At this week’s Oscars, a film about the dangers of harnessing nuclear technology in a politically-motivated death race looks set to take home Best Picture, which is good, isn’t it? As we all know, the Manhattan Project did not have a particularly happy ending, and it’s worth celebrating a work of cinema that warns against taking a similar path in the future. Or that’s what we would be saying... if the human race didn’t seem intent on entering the doom-spiral anyway, career-high Cillian Murphy performance be damned!

On Tuesday (March 5) the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Yuri Borisov, announced that the nation is set to team up with China to bring nuclear power to the moon as early as the 2030s. This is the latest bold claim in an ongoing race to colonise the lunar surface, AKA the Space Race 2.0.

“Today we are seriously considering a project – somewhere at the turn of 2033-2035 – to deliver and install a power unit on the lunar surface together with our Chinese colleagues,” said Borisov. “This is a very serious challenge...it should be done in automatic mode, without the presence of humans.”

Reading this, you might be wondering why we need nuclear power on the moon at all – “automatic mode” or not – and that’s a good question. According to Borisov, it’s about powering potential future settlements, where other sources of energy, such as solar power, would likely prove insufficient. And why would we want to build the settlements themselves? Well, there are a few reasons, ranging from the mining of rare earth metals or valuable gases such as helium-3 (NASA has suggested that the moon contains hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources) to preparing for colonisation missions further afield, like Mars.

Russia and China aren’t the first to cook up a wacky scheme for nuclear reactors on the moon, either. Back in December 2023, Rolls-Royce (the luxury car company) unveiled a concept for a mini nuclear reactor as part of a research programme backed by the UK Space Agency, while NASA wrapped up the first phase of a moon-based nuclear fission project back in late January.

Actually getting back to the moon since humans last walked there in 1972 has proved harder than expected, however, for space agencies all across the world. NASA delayed its manned Artemis missions earlier this year due to safety issues, while major private missions have crashed back to Earth and fallen over after landing, both effectively ending in failure. Last year, the Russian spacecraft Luna-25 also crashed into the moon after spinning out of control.

Nevertheless, none of this seems to have dampened powerful nations’ passions for building nuclear-powered settlements – potentially including a joint Russian-Chinese base – on our only natural satellite, and racing to call themselves the first to do it. What could possibly go wrong?