the Moon.
The statement led to speculation about whether India, Russia, and China are for sure coming together for a space mission.
What Rosatom, and through it, the Russian government, proposes is to jointly carry out the R&D of a micro-modular nuclear reactor with a power capacity within 0.5 MWe, and one that could be transformed into a space payload and assembled on the Moon through robotic and human-in-the-loop intervention. Keeping the lunar research base paraphernalia aside, the world has not seen such small power capacity reactors until now. Rosatom’s proposition is even smaller in power capacity than the smallest under-development micro-modular reactor—the American private company Oklo Inc's Aurora, currently under R&D and designed to be 1.5 MWe. The proposed micro-modular reactor, has much higher power generation than radioisotope thermoelectric generators, often used in deep-space exploration spacecraft, which generate less than 500W. The micro-modular reactors are way smaller, in terms of component miniaturisation and power capacity than the small modular reactors (SMR), which are in the 10-500 MWe power range. In that case, it is futile to get swayed by the buzz around ‘small modular reactors’ and assume this proposition is for the same. It is not.
What Likhachev said is also very specific and does not allude to the small modular reactors; Rosatom’s smaller arm, Rosatom Overseas, during the AtomExpo 2024, said that it is in talks with the Indian nuclear establishment for the supply of technology for small modular reactors. So, if SMR tech is to be sold by Russians to India in March 2024, it cannot be part of their proposition for co-development in September 2024. The micro-modular reactor is a new category, separate from SMR, and is geared towards strategic scientific and industrial applications.
Over the past four years, China has made steady progress on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a multi-country lunar research base megaproject that it announced in 2016. The ILRS is more of a China-led megaproject, which Russia joined only in 2021. In 2020, the Russians were still open to joining the Artemis programme in the spirit of joint exploration of the Moon. Today, except for Russia and China, the ILRS consortium is largely made of member countries that have yet to develop lunar landing and surface operations capabilities indigenously. It needs another capable partner, and the one with this rare capability is India.
Except for Russia and China, the ILRS consortium is largely made of member countries that have yet to develop lunar landing and surface operations capabilities indigenously.
Russia, at this moment, is fixated on getting its lunar landing right; as of the four preliminary ILRS missions, China got two right, Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6, and Russia has only one mission left, the Luna 26, which it anticipates to go successful. Unfortunately, the Luna 25 lander crashed on its descent to the lunar surface. Apart from these four Sinic and Russian missions, the current ILRS mission dashboard shows one pseudo-Pakistani, but in reality, a Chinese nanosatellite, iQube-Qamar. The inorganic and forcible Pakistani participation in ILRS will keep India further away from this grouping. China has tightened its stranglehold further by setting up the International Lunar Research Station Cooperation Organization in Hefei. This may not be a pleasant development for Moscow as it increasingly appears as a subordinate and unequal member of the ILRS. If one is to read, into the subliminal messaging, Likhachev spoke about India’s joining the Russian lunar plans from ‘Vladivostok’, a city that is the pain point of overall Sino-Russian relations. India may not join ILRS, but by no means is it a declination of joining the Russian proposal; only the modality could be different.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during the 2023 BRICS Summit in South Africa, came up with an extraordinary proposal towards the creation of a BRICS Space Exploration Consortium. The consortium is likely to be the group of nations that would pool their technical, financial and human resources to jointly partake in lunar and interplanetary exploration through the participation of their commercial and non-commercial entities. So, if there is a large pool of users laying the architecture for long-duration human presence, the countries capable of providing cutting-edge, safe, and sustained energy sources for the construction and operation of this purported lunar infrastructure will find it rational to pursue what Rosatom is proposing. There are only two energy options on the Moon, photovoltaic and nuclear, and in terms of their legacy levelised costs of electricity numbers and resilience to space weather and micrometeorites, nuclear trumps photovoltaic by a long way.
China has tightened its stranglehold further by setting up the International Lunar Research Station Cooperation Organization in Hefei.
In its fifteen years of existence, the BRICS has emerged as a mature multilateral organisation that has given tremendous latitude for scientific cooperation. There are three BRICS Working Groups, which have been working in parallel but germane cooperation on the proposed micro-modular reactor.
The BRICS Astronomy Working Group has been working exclusively on expanding the scope of astronomical sciences through universities, research institutions and major national laboratories. During its 2023 working group meeting, the members decided on two crucial aspects: One, to convert the working group into a research society or association, and two, to expand the scope from merely sharing astronomy knowledge to co-development of astronomy instrumentation.
The 2024 BRICS Presidency of Russia saw the establishment of the first BRICS Nuclear Medicine Forum, which is now geared towards using radiopharmaceuticals to treat oncological and non-oncological diseases. The Forum will now engage in setting up multi-country clinical trial centres, harmonising radiopharmaceutical regulations and clinical trial results, and creating processes for expert inspections across member states.
The BRICS Working Group on Research Infrastructures and Megascience Projects, since its proposition in 2015, has been the provider of a common platform for providing access to select scientific laboratories of member countries for carrying out mega-science research. The working group, having connected the member-government-approved laboratories, is currently working towards identifying new megaprojects that the member states could jointly build and operate and be made open to non-BRICS nations.
The astronomy working group could help with setting up ground-based telescopes for cislunar space situational awareness that would ensure smooth construction and operation of the reactor.
So if a nuclear micro-reactor is to come to fruition, the Space Exploration Consortium could be ably aided by these three extant multilateral technical working groups. The astronomy working group could help with setting up ground-based telescopes for cislunar space situational awareness that would ensure smooth construction and operation of the reactor. The nuclear medicine forum could be of immense help with space biology, radiation biology, and space medicine research initiatives to ensure the good health of spacefarers and their habitats. The megaproject working group could lay the foundation for making the nuclear microreactor an international multilateral scientific megaproject. It would also enable BRICS to attract new non-member stakeholders to join this megaproject.
The construction of any peaceful, scientific nuclear installation, however small, will demand global confidence-building. Although BRICS, if it chooses, could lead its construction and operations, the safeguards and inspection protocols and confidence-building measures set by the International Atomic Energy Agency would be essential. It is likely that some of the Artemis Programme participants may also show interest in this project or raise a similar but non-competing reactor, the latter being a real possibility, with Rolls Royce already working on such a lunar reactor. All steps must be taken so that such a project remains in the collective scientific interest of humanity and does not become a zero-sum game of lunar dominance between astropolitical blocs.
Chaitanya Giri is a Fellow with the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
Dr. Chaitanya Giri is a Fellow at ORF’s Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology. His work focuses on India’s space ecosystem and its interlinkages with ...
Read More +
PREV
