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Radiation. His last hope. Kaelen stared at the Stefan–Boltzmann law in Chapter 12. In a vacuum, radiation was the only game in town. He grabbed a roll of thin aluminized mylar—normally used for insulation—and a canister of dark, soot-like carbon powder from an old air filter.
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. Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer
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. Radiation
He worked fast. Outside the airlock, in his bulky EVA suit, he spread the mylar across a twenty-meter metal frame, then coated one side with the black powder. High emissivity on one side, low absorptivity on the other. He angled the black side toward the reactor’s emergency dump port and the shiny side toward deep space. The temperature difference was extreme: the reactor’s outer casing was glowing at 800 K, space was a frigid 3 K. In a vacuum, radiation was the only game in town
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