Martian equatorial underground ice sheets as a Nuclear fission powered warmed reservoir & Pumped storage unit

Martian equatorial underground ice sheets as a Nuclear fission powered warmed reservoir & Pumped storage unit

Hypothesis; Mars possesses vast subterranean frozen ice sheets that could be melted with coolant from fission power plants & funneled through a Penstock and Dam both built underground and under the ice and dust cap. These ice sheets are near the equator and would have easier access to and from orbit.

The fission reactor could both utilize the water as coolant and pump the water uphill during the night to flow back down the Penstock during the day for hydroelectricity.Due to the ice sheet there possibly might not be a dam but a Penstock shaft instead leading downhill to a generator.

Water pressure from under the ice sheet at bedrock should be high as it feeds to the Penstock and downhill hydroelectric generator

Penstock base and settlements; a boring project

The existence of a settlement here is the Boring machine that starts uphill targeted at the base of the bedrock and subterranean ice sheet. A small bore is dug first as a science project to look for life and to ascertain the geology of the area for the larger hydroelectric bore.

An Antartica test bed demonstration glacial hydro-electric scheme for science base utilization

This could be a national science foundation(NSF)  NASA partnership with NOAA and a private partnership investment that sells power back to the government supported Antarctic research station. This could be another boring project 🙂

The Equatorial Ice Sheet  Boring leveraged ESOP & Power company

The leveraged ESOP borrows on the capital markets and funds the cost of passengers & cargo flights to Mars to build the Mars ice sheet hydroelectric company station. A major byproduct is water and propellants. Propellents to Mars Fuel depots.Water to other Mars settlements.NASA could be the anchor tenant, a purchaser of science from the smaller test bore to test for life under the ice sheet & subsequent purchaser of water & propellant

EDIT

A recent article on Mars daily describes locations of buried ice in the mid-latitudes of mars

Mars water-ice locations

And a New set of data

5-5 Orbital Radar Assessments of Non-Polar Ice-Rich Terrains on Mars-Putzig

Fission power reactors produce waste heat this can be used to melt subsurface Paeloglacers to flow through a bored penstock for water and hydroelectric power generation to a downslope colony. here is a video of the small fission reactor,

Mason_2-1-17 Mason FISO presentation on the NASA small fission reactor

Tom Mueller interview (Kilopower)