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OK-151 is a pressurized water reactor. This has a primary cooling loop with water under high pressure, this loop must be cooled in a heat exchanger by a secondary loop. The OK-151 is designed to be used on a ship, with a constant supply of fresh water for the secondary loop. In your situation, the water and CO2 would evaporate, so you can't fill the ...

4

The research quoted in the comments indicates that this is indeed a bad idea, and wouldn't accomplish the intended result, but if it were decided that the CO2 should be vaporized, it's highly unlikely that active methods would be the most economical. By "active methods" I mean that we have to generate the heat to do the vaporizing, by means such as ...

3

We can estimate the pressure pretty easily, since both water ice and $CO_2$ ice are flexible enough that the pressure and weight must be more or less in balance after a while. At the top of the $CO_2$ layer, we have a 20m column of ice above us, so the pressure is $20 \rho g$ where $\rho$ is the density of the ice ($10^3 kg/m^3$ near enough) and $g$ is local ...

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A nuclear heating device with a mass of around 1000kg wouldn't make a measurable difference on the martian atmosphere in it's total (nuclear) lifetime. If you use MMRTG's, the same power source that the Curiosity rover and the Voyager probes have, you could bring around 20 of them as they mass around 50 kg a piece. Your average MMRTG puts out 125 Watts of ...

2

First of all, vaporizing 12k cubic kilometers of CO2 on another planet is not going to be "economical" (in the sense of "cheap") at all! Even if the deposit had a "switch" that you just need to touch to make it happen, a robotic mission to Mars to push that switch would costs millions :) This is going to require a lot of work.. but how much exactly? How ...

1

Looking at the amount of CO2 we want to vaporize, we can expect to need a lot of energy. If we kindly steal the energy requirement BlueCoder calculated, we can see that this is the same order of magnitude as the amount of energy stored in the global uranium-238 reserves.[1] This would favour a passive method over an active one. Of the passive methods, my ...

1

Why not just hit it with an asteroid? In other words, use asteroid redirect maneuvers to send an asteroid into the deposit thereby sending debris into the atmosphere.

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