There’s no sun in the winter for solar, and the winds are often too high for wind power - they’ve got I think three turbines over at Scott, just around the corner from McMurdo, but they only cover a small percentage of their power - the rest is diesel.

They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill.

In Antarctica, geothermal would probably be the most reliable renewable power source for somewhere like McMurdo, as they’re practically on Erebus - but way out in the interior, you’d have a few km of ice to contend with before getting to any kind of geo-anything.

Weirdly, I was walking along behind a tractor yesterday, and found myself enjoying the stink of diesel fumes - it took me a few minutes to realise why - it’s the smell of Antarctica, minus the Penguin shit, as practically all power there comes from burning diesel!

As to a Mars analogue, the dry valleys, just over the sound from McMurdo, are pretty close, and a lot of research of the “will it work on Mars?” type is carried out there - much of the Viking hardware was tested out in Taylor Valley, for instance.

>They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill

How did they F that up? The Russians manage to successfully use nuclear power for similarly remote stuff and it works well until locals decide they want to steal parts to sell for money (which is a problem you don't have in Antartcia).

I suspect Russians care a little less about cleaning up after themselves or keeping the radiation levels down in the first place...

The Russians are using thermopiles driven by radioactive decay, not actual reactors that go critical. Such devices are indeed quite stable for decades unless they get targeted by scrappers. A few hundred watts from a large RTG is a drop in the bucket compared to the power required to keep a base going, so those aren't applicable.

If you need a transmitter or relay station hundreds of miles from people to run for years without fueling... RTGs are an option for governments.

None of the marines, the army, nor the Air Force have successfully fielded nuclear power. The navy is the only branch to pull it off. It might be harder than you think.

And it is likely still orders of magnitudes easier than actually living on Mars. So you'd expect that long before a Mars mission is feasible/desirable Antarctica would be colonized.

The motivations for colonizing Mars are quite different from the motivations for colonizing Antarctica.

> ... and the winds are often too high for wind power ...

Maybe this is a great candidate for vertical axis wind mills / turbines?

As I understand it, vertical axle don't suffer the red-lining problem of horizontal axle / fin based turbines, and while generally less efficient than conventional wind turbines, they'd ultimately be more effective in this environment.

> 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export

Wouldn't it be better left in Antarctica than where ever else it was dumped?

Probably, but those optics are almost as bad as mildly irradiating the port of Dunedin (yeah, that happened) and then shipping it on to California and Georgia for internment.

For a long while, waste management at McMurdo was “tow it out onto the sea ice, and wait for summer”. The sound is littered with who only knows what.

Antarctic Treaty forbids the disposal of nuclear waste there.

What actually backs up the treaty? What happens if it is broken?

You still might want the other side to hold onto parts of the same treaty...

In this case the result might have been the Russians deploying nuclear energy or even weapons there.

Some parts of the world luckily still seem to run on this obscure ancient thing called morality, trump didn't have time to mess up this part of the world

Oh really? Please name those places, and the relevant agreements/treaties they uphold for purely moral reasons.

What part of the world is that?

Sometimes treaties are made and nobody needs to be threatened for people to keep them. That's what it means to be in society. If you cannot have treaties without the threat of outside violence you are in a primary school playground.

Try not paying your taxes, or paying fines, resisting bailiffs, and yet refusing to go to court/jail and see how things work outside the "primary school playground". You'll see it is all based on the threat of physical force, even if you can't see so. If violence is the last resort, is is by that measure the "foundation" of society, if not the basis.

That said, the international community is not "society". You can have all the treaties you want, the threat of violence comes when nations care to break them.

It is a very different environment with different challenges, it isn't that useful an analog. Many of the Antarctica challenges relate to the ice.

One thing it does share (on smaller stations, not McMurdo) is the isolation and the impact on social structures. Concordia, run by the French and Italians, it has an ongoing relationship with the European Space Agency.

Supposedly, it would be difficult to set up for space exploration there given the Americans are [apparently, allegedly, rumoured to be] using it as a covert military missile silo[0].

[0]: https://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm

This is a great travelogue. I've always wanted to visit Antartica, and now I have a reason to. (On of my HS teachers spent a summer at Scott Base, the NZ one near McMurdo; I didn't realise they are in walking/skiing distance).

Somewhat north of that location: Project Iceworm and Camp Century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuBrQLMUAZU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acSpI9mheAI

There are people doing such research, but they use the Utah desert: http://mdrs.marssociety.org/

I imagine you can get a similar effect with an underground bunker without travelling to the pole. You'd have to the bunker would have to derive all it's needs from a solar-cell-like electricity feed, and the solar-panel tech could probably be developed independently from the colony project.

Maybe you could even remove the air from a case if feasible?