[JumpCrisscross]

> seems "obvious" that there must be some clever way to exploit this to generate energy in a simple and novel fashion

Sure, once you have two-week power-storage infrastructure. (And the scale to harvest a useful amount of energy once a month on average.) In the meantime, i.e. our lifetimes, you have countries that can build space nuclear reactors and countries being performative.

[somenameforme]

I see a couple of issues here. The first is that creating, maintaining, and operating a nuclear facility on the Moon would almost certainly be far more challenging than "just" maintaining a couple of weeks of power storage. But that kind of implicitly leads into the other issue. That is that you only really need the scale of power that nuclear can offer once you've already substantially industrialized the Moon. For some simple habs and research areas, even something as small/simple as a radioisotype generator [1] would be more than fine.

Beyond all this, I meant novel when I said novel. The regular extremes of heat and cold offer all sorts of interesting ideas. You've got room for predictable and endless convection on basically an arbitrarily large scale there. There is certainly going to be some clever way to exploit this in a novel fashion.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...