Fundamentals Of Heat And Mass Transfer -

Kaelen opened the emergency vent. No coolant, no moving parts—just pure electromagnetic waves carrying energy away. He watched his suit’s thermometer. The reactor’s temperature stopped climbing. Then, slowly, it began to fall.

Kaelen’s first instinct was conduction. “Just sink the heat into the lunar regolith,” he muttered, flipping to Chapter 3. But the numbers were brutal: lunar soil was a poor conductor. The heat would build up faster than it could diffuse. The reactor’s silicon carbide housing would reach critical temperature in under an hour. Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer

He turned to convection. “Fine,” he said, pulling up schematics of the backup loop. He could vent the reactor’s secondary helium coolant into a makeshift radiator—a long, coiled tube he could snake across the crater floor. But without a pump, the helium would move by natural convection only. He ran the Grashof and Prandtl numbers in his head. The buoyancy-driven flow would be too slow. The tube would melt before the heat ever reached the far end. Kaelen opened the emergency vent