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Could The Moon Power Earth?
Gatton writes: "Cool article at [Space.com which says that Helium-3 is] found on the moon in great abundance. Combined with fusion, it could be a clean alternate fuel source. Quote from article: "Scientists estimate there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year, according to Apollo17 astronaut and FTI researcher Harrison Schmitt." The article is a bit breathless and mumbly on details (So how do we fill up our tanks with H-3, exactly?), but tantalizing. And "combined with fusion," wouldn't a whole lot of things be interesting? Still, if the energy is feasibly recoverable, expect a different kind of corporate-sponsored moonshots.
Expanding on this, doesn't planting consume the nutrients of the soil.. INAF (I'm not a farmer), but don't farmers have to replenish all the nutrients periodically (sometimes by planting crops that they till into the soil). The more energy you could acquire from a crop, the more greedy it will be from the soil (like Tabacco).
Basically you'd be trading environmental friendliness with starvation of our farmlands.
-Michael
-Michael
If we had a humongous generator with a crank handle extending all the way to the moon, we could use the moon for some serious energy. Of course, since we're effectively slowing it down, it will eventually plummet down to Earth and kill us all. But I think the tradeoff is well worth it, and if we calculate the energy extraction rate carefully, we can time the whole falling-down-to-earth bit so as to make it a future generation's problem.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
If we get fusion working, there is so much deuterium in the world's oceans, it would be equivelent to a ball of oil the size of the sun. We won't be making any trips to the moon to get fuel any time soon.
This Sig Intentionally left blank
Actually, all EME (earth-moon-earth) work is done at 2 meters and above (144MHz and above), not in the HF bands (generally taken to be 50MHz and below). HF bounces off the ionosphere, not the moon.
As for beaming power to/from the moon: it will spread, and the beamwidth from the moon would be roughly the size of the earth. You'd have to cover the whole earth with antennas and diodes to recover the power. It'd make more sense to put the collectors in low earth orbit: the beamwidths then would be roughly football field sized. However, the stupid environmentalists (as opposed to the more common but less vocal smart environmentalists) scream because there's "radiation" involved.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Actually, I took a class a couple of years back at the Univerity of Wisconsin. The course was taught by Schmitt and several other members of the Engineering faculty. It covered ideas like this and other not-so-far-out ideas for using resources from space. This isn't just some crazy, spur of the moment what if. This plan is remarkably well thought out. If you talk to Schmitt he will openly admit that this cannot be done today. BUT, if we as a society (or even just a few big companies) choose to make this a goal, it is reasonable to expect lunar 3He to become a useful energy source in the next 20 years.
Pluto.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Just as a side point...
Luckily, solar cells are not the only way to harvest sunlight directly to energy. Solar powered turbines are in use, Stirling engines (unfortunatly long negelected) are starting to gain some small measure of popularity in research circles again...
Any prime mover can be used to harvest sunlight.
Personally, though, I think most gains will come in the form of more efficient ways to use the fuels we use now. We belch an awful lot of waste heat and fumes our of our cars for no reason. Now if I can just justify either the Honda or Toyota hybrid car this fall...
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Just a question, but it be possible to just go to the gas station to get some nice and cheap bulk vegetable oil? Yum.
Actually, this concept has probably been around for more than a decade. I was in speech and debate in high school, and the topic for policy debate in the '90-'91 school year was space exploration. I can remember reading about this idea at the time.
The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. - Jacques Bènigne Bossuet
Did you ever notice on your electric bill there are charges for "lost energy"? This is the loss of transmission through power lines. Batteries are rarely an effecient solution. Carbon-fiber would be more efficient, but still not efficient enough for heavy use. Those Terex Titan dump trucks out there still run Diesel, but as a generator for their four powerful wheel motors. The same would be more efficient for a car, as it doesn't have to race up and down during shifts, instead running smoothly to produce more power, and shunting excess to/from a flywheel.
BTW: though much work has been done to scrub outgoing emissions from power plants, coal burning plants still put more radiation into the air than do nuclear plants. This is part of the nature of coal. No big deal, sine coal plants have been along about as long as DC current and AC current systems. It only affects where they put the stacks: your nation's farmland.
Lowmag.net
But you don't see fish driving limo's now, do you.
What can you conclude from this?
I think both needs can be served. I mean, if we have these gas or bio fuel powered cars available, there still needs to be a distribution network available, parts to build and fix these cars, skilled mechanics with the knowhow to fix these things. I think the system can "evolve". Heck, take a look at biodiesel. Basically, a corn-based fuel, it can be used in stock diesel engines with no modifications whatsoever, and it's from a renewable source. Plus it's safe enough that you can drink it! I'm sure other fuels could be developed that don't have crude oil bases, but are compatible with current engines, which will give us the time to slowly move the "system" to alternative power sources for automobiles such as hydrogen and power cells. Regardless, throughout history, jobs have always evolved. From the original farmers, to the factory workers, to the computer technicians of today, to the who knows what of tomorrow, things change, but they don't have to put millions of people out of work when they do.
In the game Allegiance by M$, Helium-3 was the most used resources, and they mined the moon for it. Hm...
--- Ãther SPOON!
Fun.
The article implies that, to first order, the H3 is nicely dispersed over the entire surface of the moon. En lets suppose it's fairly close to the surface (since created by solar wind interaction) up to 1 meter depth. So, how concentrated is this stuff anyway? Concentration will dominate the extraction costs, right?
Moon surface = 3.6 * 10^13 m^2
Concentration = 1 million tons/(surface*depth)
Lemme see, thats barely 0.03 g/m^3. Extracting and shipping a 10 ton load of H3 to earth would require mining an area of 360 km^2(!).
And all this for a lousy $40 billion dollar revenu? If I recall correctly, solely putting a couple of people on the moon cost about $24 billion dollar 30 years ago.
Dream on.
Ivo
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
Well, in case you missed it.
Of course, you don't think radioactivity and radioactive waste is a problem, witness:
I keep wondering what the credible safety effort is for a ecological time-bombs that stay armed for a couple of tens of aeons. I haven't heard it yet, I have to say.
Just what I always wanted: a big block of hot metal in orbit, harboring a controlled reaction of huge potential, sending down an enormous amount of energy over miles and miles in some concentrated form through the ecosystem. Can't wait.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can call me a Luddite now. Thing is, I haven't been thrilled with the actual real social and ecological problems of our wonderful Atomic age, so I am skeptical to the thought that just throwing more technology at some fundamental problems is going to make things better.
Call me Joe Q. Public. This is who you have to deal with.
You should also remember to point out biodiesel - a diesel fuel formulated from soybean oil.
Bah! You're just as bad as those people who tell us that Jupiters orbit affects our love-lives!
We just don't have the power to drastically change the mass, let alone the volume of the moon, significantly.
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
Actually, the gas station workers and their families would most likely not be out of a job. The government of midwestern states such as Ohio have already started a strong campaign promoting corn powered vehicles. In collabiration with this, many gas stations have already installed new pumps or refitted standard pumps and now sell both petrol and ethanol.
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
While D-He3 fusion should indeed be somewhat easier to achieve than D-D fusion, it's still singificantly harder to achieve than D-T fusion (the easiest reaction to achieve). And, we still don't have a working D-T reactor design, and that has nothing to do with either a lack of Deuterium or Tritium.
The real beauty of D-He3 fusion is that it is almost aneutronic. That is, the reaction produces very little neutron radiation, and the radiation it does produce is at a lower energy than that produced by D-T fusion. This means that less shielding is needed for the reactor, and long term damage to reactor structure do to transmutation is less of an issue.[D-He3 produces no neutrons itself, but once you toss D and He3 into a plasma, there are also neutron producing D-D reactions, albeit at a slower rate.]
[Note that the P-B11 reaction is really aneutronic, but its even harder to make work]
So, while it's nice to know there's He3 around it does us no good till someone irons out the considerable kinks in fusion reactor design.
I just have to laugh because in the latest Linux game Terminus (which is quite fun) everything uses He3 from the moon for its primary energy source.
Do you want the menstrual cycles of hundreds of millions of women disrupted? NO. It's bad enough now and we KNOW what to expect.
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
That's why some people are talking about fuel-cell motors. They work on gas, too, but they use it on a redos process that uses the entropy drop.
My point:
- Electric cars are FAR more efficient than actual combustion cars. Their batteries are, too
- While many power plants are only big combustion engines, they can also be made in an ecological way, and even the combustion ones are more efficient at it than ca motor car can possibly be
- You didn't proof your affirmations(links, links). Ok i also haven't, but you can ask any chemistry student you have around and he'll confrim.
- of course if you come up with some kind of proof, i'll believe you(no really, i'll move my lazy ass and search for a counter-proof)
HANDThe Earth on the other hand, is another matter.
The "Greenhouse" effect that Al Gore and others keep whining about is caused by an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Any time carbon comes out of the ground and into the air (volcanic activity, coal plants, cars, etc.) it makes the atmosphere retain more of the reflected solar heat from the ground.
We think that this can be partially slowed down by the increase in vegitation that will typically come about when you have higher CO2 levels, and eventually those carbon atoms may find their way back under ground. Studies are underway to confirm or deny the worries about greenhouse gasses, and the issue is not completely resolved.
On the other hand, if we were to start "importing" massive amounts of carbon from an extraterrestrial source (like the moon), and introduce it to our biosphere, the results could get interesting.
Unlike the alarmists on the left, I think the best way to deal with greenhouse emissions is not to relinquish fuel-based power (because such a tactic would keep the third world poor forever), but instead a two-fold plan: 1. Come up with machines that consume carbon gasses as quickly as our other machines are producing them. 2. Use more nuclear power, which produces harmless steam (and spent rods, but no plan is perfect).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The moon is not God. It is not Diana. It is not one of the shining buttocks of the four-assed space monkey. Deciding not to exploit its resources (or any other resources) out of concern for the spiritual beliefs of a population that still considers the bow and arrow to represent a great leap forward is Just Plain Dumb. I'm all for religious tolerance and respect, but when superstition slams into necessity then the church-going public is just going to have to give a little ground -- and I don't really care whether the topic is putting up a power station on the moon or establishing the Strip Mall of the Rock in Jerusalem.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
I just finished reading Homer H. Hickam's Back to the Moon. This book of fiction deals with the shuttle being modified to achieve escape velocity, taking a landing craft to the moon and retrieving 30 kilos of Schmitt's discovery, the helium-3 at the crater named Shorty. It was a fun read. Fusion reactors, bad top level politicians, duty bound astronauts, TEXAS!, sex, space shuttles, evil bad guys.
This is the same guy who wrote Rocket Boys: A Memoir, aka October Sky. He is a real life NASA engineer that has helped train shuttle crews, so his info is legit and his premise is supposedly possible.
Cold fusion, anyone?
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
"But lots of people would have had to learn new job skills!"
Sounds pretty lame to me. I think your kids will say so too.
Oh, and about being on the "verge of fusion, fuel cell and superconductors", I've got news. Fuel cells work on gasoline, since we don't have any source of hydrogen, and fusion is so horribly complicated that we're going to have to continue dumping gigadollars into it before we get anything useful.
We've been on the 'verge of great things' since the 1950's. Where are our jet-cars now?
Wah!
P-B11?
"combined with fusion" is the same cop out Matrix used to explain human batteries... You would think Schmitt could do better
I forget the exact figure (it's been a while since I last studied any astrophysics...), but trust me, 1 million tons is a minute fraction of the total mass of the Moon.
:-)
While removing that much mass (or indeed, any mass) would make a difference to the Moon's gravitational field, the effects would be far too small to be measured, yet alone to have any (noticeable) effect.
Don't forget that during the past few million years, the Moon has been hit by more than its fair share of rock, and its still "up" there.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Great, now on top of having 4 hours sleep, you go and give me a bloody headache. Wonderufl. :)
You are right though. It's Sodium and water, not salt and water.
Lowmag.net
Imagine the extra damage we could do to this planet with cheap abundant power. Cool !!!
Slaine
I'm sure it even could reach 100% if they dump the charged batteries on the river.
Seriously, imagine this: you have something gas station-alike(power station?), you go there, park remove the used batteries of you car(a heavy pair of cylinders) give them to the guy in the station, he gives you a new pair, and you pay him.
He has some 10 of these cylinders in a backroom, so when a user comes, he simply gives him one of these, and puts the used one on a recharging machine(he has a very big electrical conection, so it takes 5 min to fill it). This way, the batteries would only be charged and idle a a few hours, so they won't discharge.
On the other hand, if we were to start "importing" massive amounts of carbon from an extraterrestrial source (like the moon), and introduce it to our biosphere, the results could get interesting. Hydrogen is not carbon. The article about using HYDROGEN on the moon for fusion, not carbon. The moon has no carbon.
Is it perhaps possible to drop pure Na instead of NaCl into the water? As far as I can recall, Na reacts with water to create a rather violent reaction. Shot across the room in high-school. That may have been Potassium though. It is a bit more reactive :).
Lowmag.net
True, the moon doesn't have life on it, like the Earth does. But it's still a unique environment, one unlike any other in the universe. (How many other planets can you think of with a single, large moon?) If we charge right onto the moon and try to exploit it, we could damage it as severely as we have the Earth. We never know what we might want to use the moon for in the future -- and disturbing its natural balance might ruin future plans.
Now, this might seem like just another "gloom and doom" prediction. But given all the talk of terraforming in other planets we've heard lately (putting trees on Mars, water on Europa, etc.), it's not too early to start thinking about the repercussions of these plans. Just like in Star Trek, shouldn't our goal be to seek out and explore (and adapt to) strange new worlds instead of pillaging them and warping them to suit our whims?
While you're doing the math, don't forget to include in your formula that the vast majority of the Earth's greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor.
...until the spent nuclear fuel somehow manages to leak out into the soil. And knowing nature, it will happen. And there goes the nice solution.
The only nice solutions today are using wind, water, or geothermal power, though fusion looks to be promising (if we can manage to get more energy out than we put in just to keep it going).
--
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
a) Fusion don't work yet.
b) The shuttle can't go to the moon and back.
Other than that... sure, great idea!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
How clean would it be to do this? I mean polution wise?
Am I reading this correctly? One space shuttle load is enough to supply the US with energy for one year? Is this a typo, or is this stuff actually that full of energy?
-- Rogier
H3=Tritium=easier fusion He3=CON-fusion= cold day in...
Beta particles are not helium nuclei; those would be alpha particles. Beta particles are high-energy electrons/positrons. AFAIK, beta particles don't generate radioactive isotopes. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
Ok, admittedly I'm shooting for (Score 5, Funny) with this one, but bear in mind that this isn't a joke I made up. This is a solid, technological fact; check out the books Entering Space or Mining The Sky for the best discussions of Helium 3 extraction I've seen. Neither of those authors got the joke, or perhaps they had more taste than I and didn't print it. If you don't find it as amusing as I do, blame the Greeks, the astronomers, and the universe.
Getting Helium 3 from the moon to power fusion reactors is a nice, short term way of providing mankind with a non-polluting energy source. It isn't weak like solar, wind, and geothermal power, it isn't polluting like fossil fuels, it isn't a huge radioactivity source like fission is or a small one like other fusion reactions could be. Its extraction is environmentally friendly, and it comes from places where there is no "environment" to speak of. And at current energy prices, each kilogram of helium 3 would be worth millions of dollars if we master fusion power.
But it's a nonrenewable resource. It comes from the solar wind, it doesn't embed itself very deeply in solid rock, and it "leaks". It might be profitably extracted from the moon, but it won't supply more than a few centuries of the world's energy needs, not once the third world consumption rises to that of fully industrialized countries.
If we want plentiful energy that will last us for thousands or millions of years, we need to look for a Helium 3 trap that has collected far more of the stuff than our moon. The outer planets have done this; straining out even the thin concentrations of He3 in their atmospheres would give us electrical power for a longer time than homo sapiens has existed so far.
Unfortunately, not all the outer planets are easy to pick up He3 from. Sure, you could drop a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter, but even if it wasn't crushed, we don't have rockets with both the thrust and the specific impulse to get it back again. For this and other reasons, there is one outer planet that stands out from all the rest for He3 mining. And when the fossil fuels start running out, the fissionable uranium starts running out, and the price of energy skyrockets, there will be only one place capable of supplying the demand.
That's right. A thousand years from today, humanity's energy will be supplied by the extraction of millions of kilograms of powerful gasses from Uranus.
Remember ten years ago when the "Solar Challenge" was held in Australia. What good did that do? California then passed a law requiring automakers to produce Zero Emissions Vehicles if they wanted to also sell regular cars. So the auto industry, and Congress threw a bunch of money at electric cars. I'm not against electric cars, but they just aren't practical until there are better batteries or fuel cells available, and everyone knows that is still years away.
Even if they could solve the technical problems, the energy crisis won't be solved by a handful of environmentalists driving around in ZEV's with about 50hp that cost $30,000.
But if the average standard family sedan with say, 150hp, could be built for $20,000 and powered with a hybrid engine that gets 70mpg, that would really make a difference. People might actually buy those. And from an engineering standpoint, it's a lot easier to accomplish. We could have done this by now if we hadn't been wasting time and money with electric cars.
But no, we've got to go to the f*cking moon to solve the energy crisis. And in the mean time, we're all driving SUV's.
Not to pick nits... OK, I am picking nits.
The gasoline example -- it's not an example of Einsteinian mass-energy equivalence. Gas burning is a chemical reaction, not a nuclear one, and E=MC^2 has nothing to do with it. In a chemical reaction, energy stored n chemical bonds is liberated. Matter is not destroyed, only re-ordered. All the elements stick around in the same quantities.
In a nuclear reaction, the difference in mass between what you start with and what you end with is where the energy comes from. That's where the famous equation is useful.
"If I removed everything here that I thought was pointless, there would be like two messages here."
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
In my opinion, using a big rock whose entire job seems to be to act as an asteroid shield and a tide generator as a power source is pretty damned intelligent.
Now, I agree with you on this one, but I'm glad you added the "seems to be" part. Therin lies the whole problem. We have a bit of a weakness for thinking we understand what we really don't. A key example of this is what is going on in the fields of North America with genetically engineered crops. Plants that looked completely benign and super-l33t in the lab are passing genes off to wild plants, letting fieldside weeds acquire resistance to Roundup and all those other brand-name herbicides.
Monarch butterflies are dying from the BT-pesticide-enhanced canola pollen, not from eating it directly, (which monarchs don't do), but from the pollen being blown onto milkweed plants which feeds migrating butterflies. Who would have seen that one happening? Nobody.
The caution that I would just like to voice is that "resources" aren't always "just sitting there waiting for us". Extracting oil from the ground is pretty much okay, except for what we do with it once we get it out, and sucking hydrogen off the moon would probably be okay too (supposing we found a way). But often, what we view as a resource "just sitting there" is actually doing a lot for us! Take trees in a river valley for example. Cut them down and you flood the river with silt from rain runoff and kill the fish. Seems obvious now, but nobody said anything until the 80's.
There's no money in sitting back and saying "Things are pretty good now, let's just figure out how we can fix some of our mistakes and maybe stop exploiting the third world". There -is- money in the latest miracle drug/product/crop/sodee pop. Yay capitalism.
Wah!
It's a bit pointless to point to the Sun as an example of functioning fusion, except to state that it is possible.
Here on Earth, fusion does work, but it isn't a feasible energy source as it currently takes more power to start the ephemeral reaction than the reaction ends up producing. Cold fusion (somebody else has probably made a better joke, or will, so I won't even try) is not possible yet, and with major cuts in funding will be harder to produce.
The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (Princeton, NJ) was one such lab that had set a number of records in the field with its aging Tocamack (sp?), but as the public, and the post-cold war government has lost interest, they have lost funding. Unfortunately, many view their research as lots of money in, no useful technology out. People expect immediate results. It's a shame really; if we could get functioning cold fusion, we would have a lot less problems to deal with.
--
Never trust anyone over 90000.
--
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
where are our jet cars now?
I believe they are called computers.
The moon has no carbon.
I highly doubt that. Carbon is an extremely abundant element in the solar system. Do you have a source you can cite?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The energy flux from the sun at the Earth's orbit is about 1 kW/m^2. Given that not all of the Earth's surface is perpendicular to the sun's rays at all times, this means on average we need 4 m^2 of surface area to get 1 kW. (This includes the fact it is night some of the time.)
How efficiently can we convert sunlight to electricity? I think solar electric panels are about 25% efficient (I'd welcome correction) meaning 16m^2 per kW.
What is our per-capita energy consumption? I'm guessing here, but in industrialized countries, probably a few kW - say 4, bringing us to 64m^2 per person. Multiply by 6e9 people, divide by surface area of the Earth and I get .08%.
Assuming we only do this on land, and land is about 20% of the Earth's surface, this is 0.4% of the land area.
This isn't too bad, but is too much to be dismissed out of hand as having negligible environmental effect. Does anyone else have better numbers?
Some factors that make the situation worse: Whatever it is will need to use easily accessible land, which is much rarer than land in general. This also ignores the energy cost of producing the solar power stations. I understand this is a killer for semiconductor solar electric panels currently - they take about 30 years to pay back the energy used in their production.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
last time I heard, they had super-efficient cars that gets a few hundred miles to the gallon, but blocked by the oil companies And governments. If we introduced a major alternative to petrolium all of a sudden, or decrease the need for petrolium by 5 or 10 fold, it'll hit the already well developed gasoline companies hard, and have a big effect on world economy.
;-P
On the other hand, Microsoft vs. OPEC in their struggle to control the world's energy supply...anyone with me on that?
2*Na(s) + 2*H2O(l) -> 2*NaOH(aq) + H2(g)
--
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
carlos
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
2*H2O(l) + [2*Na(aq)] + 2*Cl-(aq) -> H2(g) + Cl2(g) + [2*Na(aq)] + 2*OH
though electrolysing [very] dilute sulfuric acid has the nice effect of giving you hydrogen and oxygen, which you can then burn back into water again.--
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
instead of flying the shuttle back and forth(if we could) why don't we just glue all of the annoying free AOL cds together and make a giant straw from earth to the moon to suck the helium out.
Excess water vapor from steam, when it cools, becomes liquid water. The earth does a very good job of regulating its own humidity.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Highly recommended.
Al.
We have all the free energy we could ever want, from literally the biggest fusion reactor that will ever exist in the Sol system.
Yeah, the sun.
All we need is a constellation of satellites, each covered with solar panels and a giant maser. Beam all that power into huge antenna fields. You can even let the cows graze underneath.
The only problem is that all of that extra power eventually turns into heat.
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
I had heard a discussion on a news radio program a good number of years ago talking about this very thing(they were also talking about hydrogen fuel cells). Back then strip mining the moon to acquire the resource was part of the conversation.
So they'd either have to develope mining operations on the surface and transport it back via shuttle, or find a way to "beam" the energy back to the earth from a plant built on the lunar surface.
When I listened to the radio show I often imagined huge yellow digging/dumping tractors tearing up the surface of the moon. Thanks for opening up old wounds.
D
There are serious problems. We don't know how to build D-3He fusion reactors. The 3He is present on the moon embedded in the regolith at a concentration of maybe 10 ppb. You have to heat the regolith to get it out. The energy required for the heating is significant, maybe 10% of the energy you get from the fusion. So, if you want to produce 300 GW of power on earth you'll need to have processing equipment on the moon handling in the neighborhood of 30 GW. Needless to say, this would be extremely expensive.
So, this idea is going to stay in the realm of science fiction for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, accelerator-driven fission reactors seem easier to build, can operate on the thorium-uranium cycle without separation of plutonium, and can destroy their own long-lived fission products and actinides. And there's enough thorium on Earth to supply the energy demand here for billions of years.
Since fusion is what unlocks the power of helium 3, and since hydrogen bombs work on the principle of fusion, I wonder if it would be possible to combine an H bomb and helium 3 together to produce a fusion bomb of unspeakable power? Something like this might come in handy if we ever need to shoot down an asteriod hurtling towards earth.
Although there are several comments discussing the flaws in your argument, I feel compelled to contribute.
Real $$$ is being spent on solar energy research. Lockheed Martin is funding the solar cell research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I have a good friend working on this research, they are trying out ways to mass produces solar cells with an effeciency of 15%, they have 10% right now. The space program needs solar cells and therefore needs research to continue to be done, and so long as we allow for funding of the space program then real $$$ will be spent on solar energy.
As for hydrogen, they tried that in cars once. It worked really good, at least up until the first crash test, kaboom. They are having the same problem with some of the batteries today, like the lithium ion batteries (the material inside reacts violently with water and air) which is why you don't see really big ones being used for electric cars even though they have roughly the same umph per area of material as gas.
Sence when is helium considered a non-renewable resource? I guess that it is, but then so is everything in that case due to entropy. Helium is an extremely abundent resource, don't believe me then look up at the night sky and see all of those beautiful fusion reactors light years away.
There are several major problems with fusion, one is that Nuclear research is a dying field in the US. Next is that we are ~100 years away from having a fusion plant that is able to produce an abundence of energy, right now they can't even get them self suffecient. Third, it is clean, up until the metal used to contain the plasma that has been bombarded by extremely high energy alpha and beta radiation becomes radioactive, and structually unsound? Fusion is a long way away.
Fossil fuels are amazing things. High effeciency for a relatively stable material. Most of the alternatives are either unstable, ineffecient, or not ready due to either cost or the research isn't finished yet.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
It wasn't mentioned that batteries use dangerous chemicals, and electric cars require lots of them.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
the public, and the post-cold war government has lost interest, they have lost funding
ICF fusion is still being heavily researched, and new generations are being designed and built. The projects are extremely expensive, and with the poor administration at government labs, lots of the money is diverted from the projects. The reason ICF fusion is being researched, such as they were on beamlet, Nova, and soon NIF, is because it allows us to develop our nuclear weapons technology. The projects being funded have two main goals:
1. Develop new (and safer) nuclear weapons.
2. Help the Stockpile Stewardship, which aims to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. A major goal is to allow all nuclear testing to be in-lab, and thus stop blasts for data gathering and ot reduce aging weapons.
The public wants cheap energy, but would hate any nuclear plants. Fusion is still not clean (low-level waste) and currect generations still spend more money producing the reaction than they get from the energy produced.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Why is He-3 based fusion better than using the hydrogen in the ocean? I thought that fusion power would allow us to just take all that extra water and make it into electricity... ?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Time to correct some nits... But,
E=MC^2 applies to chemical reactions as well.
The mass converted is a very tiny value, but still meaasureble.
Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets - by John S. Lewis - is a well researched book into the economics and technologies of space based mining (both for fuel and for raw materials). What makes it relevant to this discussion is the book's claim that Near Earth Asteriods (NEOs) are much cheaper to harvest for helium-3 than the moon, due to their low gravity and eccentric orbits. It also points out that, in sheer abundance of helium-3, Neptune beats the moon by orders of magnitude - if only we could reach it.
and with advances in materials science, (ceramics, etc) Stirling engines might even work !
Again, I ask: Why not just dump it in a subduction zone (Where one continent goes under another)? The earth's core is radioactive anyway, and there is absolutely no threat of it leaking into topsoil if it molten magma sevearl kilometers beneath the surface.
where i'm from we actually get our electricity from hydroelectric dams (and a few oh-so-safe nuclear reactors, but not much from them anymore) so there would be no fossil fuel burning to get the power for electric cars here.
Electric cars are a "good thing" because you are not locked in to one source of generating electricity. You mentioned corn, well you could use corn to generate electricity--as could hydro, hydrogen, good 'ol petrol, solar, wind, dog powered tread mills, and eventually fusion. All you have to do is refine the electric motor and electric storage technology to make it a more viable platform for transport (or whatever), then it is irrelevant where you get your fuel source from.
You can make electricity from hydro dams--but environmentalists want the dams taken down to save salmon--switch to making electricity from corn--drought or famine or something skyrockets the price of corn--quick, try to switch over to making electricity from hydrogen--etc. etc.
I think someone just now picked up and read their copy of Back To The Moon, by Homer Hickam, who also wrote October Sky and was a shuttle pilot. The entire plot of the moon is about a former-NASA-employee-turned-engineer trying to get to the moon to collect He3 samples for fusion. Appearently the science behind this has been around for some time now ?
And how do you CHARGE the battery, eh, sparky?
We're on the road to Tycho.
>Finally, electric cars may be less energy-intensive: A recent study by Ford Motor
:-)
>researchers found that electric vehicles with experimental sodium-sulfur batteries would use 24
>percent less energy over their life cycle compared to similar gasoline cars."
Perhaps the sodium-sulfur batteries have a life-span equal to only 76% of that of the typical internal combustion engine?
Dead cars use very little fuel
With the talk at the top of the list about the sun, it makes you wonder if (in reality) it would be possible to somehow jumpstart a fusion reactor's "core" from the sun, think about it, for the fusion reactor we would have to have materials or "other technology", that allowed us to contain it, the same technology ought to be able to be used to get a craft or some kind to the sun.. After getting one started, it could be used to start others, etc, etc, etc... Mabye I'm just weird, and quite possibly I'm missing a few scientific facts in stating the above, but hey, it's just an idea. :)
--- 'dex
I did some research on electric cars, and yes the energy does come from some coal or oil burning plant down the road. Before you start spouting off that more polution is produced one should really look the effeciency difference between a power plant compared to that of a car. The difference is quite astounding, not only amount of energy per unit of fuel but amount of polution per unit of fuel. Even with the inefficiency of storing energy in a battery, less fuel and less air polution is produced by using an electric car than driving your average car, and it is especially more eco-friendly than all of those SUV's.
One of the biggest problems with electric cars is that all of the batteries are serious ground poluters. Without proper disposal of the batteries we will just have a different type of pollution.
As for corn type sources, methanol and ethenol, they have their problems as well. Although great when added to existing fuels, by themselves they are rather inefficient and wasteful. Someone posted more information on why it isn't the best idea to use corn on a post labeled as a 5.
I agree that hybrids are the best idea, unfortunately the Honda costs ~$19000, which as a student is out of my price range. I would love to get one and if it were closer to that of the civic I would. The gas milage is 61 for street and 70 for highway, with a 10 gallon gas tank... you do the math.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
As an aside: "lost energy" has something to do with the power factor in the supply as well. Motors are inductive, ie the peak of the voltage wave leads the peak of the current wave (as viewed in the time domain). Many industrial customers whose loads are extremely inductive (pf of about .85 or less) will either have power company-imposed capacitor banks at their shops/buildings, or are charged a higher fee for the inductive loads. Power companies are in the business of selling Watts, not Volt-Amps.
...I think they should come down to earth for a bit (pun intended).
There are loads of other viable sources of energy. For example, it was said that if we build a big enough array of solar panels in a desert (say, Sahara), it would be sufficient to provide for the needs of the entire planet. Then, of course one could argue about the costs of building this array and the political implications behind it (like that the country in whose land this fell pretty much controlled the power supply for the rest of the world) could be huge, but wouldn't that be the case for the moon-mission too?
Dunno, just a thought. Solar power is something we have in abundance, yet we throw away very easily. With proper planning, we could use it to power our needs 24/7 at minimal cost (that of maintenance).
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
There are designs that include a gasoline powered generator to charge on-board batteries and/or supplement battery power --- like the toyota Prius which is available in Japan and soon in the US. There's also work being done on fuel cell powered cars, with expected introductions in four years.
From a consumer point of view, these cars look a lot like regular cars -- you put gasoline in them and they go. However, there are some real advantages. One, the generator doesn't run all the time. So,for urban dwellers who spend time waiting for lights and traffic congestion, not having the engine idle is a big win in terms of energy consumption. Also, you can use regenerative breaking to recapture lost kinetic energy that otherwise would escape as heat.
Under test track conditions, internal combustion technology is still unbeatably superior. Under real life commuting conditions, it can be improved upon. How much? With current technology, the Prius gets gas mileage in the low 50s for city driving and low 40s highway with a 600 mile cruising range and top speed of 100mph -- not bad for a car which, while on the small side by American standards, is certainly not one of the tiny little rice-cookers of yesteryear. And, according to Toyota, it puts out only 10% of the emissions that an equivalent conventional car would. A 90% emission reduction and twofold (under some conditions) mileage improvement is nothing to sneeze at.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Helium 3 is worthless until we can do better than breakeven (which we STILL cannot do) with fusion power.
Can stay in the sun almost all the time
Are easier to reach for servicing
Are a more natural step toward moving technological civilization to where it really belongs
From http://www.spacelab.net/~rjnoonan/SpaceLifeScience s/bios.htm
The Lunar Solar Power (LSP) System collects solar radiant power on the lunar surface, converts the power to microwaves, and transmits multiple microwave power beams directly (or indirectly using orbital reflectors or retransmitters) to Earth receivers (rectennas). To achieve low unit cost of energy, the lunar portions of the LSP are made primarily of lunar-derived components. Construction and operation of the rectennas on Earth dominate the engineering costs of the mature LSP (less than 0.01 $/kWeh). This paper extends previous studies of the cost of LSP energy delivered to Earth (M$/GWeY and $/kWeh). Rate of return of the LSP is explored versus key parameters such as financing, rectenna costs, productivity of lunar operations, transportation costs, expendables per ton of product, and labor per unit of output. The relative costs of three LSP systems options are presented. LSP can provide the order of 1,000,000 GWe of low-cost, clean, safe electric energy to Earth that is independent of the biosphere. Implications for the U.S. and world economy are discussed. Finally, the role of LSP and its off-Earth production facilities are explored in establishing an Earth-Moon or two-planet economy in the 21st century.
David Criswell is director of Inst. Space Systems Operations and associate director of the Texas Space Grant Consortium. He received his Ph.D. in space physics and astronomy from Rice University. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in physics from University of North Texas. He has worked for TRW Inc., Houston, the Lunar and Planetary Institute, the University of California, San Diego, and the University Space Research Association. His current focus is post-graduate research programs between the University of Houston and NASA-JSC. His long-term interest is in space solar power and lunar industrialization.
Seastead this.
IV
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
Claims of its "efficiency" or "eco-friendliness" are the most base slight of hand.
Far more gas is used, and far more polution produced (fossil and/or radioactive) by electric cars than their counterparts powered by turning combustion directly into motion.
electric cars are actually a bullshit propaganda scheme in the first place.
Methinks you're trolling a bit, no?
Wah!
Moon surface == 4 * Pi * R(1738km) ^ 2 or 3.795E+7 km^2 (approx, assumes moon is sphere)
:-)
Assume equal distribution of He3. Ratio of Moon's crust that must be mined each year for U.S. energy needs is 2.5e1 tons(U.S. yearly needs) / 1e6(estimated reserves) tons. Indicates that one must stripe mine at least 3.795E+7 *2.5E+1/1E+6 == 949 km^2 per YEAR.
Now that's just for the US. How about the rest of the world? Oh, and that assumes 100% recovery.
I guess we will need to subsidise operations by carving out adverts on the moon's surface.
I.E. The billboard that won't go away.
The earth was wiped out by a rocket boosted asteroid :) Admittedly it does wipe out all the tree huggers (no more trees)
Vermifax
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I didn't include numbers because, basically, numbers don't exist yet. As far as I know, no one has done a study on the potential environmental impact of solar energy exploding as an energy source. As it is now, of course, it's perfectly safe. The fact is, though, unless we use energy from outside the Earth, that energy was meant to go somewhere, and using it excessively means potentially having ecological side effects.
Another problem: solar power isn't continuous, so now in addition, we need an energy storage mechanism. Want to power the Earth with solar energy? You need one hell of an energy storage mechanism! Energy storage isn't perfect, so you'll lose a bunch there as well. Not only that, but you'll probably have to do it with something that's either consumable, or requires energy to initially create.
Additionally, don't forget that during the winter, a good portion of the Earth doesn't get *any* sunlight - or negligible sunlight. ("Sorry, Helsinki, but you can't have any power for about a third of the year.") No energy storage mechanism could possible store enough energy to power Helsinki for a few months, so now we'd have to have an energy grid across the entire world. Energy transmission incurs large transmission losses, not to mention the massive infrastructure cost and maintenance.
Solar power not only isn't feasible, it isn't environmentally sound, even using your numbers which are *very* generous (photocell efficiency is around 15-25%, not very much more) - 0.08% of the area of the Earth is around 36 million square kilometers. Regardless of whatever you do, those portions of the Earth will have drastically different properties than they were intended to, and will, in some way, end up radically changing the environment, I'm sure.
Thanks for the clearing up of info - my solar nuclear physics is better than my man-made.
However, my point was that people were trying to claim that saying "with fusion" was a cop out because we didn't have fusion yet. While that's true, He-3 is helpful for us in using fusion, and possibly developing it. He-3 is in pretty sparse supply on the Earth's surface (it does exist, but in low quantities - much worse than deuterium and tritium, as you know) - so experimenting with it is costly. Though unlikely, it's possible that experimentation with He-3 would uncover a method to actually make it work (very unlikely, but possibly not - the fact that He-3 has twice the charge of a triton can be useful in some instances - possibly magnetic bottling, where the same magnetic field strength will cause twice the containment force). Don't forget - virtually nothing in science has ever come out of theory before it's come out of experiment, so it's always useful to run them, even if you think you know the answer.
You're right, cold fusion doesn't work very well on Earth. Maybe if we relocate all NT servers to the moon they will work better.
We've known for some time the mooon could power the earth... we just thought it would be with Tidal Power!!
PS. not my site.
to the earth. One big conducting cable between the two, passing through the variable magnetic field would creat enormous amounts of electricity! Sure, it's a big cable, but you could probably do it quicker than getting fusion to work.
>P-B11?
p (proton) + B11 (Isotope of boron) -> 3 He4 (standard helium) + 8.7 MeV (bunch o' energy)
Note, no neutrons (good), but you need a ridiculous high energy plasma to see much fusion from this.
This is just extracting a natural gas from the atmosphere of the moon. Wouldn't need to take much of it, either. I agree that too much shouldn't be disturbed but a little fusion of helium-3 should go a long way.
Oh - just so you know, terraforming isn't necessary to put water on Europa, either - it's already there.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
I'm rather fond of p + B-11 -> 3 He-4 + 8.7 MeV.
Of course boron is a bitch to work with experimentally, as it tends to build up a layer of gunk all over the inside of your device....
IIRC, Rostoker had an article in Science in the last few years where he proposed using an RFC (reversed field configuration) plasma device to accomplish fusion, with inverse cyclotrons to extract the energy of the alphas. It seemed much like the traditional "beam fusion" concepts, however, and I could never follow his argument on how he kept from scattering all the boron beam energy into the electrons.
Would anyone who has read the article care to set me straight? I seem to remember getting something like 6% fusion gain when I plugged in some optimistic numbers.
Helium-3 has been available on earth for years - e.g. ; http://www.spectra-gases.com/StableIsotopes/he3cop y1/helium3.htm No one has a clue how to actually make commercial fusion work - even with helium-3 available. The challenge of putting the sun in an "engineered bottle" is too difficult for our dismal understanding of the strong interaction, such as string theory. There are many good reasons to go back to the moon, but getting helium-3 is not one of them. E.g. check out: http://www.space-frontier.org/Events/LunarDevel200 0/
(p+d -> 3He + gamma): aw bugger, the energy runs away as light. (p+t -> 4He + gamma) bugger again.
A couple of points here - First of all, if the many metres of shielding around your reactor absorb a substantial fraction of these gamma rays (and they'd better for the sake of the technicians), you can just run a heat engine off of it the way you do with a fission reactor.
Secondly, even if gamma rays aren't reclaimed and a lot of your energy escapes, this still looks a lot more mass-efficient than chemical energy sources - and we have a near-limitless supply of hydrogen and deuterium.
(d+d -> 3He+n or p+t) nice idea, but notice that neutron... (d+t -> 4He + n) this is an easy to produce reaction, but notice the neutron again. (t+t -> 4He +n+n) argh, two neutrons now.
And the problem with this is?
This would make fusion reactors as impractical as energy sources as fission reactors are now - which is to say, perfectly usable if you put in the required safety effort. And again, with a fuel supply that will last forever.
In principle, you could also run forever (or at least thousands of years) with breeder fission reactors taking in thorium and with reprocessing of spent fuel rods, but even "dirty" fusion is far preferable from a waste standpoint (only low-level waste produced, and no need to chemically reprocess it).
Still don't want a "dirty" fusion reactor on earth? Put it in high orbit (above geosynch). The fuel doesn't weight much, so refueling isn't much of a problem, and tidal drag will actually move it _farther_ away from earth as time passes. But I digress.
In summary, while fusion is unlikely to be a perfect energy souce, it is still quite usable IMO.
And will we see the moon partitioned like Antarctica? A US zone, a Russion zone, a Zimbabwean zone, etc. each with its own power plant? I can see it now, dozens and dozens of power beams flashing through the skies! Yeee-haawwww! Mr. Tesla would be proud.
Why pipe energy back? Why stay on this planet? Piping energy back is a waste - you lose energy in transmission. The best option is to get the heck off this planet and create our own world. Whether or not we could maintain our own ecosystem - hmm, that is a question, but to be honest, I'd rather place my trust in the hands of scientists than in the hands of capitalists.
Besides, and here is an argument I didn't think of before (but others have) - if we leave the Earth, and try to set up a world somewhere else, if we fail, we just come back to Earth. If we stay here, and try not to screw up the Earth, if we fail, we all die.
I prefer option #1.
Even in Uranian orbit, Hydrogen is damn hard to liquify just by refrigeration -- you need high pressure too.
Helium liquifies before hydrogen does, since it's heavier. So you refrigerate/compress to liquify the He-4, dump it back into the Uranian atmosphere. Refrigerate more to liquify the He-3, dump the hydrogen gas, and boom...liquid He-3.
Please!
Dropping a really big rock from orbit could wipe out the country of china, and the logistics would be much simpler than doing a lunar harvest of hydrogen!
Once your out of the gravity well, anything is a weapon. Why do you think the US and the USSR had such a pissing contest over space exploration??
Y'know, skepticism about feasability aside, this whole 'Moon as Power Supply' could easily turn life as we know it into a sci fi movie, complete with starfighters and spacebattles that light up the night sky like fireworks if nations (or even large corporations) were to start bickering over this new resource.
Now watch it all happen (yeah right) and the military adopts Terminus as the basis for their space flight simulation programs...
-----------------------------
Foolish human! Feel the Dolphin Brain Blast!
Please correct me, about the limited absorbtion thing and whether or not we have already reached the 100% absorbtion level if it is true, if you know better.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Mankind can't handle change, he just finds ways of doing the same things easier
If you listen very closely to what the Agent told Morpheous in "The Matrix", you will find the truth about our species...
We can probably count on it that all of the big energy companies who fund the campaigns of all of the politicians who make decisions both directly and indirectly affecting the establishment of such technology in our society will see to it that it's a loooong time before any abundant, efficient and/or cheap energy source such as this becomes a reality. (This is most likely the reason that things like electric cars that very well could have caught on nicely in the mass market and be affordable by now are not "in" yet.)
Sorry, sendmail screwed on that machine. I'll fix it. Try taking the treehouse part out for now.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Let me guess: we're reading this sad little story because some scientists were tapped last weekend to think about energy sources due to the oil "shortage," right?
In the meantime, we could already power our nations automobiles with fuel made from corn instead of fossil fuels, and we don't.
We could already be spending real $$$'s on solar energy research... but, uh, not since the last oil crisis, eh?
And then there's hydrogen. Cleanest fuel known to man. There was some very promising research a while ago about producing hydrogen with engineered single-celled organisms. Gee... I wonder if those guys are getting enough funding? Duh.
Bottom line: energy research is a fucked business. Or is that energy research funding?
We're on the road to Tycho.
Without water vapor we'd be on Ice instead of Earth.
ummm the article is about Helium-3 not about hydrogen.
Nice book written by the former NASA engineer, Homer Hickam, whose teenage rocketry career was shown (slightly fictionalized) in the movie October Sky (I'd also recommend that movie and the book it is based on). Really, the most difficult task of the Shuttle is the lift-off from Earth -- it is airtight after all, so a trip to the Moon using a Shuttle should be quite possible, given the ability to add a second engine pack in orbit. However, IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist).
"Display some adaptability" -- Doug Shaftoe, _Cryptonomicon_
You're reading correctly, except the fact that we don't have fusion yet, so that shitload of helium will serve at least to inflate baloons for celebrations...
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
I've noticed you've been replying this way to some of my recent posts. I don't recall the specific post you were referring to. I suggest you use Slashdot's search function.
I have amended my user profile to include one of my low priority e-mail addresses so we don't need any OT posts. Please use that if you feel the need to contact me.
Thanks.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Getting into orbit is cheaper than getting to the moon and back, and solar power has been tried and tested for power in space. The idea of transmitting it to earth has been suggested for years. Its currently a lot more tangible than the whole process of developing fusion power to be workable, and getting a new breed of lunar heavy lifters out there.
I await the inevitable Sim City 2000 jokes.
sigh. fusion is a nice idea, but, well, lets look at the available reactions (p is a proton, d is a deuteron, t is a triton, 3 and 4 He are the two isotopes of helium):
(p+p -> d + neutrino+electron) is a weak interaction needing a W boson, has hence a really tiny rate, and fortunately for us, it keeps the sun from going poof like a flashbulb.
(p+d -> 3He + gamma): aw bugger, the energy runs away as light. (p+t -> 4He + gamma) bugger again.
(d+d -> 3He+n or p+t) nice idea, but notice that neutron... (d+t -> 4He + n) this is an easy to produce reaction, but notice the neutron again. (t+t -> 4He +n+n) argh, two neutrons now.
(d+3He -> 4He+p) ah bliss, all that energy in charged particles. pity that the rate for this reaction is relatively low. (d+d and d+t are orders of magnitude higher and we can't yet make them work).
And what is the problems with neutrons you might ask? well , neutrons from fusion do the same thing as neutrons from fission: they activate things and make everything nice and radioactive.
Fusion is not as clean as people would have you believe. I am a intermediate energy physicist and work closely with the above stuff regularly. Of course, all the above is a lie, since my grant requests requires me to say that I can make it work, and I don't want to lose my grad students due to funding cutbacks...
name witheld through shear cowardiceI'd understood that a more practical way of getting helium 3 for the fusion reactor was to put a "lithium blanket" on the reactor's inner surface. Neutrons emitted from the fusion reactons breed He3 (among other things) from the blanket.
According to those doomsayers of the Club of Rome we should have depleted our natural resources long ago.
It would be alot cheaper to cover the whole moon with a reflective material so that our earth-based solar panels will keep on going 26 days out of 29.
AFAIR (taken from a badly remembered talk at school),
...
:-)
<Blockquote>
When the solar wind, the rapid stream of charged particles emitted by the sun, strikes the moon, helium 3 is deposited
</Blockquote>
These very same charged particles would hit the earth, but for a small matter of polarity (that is, the Earth's magnetic field repels all but a small proportion of the Helium-3 winging its way towards earth).
It just so happens that the moon doesn't have such a strong magnetic field (making this bit up here: someone please correct me as required), and more helium-3 can be "deposited in the powdery soil". (And the moon just happens to be close by... we could probably get our He-3 from them moons of Mars as required, but that isn't as much fun
As the speaker said to us: He-3 is great - except that there is (almost) no Helium-3 on Earth, and Fusion is required (also not yet working).
David Jackson
Yes. Hang a couple of miles of wire into the Earth's magnetosphere and beam the power generated back down as microwaves. Major hurdles to be overcome with safety and environmental issues, not to mention a thorny strength-of-materials problem, but all solvable given unlimited funds.
--Charlie
There are several advantages to this... First of all, to set up mining operations on the moon, you'd have to colonize it, more or less. The cost of colonizing it is nothing compared to the constant missions that would be required to bring enough H3 back to earth... It would be far cheaper to "convert" the energy from a plant on the moon, and beam it back to earth.
HF enthusiasts have for years, used a "moon skip" trajectory to gain more distance with their frequency bands. Why not reverse the trend, and set up an already proven power source; Microwave... In a controlled environment, a microwave beam can be used to heat water up to boiling, and presto chango, power steam/electric generators.
Another angle on this is "what kind of energy projectors will be available, when we can finally colonize the moon?" The answer is fairly unattainable at the moment, but we can project a bit...
During the 70's and 80's, the soviets built and tested several particle beams. Continuing research along this trend could yield a particle beam that can be sent to earth with almost no dispersal, and utilize ground collectors to change from one type of energy to another...
Lasers are getting bigger, and better too... As opposed to constantly aiming the beam in one direction or another, large mirrors could be set on gyroscopes and aimed to re-direct photons from the moon to any number of collector stations around the globe... AND DO IT 24/7/365. Hell, if you get a big enough laser, you could use one mirror at around half distance as a beam splitter, and distribute the photons to stations scattered around the globe. Mirrors can also be used to refocus the beam.
AND, once the moon is colonized, and powered, we can start to build Very Large Telescopes in some low G real estate, and place them on the dark side to escape IR and visible light interference from earth.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
oooops. Remind me not to read /. after the coffee has worn off. :)
Fuel cell technology has been around for a while (it's used to generate electrical power on the Space Shuttle), but I suppose it's not in a lot of people's interests to use it. Fuel cells are pretty efficient, and Daimler-Chrysler announced this fuel-cell car last year which produces zero emissions. The company claims that by 2004 they'll have invested $1.4 billion in fuel cells. Sounds like the way forward to me.
The Einsteinian mass-energy relation does indeed apply to hydrocarbon combustion. If one takes the reaction
CH4+2O2-->CO2+2H20
to complete combustion in a sealed system, allowing the resulting heat to escape to the surroudings, the mass of the final system will be infinitesimally smaller than the mass of the initial. As I am given to understand it, the energy of the chemical bonds exists as a component of the mass of the object. Or possibly the other way around. I forget that particular lecture. (keep in mind that i am merely an undergrad physicist, and don't really know much at all) Thus, the heat released in combustion comes from the conversion of a infinistesimally tiny fraction of the mass to energy.
But then, i could be entirely wrong.
--Use this space for notes--
Well! This is certainly the most impressive article in the history of humanity... in case you couldn't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
After reading the article, I can sum it up as follows: whoever runs space.com called four universities and talked to four scientists. The first one said, "Yeah, you could probably get a lot of power out of H3." The other three echoed the same sentiment: "Mine the moon for H3? Uhhhh... I'm not going to... rule it out... maybe... 300 years from now, if we haven't got any other ideas... but boy, that's problematic."
So why was this <sarcasm>amazingly insightful</sarcasm> article written in the first place?
My guess is that it has something to do with the two banner ads and two other assorted ads on space.com's front page. As nice as a good, scientific discussion of helium 3 would have been, it doesn't exactly bring home the bacon.
Sigh.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
How in the world do we land a shuttle whith all that helium keeping it afloat?
Of course, if the floating problem can be overcome, imagine the impact on the party supplies industry.
Where did you get the idea that any form of carbon would be coming in from the moon? We've been talking about He3, which even after fusion would only be He4 and maybe Li. The moon is pretty carbon poor IIRC.
www.eFax.com are spammers
As for "easily accessible land", I'd suggest spreading out well-armored solar panels across a desert, probably something like 20% coverage or less.
The problems now are those of storage and distribution. Optimally we would come up with an inexpensive way to make large-scale supercapacitors. As for distribution, you can either do AC power, or we need superconductors.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I work for a power company, so I of course have no bias.
If you show me a home generator that can produce electricity for less than 10 cents a killowatt/hour, then you'll make a believer out of me. In fact, if you can show me a home energy ANYTHING that can produce electricity for less than 10 cents a killowatt / hour, you'll make a believer out of me. Otherwise, do some basic math and check some basic facts.
Your electric utility is inherently more efficient than that of having home generation. Your electricity utility, for a coal fired plant, gets its fuel by rail - the overwhelming most efficient way to transport stuff overland. It uses all sorts of technology to recover the heat produced by burning coal, technologies that aren't available to consumers in cars. In even simple thermodynamic terms, what's the heat dissipation from a car engine as a percentage of energy produced, versus that of a giant steam boiler? More importantly, the power plants at a utility do not have to expend the energy to move themselves around. Your car engine has to expend energy to move itself and its own weight. A coal furnace at a power plant only has to boil water. About $75 a month is enough to get most people energy delivered from sometimes a hundred or more miles away, and power a house for a month. A car cannot come close to achieving that.
In the case of gas fired furnaces, electric plants use natural gas, which is pretty darn clean burning stuff. That powers a turbine that is not too terribly different from a big jet engine.
If it were more efficient to have a million little generators than a few really massive ones, then everyone's houses would have their own generators. But, people's houses don't. Wires to homes are far cheaper than generators - and fuel - in the basement. Smaller motors waste more stuff than big ones. It is a simple fact of life. Otherwise, why would they not have 1000 tiny rockets on the shuttle, or 1000 tiny engines on an aircraft carrier. Size matters.
The only reason electric cars are not everywhere is because batteries suck. Personal internal combustion engines are a host of inefficiencies offset by one good thing: Gasoline stores energy more effectively than a chemical battery, so pound for pound, gas is better as a transportable fuel source than electric batteries.
This is my sig.
Wish I'd thoughta that myself...
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
I'm trying to leave this planet, but I personally just don't have the technology or resources to do it yet...
I think that just like we will kill this planet in order to get to a high tech society (us plus all of the third worlders..), we may end up killing this solar system in order learn how to journey to other solar systems - call that high tech traveling society...
Then again, nothing ever pans out quite how you thought it would :-)
Unfortunately, many view their research as lots of money in, no useful technology out. People expect immediate results
Immediate results?
The scientists seeking funding in 1960 said that we'd have fusion power in twenty years. Today, we're being told that it will be another 10 before we get a reactor that produces more than we put into it, and probably another 10 before we get it commercially useable. So, forty years into funding a twenty-year project, it's still a twenty-year project. Is it any wonder why the funding people (who do not understand the real progress that has been made) have a hard time believing that it won't still be a twenty-year project forty years from now?
Steven E. Ehrbar
For a moment I thought the source of Moon Power was Green Cheese.
For the real history of Inertial Electrostatic Confinement, please read Distant Vision by the wife of Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of IEC.
A few details left out of the Farnsworth story:
Robert Hirsch left Farnsworth, became head of the government's fusion project and dropped IEC. Bob Bussard (an early associate of Hirsch in the Atomic Energy Commission's fusion program and the most prominent recent advocate of IEC) in his letter to Congress in which he describes the history of the fusion program (and recommended my legislative reforms of the fusion program be passed into law) stated that the Tokamak was seen by the early founders of that program, including Hirsch and himself, as a political tool to create an Apollo-style mentality to acquire funding, rather than as a viable technological direction. Unfortunately, Hirsch did not turn the funding he acquired to support IEC during these early years of the Tokamak while he was in authority, and then left government service to work for Arco. Bussard had a partnership with the Mediterranean mafias via connections provided by Hirsch initiated at a meeting held at the Isle of Malta (I got this directly from Bussard -- how Hirsch had these mafia connections I don't know and didn't really pursue in my conversations with Bussard) but this didn't prove ultimately fruitful as it was tied up with the Atlantic City developments of that era (the 1970s). This was written up by one of Bussard's investors, Bob Guccionni of Penthouse fame. Finally, circa 1990, Bussard went back to Farnsworth's original IEC concept upon which Hirsch had cut his teeth as a grad student with Farnsworth and Hirsch seemed friendly to the retreat to the technology of his youth.
It is interesting that Mrs. Farnsworth, in the above liked book about her husband, seems to imply that IEC was actually close to _working_ in the late 1960s, and that her husband was increasingly excluded from these developments as success was growing nearer.
That Hirsch abandoned his work with Farnsworth on IEC technology to become head of the AEC's Tokamak fusion project to the exclusion of IEC technology is certainly deserving of reflection -- particularly in light of his decades-later reassertion of IEC's value as a technical direction over Tokamak.
Seastead this.
I love wasting time on old Slashdot stories...
Storage and distribution are some of the largest problems in electrical design. Capacitors bleed, and they have horrible, horrible size/energy ratios. Not only that, when they discharge, they release a sizable amount of energy in electromagnetic interference. Batteries are the only efficient energy storage mechanism, or superconductors.
Unfortunately superconductors are NOT ideal for transmission, as they have a current limit that can flow through them. That's the main reason they haven't been mass-deployed currently. Transmission will always, always burn power, and that alone would make solar power unfeasible as a total power source.
Oh, and as a reminder, deserts wouldn't work. The sand would blow on top of them, covering them. There aren't any places on Earth that would be suitable for solar panels that don't have people there currently.
You've got the wrong atomic symbol for Helium. Should be He, not H. H is hydrogen.
While we here at Slashdot are thinking, "Wow!! This could supply the US with energy for a full year!!", you can bet your ass that there's someone over at the Pentagon thinking, "Wow!! A bomb made of this stuff could wipe out the entire country of China!!"
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Hydrogen is rather abundant on our planet... In fact, 2/3's of it is TEEMING with it.
And it's not that hard to get to. You don't need genetic engineering, or microbiology to obtain hydrogen... All you need are the following:
2 Tanks (if you want to hang onto it) Solar Cells Big Screens made from a non-corroding conductor BIG SALT WATER TANK some wire.
I did a project back in an independent study science class where I used the same materials listed above to perform "electrolosys" on water.
You pass electricity through the conductive solution, with the + on one screen, and the - on the other. (yes, DC works best, if you want separation)
Stuff the screens into the tank, and connect to the solar cell. Fill your "tanks" with the water, and place them directly over the screens.
On the + side you get oxygen. On the - side, you get hydrogen. Burn the hydrogen, and you get presto chango... Water.
Solutions like this have been around for years, but nobody wants to develop it because it requires extensive investments in solar power to perform.
Of course, that's not to say you couldn't build a large field of solar panels to power a town during the day, and shunt some of that power off to split water during the light hours, then burn the hydrogen at night to provide power (and water for the next day) at night.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Sorry, you are correct. Point remains the same though. The heat transfer occurs through the crashing of the Helium nucleus into the medium that extracts it. Too little sleep, too much BS when I wrote this, my apologies.
There's a book that I read who's title has slipped my mind that is about this very thing!
It's about a guy who used to work for an aerospace company but decided to help some people build a cold fusion reactor. They find out that there's H3 on the moon and the guy gets his buddies at the aerospace company to help him get it. They launch a rocket engine into space, then they hijack the space shuttle (which is legal due to some weird contract) and attach the new engine to it. Then they go to the moon, shovel in some H3, and go back. I think there's also an oil company conspiracy in there also.
If anybody knows the title put it in a reply, ok?
I will rise from the ashes like a Tuscon!
It nice to see that there are still free thinkers out there that aren't giving into the greenpeace BS. This sort of thinking is exactly what I think we need more of IMHO. The one question I have in reply is why take the hydrogen here at all? Why not just have the reactor on the moon and pipe energy back? It's probably easier to collect energy than hydrogen. I'll just go get started on the fusion reactor. =) If you want a good source for hydrogen, scientific american reported a story about the sheets of hydrogen laiden ice in the extreme depths of the ocean. Seems a little more practical to me than the moon unless the reactor was there too. There is my two cents...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Are we all prepared for the Y10k crisis??? My God, we only have 8000 years to prepare ourselves! I saw an ad the other day about someone being Y3K compliant... I'd be a lot more impressed if they were Y10k compliant. Not to mention Y64k (as in 65536) compliant...
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
Allegiance Timeline
There is also the fact that they can measure the effect of wave and tidal power on the rotation of the earth. :-)
I am well aware of the electrolysis solution and so were the researchers doing the alternative hydrogen production research. It's a question of efficiency.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Bombs that are able to wipe out China (and all other countries, 100 times) are already here. No need to go to Moon for it. The trick is to release that energy in a controlled fashion, and we still can't do it.
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
And do the forking SCIENCE! Space.com headlines Fusion and He3. HYDROGEN3=tritium=easier fusion. He3=cold day in .... Maybe Space.con (fusion)?
to even consider reading a post written entirely
in dork-text?
I don't consider it 3L33T... I just find it
annoying...
Just as annoying as having a post labeled
Offtopic instead of funny... *shrug*
Some people have no sense of humor.
No.. I won't acknowledge the time it took this
person to write the previous post out.
I can read the junk almost as fast as regular text.
I just refuse to...
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
Now this is good news for science. It's gonnatake time for the scientest to figure out how to use H-3 proper. But Once they do then just imagine how much effort companys are going to spend on making space travel economicaly feasible.
Untill now there was little practical to go to space. Now we have a tangible goal for outer space
Not just braging rights for putting a man on the moon, but something that is actuly usefull.
guvf vf zl fvt
I've already purchased my chunk of the moon. See the Lunar embassy at http://www.lunarembassy.com/.
Unfortunately, the article itself lost me with the quote "When the moon becomes an independent country, it will have something to trade."
....
....
--Hey Doctor Jones! No time for love!
First off, this is definitely old knowledge. The existence of He-3 on the moon is completely well known and has been for a while.
The "combined with fusion" thing is not exactly a cop-out. What they meant was that using He-3 as a fuel for fusion can produce quite a bit of energy, and He-3 is a very useful catalyst for fusion. Why? Same reason that deuterium is beneficial - because you're bypassing some of the steps in the p-p chain (the process that the Sun uses to make helium out of hydrogen). Basically, you can lower the energy threshold of sustainable fusion reactors if you already have tritium, deuterium, and Helium-3 present, because now instead of reaching the energy threshold of just one reaction (proton-proton -> deuteron) you can reach any of the steps in the p-p chain immediately. It's similar to chemistry - you can speed up a reaction if you have some of the intermediary products already available.
Second comment: what the heck are people complaining about using the moon for energy? You think solar power is better? Really? You really think it's free? Just like wind and water power is free, huh? Solar power is great - on a small scale. Try to use it for the reasons you want to use it for - like powering the *world*, for instance - and you might have a problem. All that solar energy was meant to go somewhere - the air and the ground. There's a definite solar thermal cycle, and stripping out energy can affect it. On the scales that people typically use it for now, like powering lights or scientific instruments, it's fine. Even maybe for a few supplemental reactors. But if you honestly wanted to power the world with it, you better start realizing that power generation will always hurt the environment. Always. Period. End of story.
So, then, the answer is, why the hell do we care what we do to the moon? It's *dead*. It's static. It's unchanging. Study it for a while until you mostly understand it, and then you're free to do with it what you want. Helium-3's a good idea - very good in fact. And yes, when we run out, we move on to another planet. Is this a problem? No. These planets were static. They weren't changing. We're not *affecting* anything that was important to begin with.
Here's a bit of reminder before I get flamed for being an anti-environmentalist or something strange like that. Life is destructive. It's entropic. But who cares? That's the point of the entire friggin' universe.
Interesting scientific point. Entropy is mathematically identical to the concept that Shannon (yah, the modem guy) called 'information', and it's quite appropriate. Entropy is information - it's the universe saying "Something happened here." So when people say that entropy always increases, that's correct - because things are happening - information is being generated. Thermo tries to tell us that this is a 'bad' thing - they call entropy chaos, or disorder. That carries a connotation of evil or wrong, which is not right - it's simply a way of saying "something happened here."
So we have two choices. We can avoid energy use entirely, and calmly sit here on the planet, maybe migrate when it dies, and do nothing. Might have to destroy most of Nature too. Nature is rather entropic... eats up a lot of power and just turns it into heat. Or we can do what living beings were intended to do. Live. Use the fuel that the universe gave us - just, try to make it last as long as possible. Not infinitely. We can't live forever, and we shouldn't try to.
Bottom line - there's nothing wrong with using up resources. They're there to be consumed, or else they'll just sit there forever. The real goal is to use them intelligently. In my opinion, using a big rock whose entire job seems to be to act as an asteroid shield and a tide generator as a power source is pretty damned intelligent.
Those tribes might get a bit freaked out when the moon slowly gets farther away as it eventually will. At some point, it may not even be visible in the sky for them anymore! Maybe we should go blow up a nuclear bomb on the moon to make sure things don't change for those tribes. (/sarcasm)
Things change. Life would be boring otherwise.
does this mean all the exhausted fumes will make everyone talk with a squeaky voice?
------------------
It occures to me that the deposits of H3 must be spread uniformly across the surface of the moon if it is catching rays from the Sun. This means the entire surface is evenly loaded and a target for a strip mine. This begs the question: Will the moon eventually be paved flat?
After several passes with truly massive mining equiptment the entire surface of the moon will have been run through grinders, slurry heaters, leech processes, and redeposit. The redeposit process will have to lay down the remainders without stirring up any "dust" so controls will be tight and mistakes intolerated.
There will be a strict condition imposed by the UN that a mining compnay or national venture may only extract usefull elements like h3 and aluminum and carefully place all the rest of the materials back on the surface. The risk of flying into a 'dust cloud' of micrometeorites in a lunar transport will be high enough without sloppy mining messing things up. The remainders might be left in large mounds, but this is only necessary if processing stations are immobile. In the reduced gravity of the moon, the entire processing plant could be mobile, even including the spaceport where the ferries load. This seems most practical and elegant. Now the factories are moving around like cows in a pasture. leaving their remainders in a smooth ribbon behind them.
The claims will be debated and marked in the UN. some nations might go rougue, political tensions will rise, perhaps skirmishes here and above, but things will settle down pretty quick as companies move in and tax proceeds are made available.
Back on Earth, there will be much debate over the effect the redistribution of mass on the moon is having over the tide and weather patterns. Coastlines will change, species will die, but at the same time, the power to do something about it will be ours. With that much pure fuel for fusion at our disposal we could take back the climate, by simply running massive underwater heaters in strategic locations. Advances in other technologies will allow us to construct ecological sanctuaries with stable populations of every species, including many 'extinct' ones. I guess the real question is, can we get to the paradise before hell catches up with us?
Meanwhile, the moon has been churned hundreds of times in a crop rotation pattern that's running out of time and facing ever growing demand. Enterprising organisations will move to set up very large sail-like collectors facing the Sun and surrounding the earth and the moon to collect H3 as the moon runs dry. They will also double as conventional solar collectors as refined to that date. This will probably be deemed more important than astronomy, but at no time will anyone be permitted to obscure direct sunlight to the earth or interrupt communications. Off the top of my head, the likely metephor is that of the Earth blooming into flower petals. Kick ass. The sails will be strung together with clearly marked conduits running to beam generators pointing at stations on the surface, brimming with so much power that they are visible for thousands of miles, and drastically changing the look of sunset and sunrise as the stations must always remain positioned along the terminator...
I could live with this future, smooth moon and all.
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm just a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta...
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
semi-practical :-) The item up for comparison is mining the moon for H-3 and using it for fusion.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
You know... if we loaded the moon up with a load of magnetic material and made the earth/moon combo into a giant electromagnetic generator, the orbit of the moon could be used as a clean engergy source...
...but we might run into some problems with the huge amount of magnetic material remotely wiping hard drives...but I guess that's the price you gotta pay for clean energy.
-----
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
No, not laundry detergent. That's not funny.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
If we'd use the moon for gaining resources, we'll have to build large structures where people live and work. Even a robotic implementation of a site is big enough for us to see on earth with the naked eye (eventually).
I think this is quite an unethical thing as a lot of people have a religious association with the moon, which we'll then destruct, or alter anyway. But who cares about unknown/undiscovered African or south-American tribes who will panic when they see the moon change... as long as it makes the big bucks right...
Bizar technology?
With just one bucketfull of martian soil, one can power the energy needs of the entire planet for a year! All that is necessary is to combine it with a bucketfull of anti-matter in a sustained and controllable manner.
Of course, if an anti-matter based reactor existed, we could just get dirt from the Earth. But then, if cold fusion existed, it would hardly be necessary to go to the Moon to get fuel.
On the + side you get oxygen. On the - side, you get hydrogen. Burn the hydrogen, and you get presto chango... Water.
I hate to break this to ya, but if you electrolyse normal salty water, you get hydrogen and Chloride.
Although the potentials would indicate that the oxygen would form before the chloride, somehow there is ONE exception to the "potentials can predict what products will form" and this is it.
But, yes, you can make hydrogen in your kitchen with this. Makes pretty little bangs if you light it. And if you do it professionally you can certainly produce the oxygen too, but I'm not sure how. (No salt-> low conductivity -> higher voltages? Different salt?)
Roger.
http://www.exosci.com/news/129.html1 202080006.htm
http://www.asi.org/adb/02/09/he3-intro.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/12/98
http://www.digistar.mb.ca/minsci/future/he.htm
try these. The last ones interesting.
--Rob.
The article estimates that He-3 would be worth $4 billion per tun, and makes the flippant comment, "When the moon becomes an independent country, it will have something to trade."
Necessity is the mother of invention, and I am sure there are a hell of a lot of people who consider getting their hands on this gaseous gold a necessity. I hope we will see an awful lot of highly financed scientific development into spaceflight and transport -- this is wonderful!
Compare a similar event in history; nuclear technology was developed many years before it might have otherwise, because the US Government sank so much money into having the scientists work their arse off, so they could use the technology to win WW2. [Different motives, but same effect of need accelerating scientific development].
It is one of the great misconceptions that fusion is a "clean" power source. Far from it. It is probably going to be every bit as dirty as fission.The problem comes in how you extract the heat from the process. Fission extracts heat by impact of the neutrons into some surrounding media. This leaves the media chock full of various isotopes that must be dealt with. Unfortunately, extraction of heat from a fusion process is the same except that you are impacting with beta particles (helium nucleus). This also transmutes the jacket into an isotope soup. The favored extraction mechanism today of liquid sodium will have all sorts of radio-active gunk left in it after a period of time. Sorry, but that's the way it is when you bang stuff together...
An ordinary cubic kilometer of ocean water contains 14 tons of gold (this was on the radio again yesterday). However, it's uneconomic to go and get all that gold from the ocean.
Assume that the concentration is similar to the gold in the ocean. So then the size of the moon can be calculated as siomilar to a block of 100x100x10 km. That's way smaller than the real thing, so we have just concluded that the concentration is WAY smaller!
Extracting it is not trivial.
So, where everybody can just drive over and put a plant on the nearest ocean shore to go and extract the gold from the ocean, you're expecting people to build a plant 300000 km away and haul the stuff back here, and make a profit? No way!
Getting it here is not trivial.
By the way, I must tell you that I know of an even larger store of fusion-fuel just a bit further away. The concentrations are much more manageable! Problem this time is that the stuff is fusing already....
Roger.
Helium's biggest two assets are:
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Solar power takes up a lot of space, and half the time you would be better off just using the power directly. Still, if you need hydrogen, you could always send a ship into the Pacific, (Or somewhere with deep water) and use a huge thermocouple to generate power. Not sure if its worth the cost though. I'd be more inclined to use alcohol and gas from waste vegetable matter.
Cold fusion disappeared from the news because it's just too damned easy to make weapons with it. Just implode an active cold fusion cell, and BOOM
</CONSPIRACY_THEORY>
I thought the french and russians have both claimed that they've had fusion working.
The russians claimed they ran a city off it for a week and pigs may yet fly.
But I believe the french sustained it for several seconds although the energy generated was very small in comparison to the shit loads it took to get going.
Yes it almost certainly is cheaper.
A single shuttle launch is a relatively routine event and we'd have high intial costs in building a helium mining machine (or however u extract it).
Compared to the costs of extract coal, oil and gas I expect it would be vey muh cheaper.
However why we cant just use Water to run fusion off i dont know, because i'm sure we could live with having 25 tonnes less on our own planet each year... we've done enough other damage to it.
If you crashed the moon onto the surface of the earth you would generate enough energy to last, I dunno, probably longer even than our species survives.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I thought up the conspiracy theory...and have found I'm not alone. Nuclear Pipe Bomb anybody?
--Mike--
Moreover, producing energy from fossile fuels always produces heat in addition to the useful mechanical (or electrical) energy (this is a consequence of the 2nd thermodynamical principle). In a car, this heat is basically lost energy. In a stationary plant it can actually be reused for useful purposes ("cogeneration plants": they provide heating for nearby towns or industries in addition to electricity). Not to mention that it is easyer to finetune energy efficiency in a plant where you have basically no space constraints than in a car.
Say no to software patents.
Unfortunately that's not really a wonderful argument (the first portion) - the amount of energy lost in slowing down and speeding up is miniscule on any decent sized trip. It can be large, but usually it is not that important. Drag dominates everything, by far. Friction is pathetic (remember, friction only generates a constant force, so you'd only need an engine to start moving, rather than to accelerate. On an airless planet, all speeds are equally efficient. Since it is distinctly known that there are "most efficient speeds" for cars, drag really must dominate.
You can immediately see how much energy it must take to overcome friction - just try to push your car with the brake off. It's not that hard at all. At highway speeds, friction is more of an annoyance than anything else. After all, in most cars, with the car in gear and the foot off the brake, the car will begin to move. Therefore, if it wasn't for drag, at highway speeds a car could *idle* and still move.
And as for the slowing-down/speeding-up argument, remember that the in-town/in-highway miles per gallon only change by a tiny amount - at most 30% or so, at least about 5%. Since slowing down/speeding up only occurs once on a highway trip, again, drag must truly dominate.
So, unfortunately, the -pure- energy efficiency of electric cars vs. gas burning cars may still be in question. My guess is that the energy efficiency award could ultimately go to a car, *with* an intelligent enough design, and also only in most situations. However, currently, with the piece-of-crap internal combustion engine located in most vehicles, an electric car nowadays will win out.
There is still, of course, the issue of pollutants, and as you noted, electric plant generation of heat. However, I would note that adding additional power plants, while significantly cutting down on global pollutants, would significantly increase local pollutants, destroying local habitats and doing much more -visible- damage. Therefore, to people, it may appear as if electric cars have done more damage than gas cars did.
I don't know the mass of the moon off the top of my head, but it is greather than quadrillions of tons (10^16 tons). Assume that a one part per billion change might cause some problems - that is still over 10^7 tons! At 1000 tons per year, that is still over ten thousand years before we could even begin to modify the moon's orbit.
Come on people, DO THE FREAKIN' MATH before you start spouting off!
Secondly, the moon is a lifeless ROCK! You could strip-mine the surface of the moon, spread the chat back over where you mined when you were done, and NOBODY COULD TELL THE DIFFERENCE! I'm all for protecting the environment, but there is no environment on the moon!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Is this a typo, or is this stuff actually that full of energy?
The Helium-3 atom is not in and of itself drastically energetic. One could not fill a bomb with He-3 alone and expect it to do anything more drastic than make the target talk funny. The excitment expressed in this article is due to the high degree of effeciency of a Fusion reaction, which can be attained with He-3.
Traditional energy sources, such as hydrocarbon combustion, only convert a tiny percentage of the available mass to energy. As shown by the famous equation E=mc^2, even a tiny amount of mass converted to energy results in quite a bit of energy. If you doubt that, go light a can of gasoline on fire. It's hot. In a comprable He-3 fusion reaction, a much greater (but stil small) fraction of the total mass is converted into energy. Thus, a small amount of He-3 could theoretically provide the same power yeild of a much greater amount of gasoline, or natural gas.
--Use this space for notes--
On the + side you get oxygen. On the - side, you get hydrogen. Burn the hydrogen, and you get presto chango... Water.
OK, what's the point of using your electricity from solar cells to break down water, and then burn the stuff again?
Why not just use the electricity directly?
Jeff
stty erase ^H
...this article is rather odd folks - because as far as I know, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt died several years ago from cancer, after serving as a Senator from New Mexico for several years. Yes, he did go to the Moon on Apollo 17 - he may have even had certain views on He3 and it's viability as a power source. But he hasn't had them lately unless the writer has been seeing blue Force ghosties. :-)
"Where am I going, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
For more (fictional) information regarding what can be done with He3, take a look at Peter F. Hamilton's 'The Reality Dysfunction'.
News on He3 will be really interesting once we've got bitek habitats orbitting Jupiter.
Helium3 is present on the moon in parts per billion on the surface from solar wind particles that got stuck. On Uranus, Helium represents 15% of the gas giant's atmosphere, with Helium 3 being one part in 10,000 of that, so you have 15 parts per million He3 on Uranus, which is several thousand times the concentration on the Moon.
If you have a need for He3, that means you have fusion working, so you can use fusion rockets to travel to Uranus and retrieve the stuff. Any mining engineer will tell you that you want to mine where the 'ore' is richest. Even though Uranus is harder to get to (about 50 times harder than the Moon), the higher concentration wins big time.
It's fairly easy to separate helium 3 from the Uranus atmosphere, too. It's cold there, so it doesn't take much refrigeration to liquefy the hydrogen, leaving pure helium. Then further refrigeration liquefys the helium, and you can use thesuperfluid properties of He3 or the melting point differences to separate He4 from He3.
Daniel
funny, but offtopic.
However, I cannot see the relevance of any of this story. There is probably trillions of tonnes more fusionable material here on Earth, which is also much easier to access.
Yes, research is being done on using photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen (again, harvesting sunlight), and research is being done on how to store the hydrogen in a fashion that would allow you to fill your tank and have reasonable range, but it isn't here yet! And it IS being funded quite well, it's just a very hard problem and takes time.
www.eFax.com are spammers