A nuclear reactor on the moon!? Yes, this is a great idea, and totally doable! You need lots of power on the moon for people to live there full-time. They need heat, closed-cycle life support, and oxygen from oxides in the soil or ice. Here's a nuclear-powered lunar base 🧵

The habitat might be a 16 m inflatable ball with 1 meter of radiation shielding. You need shielding from cosmic rays and solar flares anyway, and yes it helps with the reactor radiation too.

There are many reactor types, some higher TRL than others. Here's the SP-100 concept, a 900 kWe system that couples enriched lithium liquid metal coolant to a bunch of Stirling engines

For shielding, the best option is to dig a hole in lunar soil and the reactor down there. This gets you down to 50 mSv/month at the radiators. You still do need to bring along an instrument shield. The soil will become activated by neutrons, but oh well you have no other choice.

Here's a side view of the reactor and stirling engines

And the overall site view with radiators. Can anyone find a better scan of this? I see the document on microfiche in some libraries. This would be cool to enhance. I tried AI-interpolating it...

The SP-100 is a pretty advanced space reactor concept. It might be hard to deploy in 5 years. There are plenty of less fancy reactors that would be doable in that timeframe though.