Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Went to a restaurant the other day. There was all this food on the buffet and the first thing I thought was I'll bet that food is there for a reason. I went hungry that day, not wanting to upset the delicate equilibrium of the restaurant environment and contented myself by soaking in the ambiance.
carlos
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
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.
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 cowardiceThere 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.
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.
Claims of its "efficiency" or "eco-friendliness" are the most base slight of hand.
With regular cars, you burn gas to create energy, and your car moves, right? But the gas is messy, dirty and dangerous (not to mention being about to run out in less than 100 yrs or so). Meanwhile, electric cars run on nice, clean electricity, right? No exhaust, no mess.
Unfortunately, that's bullshit. The electricity that powers your cute little golf cart was created by burning gas somewhere else. See those big smokestacks? That's you. But it gets worse. Because producing the electricity, distributing it, and storing it in your cars batteries are all extremely inefficient processes. 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. Oops.
Meanwhile, there are a number of other known, tested clean, renewable alternatives now. Fuel made from corn being the most obvious. Some are even in use in other parts of the world, where "energy" is expensive and the powers that be are more distant. Why is it that out of all the alternatives, electric is the only one being "seriously" pursued? Because electric cars are actually a bullshit propaganda scheme in the first place.
Notice I haven't mentioned gas/electric hybrids, which aren't necessarily a bad thing; at least you get 60-80mpg or so. Honda is actually selling one right now, which I believe you can order...
We're on the road to Tycho.
"Michael Quanlu Wang of Argonne National Laboratory used a computer simulatation to compare the use of electric and gasoline cars in four large U.S. cities. The results showed that electric vehicles would reduce hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide by 98%. (Hydrocarbons create ground-level ozone, which causes cardiac and respiratory disease.) Emissions of nitrous oxides, another cause of ozone and acid rain, also fell.
But Wang found that emissions of sulfur oxide (a key cause of acid rain), and particulates would actually increase. (The health effects of these ultra-fine soot particles are now under increasing suspicion.)
The story for carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that's taking heat for causing global warming, was more complex. At slow speeds, electric vehicles greatly reduced carbon dioxide; the effect was less dependable at higher speeds. And as you read them, remember that all calculations of pollution trade-offs will depend on the age and pollution controls of the gasoline autos and the electric-generating plants in question.
Clean? That depends on where you live... (Sound Familiar?)
To urbanites, electric vehicles truly produce"zero-emissions," Wang says, since they move all pollution to the power plant. Overall, he suggests, electric vehicles would benefit the environment by reducing hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions, and thus ground-level ozone. And while more particulates would be produced (particularly if the electricity came from coal), Wang observes that most electric generators are "away from populated areas, so there would be less population exposure."
Electric vehicles also offer a way to use "green electricity" (from solar, wind and geothermal sources), as clean transportation power.
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."
information source
-- Virtual Windows Project
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.
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
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