Electric power system

Surprisingly intelligent.

We'll get to the power system later when we talk about some of the good things in this show, but the immediate praise that we can give to Seikon no Quasar is that for an ecchi series, it's got really good production values.

It is hard for me to recommend this show unironically to people, especially in today's age.

I had somebody ask me in a Discord server for local fans whether or not they should go and see Ninja Scroll in the theater.

I think, again, we could see a little bit of D.

Gray Man in here.

And also, the power system is also a little akin to Soul Eater, where you have a partner that is the source for your power, in which case...

You know, the Quasars have either a Mariah or a Magdalene, which, Kat, do they ever explain what the difference is between a Mariah and a Magdalene in the show?

So when you work with physical systems, you learn a lot, [chuckles] and you-- it's not exotic, well, FX.

You, they, you have to look at the physical properties of the system, and that part was done with my collaborators in power systems.

I worked with Alex Stankovic and with motors, in motors with Professor Nam from Korea.

So they are really experts in those fields, and, and I learned a lot from them, and I spent long periods with them in Korea and in the US.

I guess I want to mention, as we continue our discussion, a bunch of papers that I didn't do justice to before when we talk about, for example, PM synchronous motors and your collaborations with Petrovic and Stankovic.

So, uh, Interconnection and Damping Assignment Approach to Control of PM Synchronous Motors, then An Energy Shaping Approach to the Design of Excitation Control of Synchronous Generators, and many others, uh, as you say.

So Transient Stabilization of Multi-Machine Power Systems with Nontrivial Conductances, Sensorless Control of Surface Mount Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors Based on a Nonlinear Observer, and I could go on, uh, indefinitely, I guess.

Well, not indefinitely, but for a very long time.

Oh, labor.

That's something I think you and I have talked about on the pod before too, right? Everything is more expensive for adding anything to the power system right now.

Right.

And then in addition to that, you've said this a couple of times, it's It's not the only factor.

I mean, there's like a bunch of stuff that is totally orthogonal to the rest of this, but also just adds to the otherwise inflationary pressure on electricity.

Yeah, and I'm especially worried actually now about that macroeconomic pressure, right? I mean, we seem to be moving into a higher interest rate environment in general, certainly in kind of global capital markets.

And And the power system is a big capital expenditure for society that we make sort of generationally.

And it would be really great to have been making that investment at the scale we're making it today, 10 years ago, when money was so much cheaper.

Launching 80 tonnes of batteries to the lunar surface is not just expensive, it is logistically absurd with current launch infrastructure, and those batteries would need to be replaced after a few hundred charge cycles, meaning fresh batteries would need to arrive regularly for years.

Nuclear power systems, specifically radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or small fission reactors, offer a potential solution.

NASA has been developing the Kilopower project, a small fission reactor designed to produce up to 10 kilowatts of electrical power on planetary surfaces, but these systems have never been operated on the lunar surface.

They introduce their own engineering challenges, including radiation shielding for the crew, thermal management for the reactor itself, and the political and logistical complexities of launching nuclear material into space.

No three-dimensional printing system has been tested on the lunar surface.

The gap between laboratory demonstration and operational deployment on the Moon is wide, and closing it will require years of robotic precursor missions and iterative testing under actual lunar conditions.

Nuclear power systems, particularly small fission reactors, offer the most credible solution to the lunar night power problem.

A fission reactor does not depend on sunlight.