On 19 October 2026, Academician Stepan Kalmykov, Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, endorsed a small lunar nuclear power plant at the SKIF-2026 conference. Rosatom CEO Alexey Likhachev previously said Russia intends to develop a lunar power unit by the middle of the 2030s with the Kurchatov Institute; a March 2026 specification called for at least 5 kW and a 10-year operating life. Roscosmos and NPO Lavochkin signed a development contract in December 2025 covering 2025–2036. The effort aligns with the Russia-China International Lunar Research Station, established through a 2021 Roscosmos-CNSA memorandum, with China targeting crewed lunar landings by 2030 and an initial ILRS configuration by the mid-2030s.[1]
A 5 kW reactor would support essential systems but is insufficient for a self-sustaining settlement; proposed later phases reportedly include approximately 10 kW for science and more than 100 kW for oxygen production, ice processing, and rare-earth extraction.[1] Nuclear baseload power could reduce dependence on sunlight, enabling operations through lunar night and at permanently shadowed sites, but it introduces reactor-launch safety, radiation shielding, heat rejection, nuclear-security, maintenance, and failure-containment requirements. For the Ark, power redundancy is as consequential as habitat pressure integrity: a single reactor failure could erase biological, cultural, or industrial assets before local replacement capacity exists.
The Ark team should track the Rosatom–Kurchatov design, the 2025–2036 Lavochkin programme, ILRS milestones, reactor mass and launch-safety data, fuel-cycle assumptions, shielding architecture, thermal-control performance, and autonomous maintenance capability. It should model a minimum two-reactor architecture with separated power buses, passive shutdown, spare control systems, and renewable or stored-energy backups; reserve interfaces for scaling from 5 kW to at least 100 kW; and evaluate whether Ark archives, seed banks, and fabrication systems can remain protected during a 10-year reactor service interval.[1]