Expert snuggler wrote:Everyone's making good points about moving parts and 1000-year operating life.
There's textev for nanotech self-repair capabilities. Merlin's body has them. If little nanobots are rebuilding the bearings as fast as they wear down then all our intuitions and experience about moving parts fly out the window.
I don't know enough about fission reactor engineering to answer this. What if you kept one barely ticking over, at a tiny fraction of capacity? How long would it last? Then you'd have huge surge capability for emergencies.
Even if it were "barely ticking over" the fuel rods in a fission reactor would decay over time. I doubt you could have a stable reactor that could run off the original fuel rods for 1000 years. I believe most reactors today have their fuel rods replaced somewhere around every 10 years.
And producing replacement rods isn't a "non-technological" endeavor.
Zion is on the bank of Lake Pei, so it's more likely to be a fusion reactor using hydrogen extracted from lake water.
Or it could be geothermal. There might even be provisions for solar, but that would probably only contribute during the summer.
For that matter, there could be a solar power collector satellite in orbit, beaming down energy, though I doubt they'd leave any more technology in orbit than they really had to.