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Mine The Moon For Helium-3
Rob Kennedy writes "A story at The Daily Cardinal is reporting that UW-Madison researchers are looking to mine the moon for helium-3 as an energy source, which supposedly would yield about 1000 times more energy per pound than coal. Although there are several hurdles that would need to be cleared, The Associated Press mentions one catch in particular: 'The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in.' Indeed. SciScoop has a more in-depth discussion of the prospect."
Balloon sellers go out of business as prices of helium plummet
18 year old choirboys whose voices broke 4 years ago rejoyce
What a crock of lighter than air shit!
Put out more energy than it takes in? Once again, never trust the AP for science.
If inhaling Helium-1 makes my voice high, Helium-2 makes it higher, how high will Helium-3 make it?
great now whats going to keep it floating up there??? :)
I mean come on. We can't even get one watt of positive energy flow out of Fusion and they already want to mine the moon for it. Let's spend our time developing better fission reactors, including ones for space engines. Then we can use them to get our scientists to the moon so they can play with Helium-3 and Fusion all they want.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wow. Here's a space.com article from three and a half years ago on the same subject.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
The Associated Press mentions one catch in particular: 'The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in.'
That, and the fact that Amazon doesn't offer Super Saver Shipping on Helium-3. It'll be fun to see if they can come up with a way to utilize that power and get it here without wasting an equilvalent amount of power for the process itself. Negative efficiency in excess of -100% of your input is baaad.
Just how is, according to the article, the moon "a source of potentially unlimited energy"?????
Look, they should just get a methane reactor going, and come by my place after a trip to La Casa Del Taco.
The only trouble with the moon will be when I drop my pants at them.
The Moon Rulez #1 on my car?
Also, beware Slashdot readers, on the moon, nerds have their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks.
Well, we're still working on getting a net-gain fusion reaction going with deuterium and tritium, which is a considerably easier fusion reaction to start than deuterium and Helium-3. The advantage with the D-He3 reaction is that it is theoretically aneutronic, but in any D-He3 fusion-capable environment you're going to have enough D-D fusion to have to worry about neutrons anyway...
Any other cynics out there thinking some Haliburton exec read some popular science mag and talk Cheney/Bush to annex the Moon for them quick?
As a regular and vocal proponent in my office, family, and circle of friends of manned exploration / exploitation of space and its resources, I can tell you that H3 mining is very old news.
The technical limitations haven't changed in decades.
Step 1 - Make a reactor that is a net PRODUCER of energy.
...just like it was 50 years ago.
Finally, UW Madison gets mentioned for something useful, unlike this story.
'The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in.'
Great. So we've got our power problem on the moon solved for a bit. What about getting that power back to earth. Oh yeah. nevermind.
Let solve our problems here before we go solving problems elsewhere, folks.
These are exotic materials, no doubt. more info
Chernobyl.
And you guys thought descending the moon's gravity well and coming back up was a stupid way to get to Mars!
See, we'll just deficit-spend a bajillion dollars in tax credits to Halliburton, to build our mighty Helium-3 mines on the moon (staffed with happy prisoners from the efficient corporate-franchised prison system) and the Mars rockets will have all the fuel they need right there on the lunar surface.
The man's a visionary, I tell you!
....even though there has been talk about this shit for years, it is now getting news coverage in light of Bush's plan to go to the moon. So when we get there, who will get to claim it? All of mankind or Halliburton and other Bush croney corps?
The forefront of fusion research will be ITER. Unfortunately, this project is in peril because the participants have so far been unable to agree upon a location.
Canada withdrew from the project after its location was rejected by the other participants. Now France is threatening to split from the project.
Come on. As if the Oil Lobby will ever allow a cleaner, more efficient energy source to be available to consumers. How much effort has Dubbya given to his "Hydrogen Car" initiative beyond 10 minutes of lip service??
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
If we take all the helium off the moon, then what's gonna hold it up there!? gasp! cringe!
Is there REALLY anything wrong with Fission power?
Yes. It's politically and socially unacceptable.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
That is all well and good that it produces a substantial, if not infinite, amount of energy more than coal does, but realize that the energy needed to get it back to earth lessens its appeal and ultimately, its usefulness. Unless it is specifically directed towards interplanetary spaceflight to planets beyond our own, I say leave it be until then.
Relevant quote for the lazy:
In fairness to the president, I did a little research and found the microscopic grain of truth in what he was saying. It turns out that there is, indeed, an abundant quantity of something called helium-3 just under the surface of the moon. Forget for a second that we still lack the technology to use helium-3 for anything except making your voice sound really high and squeaky. Thanks to nuclear fusion, helium-3 will someday be that long-envisioned clean-burning, limitless energy supply.
Problem is, the Earth is actually running out of helium. I could tell you why we're running out of helium, but you probably already believe that it's all Bill Clinton's fault, so I won't bother changing your mind. The fact is, we're running out of helium...fast. How fast? Let's put it this way, by the year 2104, the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade is going to suck.
But the moon has so much helium-3 that it practically floats. Scientists estimate that the million tons of helium-3 on the moon could provide enough energy to power the Earth for thousands of years (or 28 Hummer-driving soccer moms for three weeks). Of course, these estimates depend on which scientists are making the estimates--the ones who predicted we'd all be living in a utopia of perfectly fitting unitards or the ones who've crashed two space shuttles in 17 years.
Please help metamoderate.
If just the US can run on "one space shuttle load" per year of this astrofuel, then what about more densely populated countries, like China or Japan?
What will the petroleum lobby think about this?What political repercussions would result if a US president pulled crap like OPEC does (threatening embargoes, being real bastards with prices, etc;) today if the US were to follow through with a plan like this?
What will mining the moon do to things like tides here on Earth? (shifting mass like that on the surface/possibly expelling it into space -which I hope won't be the case, that would be really bad-)
Do you honestly think this will remove our dependence on fossil fuel completely? Look at your computer. It's prolly got a lot of plastic in, on, and around it. Same with probably the rest of your room. Multiply that by a couple/few billion and you get the idea. Also, with the demand for plastic products growing ever more insistent, by the time (if) we get to enact a feasible plan for mining the moon, how much oil will be required to make non-energy products?
How greatly do you think this will change civilization as we know it? We'll still have electricity, the only difference would prolly be that we're mining it from the moon, from a consumer standpoint, that is. What humanitarian /technology/quality-of-life improvements do you think we, as people in a social/civilization context will see as a direct result of mining energy from the moon?
Call me a pessimist bastard who says the glass is half empty. I don't necessarily see THIS glass as half empty, but I don't see it as half full either. I'd say I see it as just another damn glass with some damn water in it. If we get our energy from the moon, whoopty-friggin'-do, we'll be getting it from the moon, we'll still pay for it. We'll still have electricity. Just be sure to inform me when they find a way to make something like plastic out of something other than oil (for instance polymerizing something more readily available, say, water. ) THEN will I be more enthusiastic.
Now watch this drive.
We've got to deplete all the fossil fuels first, then we go to Helium-3. After we deplete that then maybe, MAYBE, they'll give us the over-unity devices they already have...but they'll make them illegal except for energy providers, so we'll still have to buy energy from them.
Ignoring the issues of transportation, construction, etc, etc, etc, the "creation of more energy than it uses" strikes me as fascinating.
The goal behind using He^3 is that you can transport it. Cool the sucker down, put it into a canister, ship it back to Earth and use it there. Next thing you know, the Middle East doesn't matter anymore. (Please, no politics.)
Again, ignoring the issues of having the stuff explode on reintry, how to get it all back, etc, etc, etc.
But the energy issue really isn't one. Last time I checked, the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere, so solar energy is easier to get to than on Earth. At that point, you can have a system produce all the He^3 you want, and who cares about initial efficiency when you've got Big Old Mr. Sun providing your energy for you?
Just a thought. This is the kind of thing that 100 years down the road could be useful, and I'm probably making bad assumptions, but the idea is still kind of cool.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I love it. We don't even have economic fusion yet, and these guys are talking about mining the fuel from the moon.
It would seem that with standard deuterium and tritium fusion, involving only plentiful isotopes of hydrogen found on Earth, there's utterly no need to get helium from the moon.
The main problem is the mastering the fusion process itself, not where we're gonna get the fuel from!
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
thats it.
Are you trying to imply that there are conservatives or maybe even neo-conservatives among the slashdot press corps?
Why, next you'll be saying there are racist trolls! Have you no decency?
This has been discussed for years and how close are we to a working, ie more energy out than we put in, prototype are we??
Once we have a proper working efficient reactor then moon ahoy.
Build the reactors on the moon as well and use microwve transmitters to beam the power to earth via reciever satellites.
Gotta be safer and cheaper than multi-tonne rocks of froxen HE3 (the only mass sensible way of moving it) being fired at us by linear accelerator.
Worst
The title of that article asks whether the Moon's He3 can solve the "energy crisis." What energy crisis? We have enough oil and coal to last for centuries, and who knows how much fissionables if only the politics would allow more nuclear plants. There is going to have to be a better argument for He3, such as environmental effects.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
we would have to take over the moon, appoint a governing council, and establish a democracy.
Umm, yes. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 come to mind. They decay for a very, very long time.
:).
And beyond the pollution issue there is the fact that fusion produces more energy than fission per the amount of mass (I think; its been a very long time since physics).
That and we have easy access to a great fusion reactor. Its that big bright thing
I think that we have fucked up our own planet enough with mining without heading out to space and fucking up others. And saying they are already fucked is a copout, we have no real idea about the moon or mars or any of the other planets as far what could be living on there.
What they need to do instead of wasting money on this sort of enengy production is look at finding better ways of using solar power. It is free and it does not requre the need to blow holes in anything to get access to it. And then there is Coldfusion which seems like a pretty good idea as well and does not need for us to leave the planet.
I am a bit of a hippy when it comes to this stuff
"The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin, American author
Any scientist who claims there is unlimited energy on any planet needs to go back to Thermodynamics 101...
This story is nonsense.
No wonder Bush wants to build a moon base!
Seriously, say what you will about him, the President is a man who understands the approaching energy crisis. If it's true that the fossil-based economy will expire by 2040 (the number quoted by my college professor), then we're looking at a very violent game of hot potato over the remaining fuel. Controlling the next generation energy supply could be important if fossil fuels remain the most efficient way to get to space.
Of course, I'd much rather see renewable Earth sources of fuel (like solar, geothermal, corn oil, etc)...but then, nobody CONTROLS the sun. So there's no economic or political incentive like there is with an exclusive source like oil or nuclear.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
- Homer J. Simpson
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
We like the moon!
Does anyone know if those parachutes the shuttle uses to slow itself down will handle a 30 ton payload? Or will they just eject the payload over one of the many strip mines in Appalachia for processing?
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
A note of the Canadian withdrawl from the ITER project.
More seriously, what's going to happen to the earth's climate as we lighten up the moon by removing mass from it? Ah, wait- Bush wants to put trash up there to replace what we take, right?
If you don't know what I'm talking about- the moon is largely responsible for ocean currents, and those ocean currents move warm water to cold areas and cold water to warm areas, heavily influencing, if not determining, climates. Not to mention the thousands(probably hundreds of thousands) of aquatic species that depend upon currents and tides. How about international commerce, which depends on shipping, which in turn depends on currents, weather, and tide levels to navigate channels? Plenty of places are passable at high tide, and unpassable at low tide.
The list of things which depend upon the moon(and its effects on the earth) is mind-bogglingly long...and we really ought not mess around with it.
Please help metamoderate.
all that helium 3 is nice and all, but a depolyable fusion reactor is still far, far away.... lets get the engine built and working before we start mining the fuel for it.
A million times more expensive? Ten million times more expensive?
I'm no economist, but that sounds like the most retarded business plan I've ever heard. Ohh ya, maybe we should worry about making fusion reactions a net energy creator before we start talking about mining the moon for fuel.
Two UW Madison Professors announced plans today to help supplement waning global cheese supplies by mining the moon for cheese.
"The moon has a virtually unlimited supply of cheese, most notably the Pepperjackus Mons. This literal hill-of-cheese is an area that is the size of Rhode Island and comprised entirely of pepperjack," said Professor Klaus von Berrywinkle.
Cheese is typically mined in third-world countries with little regard for safety standards or labor laws. Authoritarian regimes usually hold sway over the cheese mines as well and placating them is a full-time priority for many governments.
"Unfortunately, cheddar is in short supply on the moon, but it is feasible that there is a cache of it somewhere that has eluded our che-dar," chortled Professor Eniac van Bumblybum.
The scientists later added that the supply of cheese on the moon would last the Earth thousands of years at the current rate of consumption.
"Although it would last quite awhile at the current rate of consumption, the past has shown that when you remove constraints consumption rises dramtically. I would not be surprised if, given a more efficient method of transportation, all the cheese on the moon would be eaten within 3-5 generations," Berrywinkle portended.
which supposedly would yield about 1000 times more energy per pound than coal
Well, OF COURSE it would...it's HELIUM, for crying out loud...I mean, it weights negative pounds! That's why they pit it in balloons!! That's gotta be screwing up their smarty-pants equations.
Man, I gotta get ME one of those research grants.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
It can't produce more energy that is put into it. Electrical energy, plus mechanical energy, plus heat energy, plus the energy in the helium-3. It will never produce more energy than is put into it. Otherwise, you have a problem with the laws of physics.
So you're offering your backyard for the waste dump then?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
"helium-3... would yield about 1000 times more energy per pound than coal. And cost about 10,000 times more per pound to mine... doesn't sound like a big economic win to me.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
till the moon comes crashing into us, (or leaves our orbit)? Wont changing the mass of the moon throw things off?!
Error: Id10t detected
They don't even have a reactor yet that produces net power, and they are estimating that the moon has enough helium to supply the earth with energy for a thousand years? What could they possibly be basing this estimate on.
"Gee Bob, some journalist wants to know how much energy is on the moon. Should I assume that the reactor we may or may not be able to come up with will be 99% efficient or 5% efficient?"
"I'd go with 99%. We're running low on grant money."
But then, negative weight ought to yield a negative number for energy when factored, so technically HE3 would have athousand times less...
The point is, unlike at slashdot, most people don't realize that "pound" is relative to gravity on earth in a large vacuum chamber. People who report this shit ought to use the kilogram instead. But then, my country is too concerned about bashing it's president and trying to get bigger pork-barrel patronage social-spending systems in place to care about SI.
space treaties forbit ownership of space. SO, why are they doing it? Would this be considered stealing ?
...when you can get decent renewable energy on Earth?
Oh, so you can't create a reactor that spits out more energy than it takes in? What about putting research effort into creating a more energy-efficient way to extract ethanol from corn?
In countries like Brazil, ethanol has a positive energy balance. It polutes much less than gasoline and it's easily renewable.
Going to the moon for He3 sounds like an overly elaborate and exotic, not to say stupid, idea.
and the rest of the world is happy as well.
D-He3 has two advantages, as I understand it (ie poorly). One, the number of neutrons emitted is much, much lower, so your plant is much less radioactive - as well as environmental benefits it means the reactor components last a lot longer. Secondly, apparently you don't need to run a steam turbine to extract electricity from the reaction - you can do so directly and at much higher efficiencies. I don't really get how this is supposed to work, though.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm not sure why this warrants an article now, seeing that no real developments on the topic have happened in a long time...
ok, it sucked, but still it did a good job scaring me with those pieces of the moon in the night sky because we blew it up by mistake
broken moon shot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Could we not just create some sling shot that shoots it toward Earth whereupon our own gravitational pull would suck it in??
I'm curious as to how far from the moon you'd have to be, to be pulled back in to Earth. And what type of device we could use to do such a thing.
Gravity.. HELLO! As the mass of the moon decreases, the gravitational force between us and it decreases. Then the tides get less and less and, in the end, we're screwed. Instead of the moon moving aaway at 3" / year, the more we mine, that rate will get faster and faster. Sure, we won't notice it in our lifetimes much, but future generations will. But hey! It doesn't affect us too much, right? So why the hell not?! Just something I thought of...
What is your penile percentile?
Ah, that's right. That's why insurance companies won't insure new nuclear reactors. That's because it's politically and socially unacceptable.
The "political" reason that they aren't getting built is because the government won't indemnify or guarantee the insurance companies that insure nuclear reactors.
And why should they, really? Apparently no one knows how to build a nuke reactor safely enough for the insurance companies. That's a fiscal decision, not a political or a social one.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Chernobyl
I hate to break it to you, but an industrial accident is an industrial accident whether we're talking chemical spills, molten steel, coal burning, nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion. They all can potentially result in a lot of deaths. Yet we deal with these risks every day and trust that companies will do their best to be safe about handling dangerous materials.
In the case of Chernobyl, the Russian government stole a US design, built a reactor, and assigned engineers who didn't understand how it worked. As a result, they did quite a few things that no sane plant manager would have allowed (such as removing control rods and cutting wires). The end result was a boiler explosion that killed about 30 people on site, and about 14 from chemical contamination of radioactive iodine. (I just recently came across these figures from an official report. Here's a link if you wish to verify.) Modern reactor designs make Chernobyl type situations impossible because a melt down situation will boil away the water that is used to keep the reaction going. In older designs, the water was under pressure and would super-heat instead of boiling.
Perhaps the most telling point is that the Chernobyl design had actually been decommissioned here in the US as being unsafe. Yet the communist government was so intent on getting an atomic bomb that they used the stolen specs just to show that they as well could use nuclear power for "peaceful" uses.
In any case, the other 3 Chernobyl reactors continued running for many years despite the safety problems, so it's not like the entire area was leveled or anything. It takes a very specific shaping of the fissible material to produce a nuclear explosion. That shaping doesn't happen inside a reactor.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
>Is there REALLY anything wrong with Fission power?
Well, some people are waging wars to avoid that they come into wrong hands.
Next, they are highly profiliated targets for terroristic attacks, and are in need of strong protection.
Finally maybe, because the backend costs of nuclear reactors make nuclear power (after over 45 years of commercial use) more expensive as conventional power-plants.
Which is all inherent to the fact that they use and need very refined and radioactive fuel and produce waste with similar attributes.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
When is the Dilithium reactor coming out?
"No 1, I order you to take a No. 2."
Apparently no one knows how to build a nuke reactor safely enough for the insurance companies.
Considering that there have been zero civilian deaths from nuclear power use in the US, and that thousands die every years from diseases brought about by coal-burning, I have to wonder what type of design they want. Perhaps a nuclear power plant that produces power but doesn't actually have a reactor?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Er, um, we can and have, actually, we just haven't made a way of generating electricity from it yet. Mind you, fission is here and down, and unfortunately going away because of "environmentalists", shotr-term capitalism and yellow-bellied politicians.
Stick Men
With a monopoly over He3 production they could cripple OPEC and effectively build their own society with an iron grip over the earth's economy. AKA Peter F Hamiltons Nights Dawn Trilogy
Fusion reactors have this BIG problem: the structure gets irradiated continuously with fast neutrons and the metalwork degrades. Pretty soon, you have a metric shitload of rotted-out parts to dispose of and they're all way HOT. Just as nasty as fission fuel-rods in the short term; maybe not so bad long-term.
About 15 years back, I went on a tour of the Joint European Torus at Culham. They thought they were getting close to break-even with D-D reactions and the plan was leading up to one last run with D-T fuel to score actual break-even. "It'll run for about 10 seconds" said our guide. "Then the machine is wrecked by the neutrons. We pour concrete on the remains and go away." I think the money ran out before they tried that.
[insanerant]
;) [Assuming 1 million Slashdot users... Just for nice figures]
;) Hah hah!
Right, how about... Everyone on slashdot donates 20GBP ($30) to my PayPal account, then I'll pay the Russians to fly me to the moon (off to mars and jupiter... no wait... stop it...) so I can make a little base with loads of solar panels. The solar panels will store electricity in a big battery, and some of the energy heats up the rocks releasing Helium-3. Then I use more energy to cool it down so I can bottle it... Then I get it to throw it Earthwards (it has got strong arms) and I get to sell it to all the major countries... Then i pay slashdotters $1000 each back! That's a massive 30 times on your investment! And I get a nice sum too
Who's with me? First person to donate gets to come along with me! Make that first girl
[/insanerant]
We're going to New Hampshire next! Then THE MOON! YEAAAAAARRGHHHGG-*cough* *sputter* there goes my campaign, up in smoke.
Your candidate is psycho.
it is the energy that you need to start and maintain a reaction. imagine if you will starting a barbie with a blowtorch, only this coal goes out the moment you take away the blowtorch. we can see that it burns, and one day we might be able to sustain a reaction but at the moment we spend more on gas for the blowtorch than we get from the charcoal.
Important note: Nuclear Fusion is not for cooking sausages with.
Er, um, we can and have, actually, we just haven't made a way of generating electricity from it yet. Mind you, fission is here and down, and unfortunately going away because of "environmentalists", short-term capitalism and yellow-bellied politicians.
I'm not sure that getting helium-3 from the Moon is a good idea economically though. Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to.
Stick Men
Actually the Earth and the Moon are spiralling towards each other. I think the rate is something like 3cm per year although I'm not certain.
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
Strontium-90 has a half life of less than a century and is a beta emitter. It's not a huge problem. The stuff that is the real problem (Gamma emitters, etc) are in very small quantities and are NOT highly radioactive. If they were, they'd have shorter half-lives.
In any case, a breeder reactor can reuse the "waste". Carter was just afraid that terrorist boogey men would somehow get ahold of the materials if they were reprocessed.
Even if we assume that "nuclear waste" can't be reprocessed, there's very little of it. Besides, it's unfair to call it "waste". Some of us want that stuff!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This IS informative, and I've just let my 4 mod points to expire... ;-(
Paul B
Check out the indian mission to moon called Chandrayan.
;-)
The primary goal for this mission is the same thing. extracting helium 3 and mapping moon surface for finding proper spot to do that.
I would like to see some comments here about poverty in India though
You mean all of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (Heinlein) took place in Mickey Mouse type voices? How am I going to get that image out of my head the next time I read that?
but realize that the energy needed to get it back to earth lessens its appeal and ultimately, its usefulness
How much energy do you think it will take? The Apollo-era Lunar Lander was used to transport 2 astronauts and about a ton of rocks off the surface to the orbiting Apollo. The rocks were then transferd to the Apollo spacecraft which left orbit and returned to earth. It's not like we are going to have to build a spacecraft 30 times larger than Apollo or burn 30 times the fuel to carry 30 times the payload back to earth.
You very much appear to be forgetting that the moon's and the earth's gravity were used to facilitate much of the trip each way.
Doesn't Jupiter have much much more He3 than Moon?
Chernobyl.
Chernobyl had nothing to do with problems with fission reactors; it was about the problem with idiots. "Hey, Vassily, lets pull out the control rods, disable all the safety systems, and see what happens!"
Considering that there have been zero civilian deaths from nuclear power use in the US, and that thousands die every years from diseases brought about by coal-burning, I have to wonder what type of design they want. Perhaps a nuclear power plant that produces power but doesn't actually have a reactor?
Yes.
And no, I'm not being funny here.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
All this talk about finding helium on the moon. Now if they found dilithium crystals, that'd be something!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Anyone familiar with old-school Gundam will recognize this as a very old idea. In the series, asteroids were brought in to close orbit around Earth and mined for He-3.
Of course, it was also this high-energy density material that allowed for the creation of mecha, as well as all sorts of exotic space-metals.
In any case, this is an old and well-documented idea. =D
It's not what you know, or even who you know- It's how many people recognize your damn
I think they'd just prefer it if it killed more people, and maybe did some nasty things to the atmosphere while it was at it. That way they'd feel more familiar and comfortable with it.
Well, some people are waging wars to avoid that they come into wrong hands.
Which is just plain goofy. Uranium is one of the most common substances on the planet. All you need is a process to separate and enrich the stuff.
Next, they are highly profiliated targets for terroristic attacks, and are in need of strong protection.
Just about anyone with the proper resources can build an atomic nuke (H-Bombs are a little trickier). The main problem is shaping the triggering explosion correctly to instill "super-critcial" fission into the material. The only ways to make sure you got it right are:
1. Test it. This is sure to be noticed by someone when you succeed.
2. Use a computer model. This is why Saddam wanted Playstations.
3. Drop it on your enemy and hope like hell it works.
The third is the only option for terrorists right now (because of technology embargoes and such), but has issues with moral in the case the bomb fails.
Which is all inherent to the fact that they use and need very refined and radioactive fuel and produce waste with similar attributes.
1. Breeder reactors
2. Atmoic batteries
Nuff' said.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
NASA announces plans to mine methane from Uranus.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
People generally don't have a good idea of just how damn heavy planets are.
They aren't very heavy while they're floating in space. I think you mean "massive."DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
ok"Then my army of drones will mine the moon for helium which I will sell for one Meeelion dollars. "
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I mean really, where are they going to get a power cord long enough to reach from the moon? Then we're going to have a big debate over which voltage to use.
Its just not worth it.
"The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in."
That is not scientifically (or logically) equal to "The energy consumed in causing the reaction is less than the reaction releases", which is your approximate rewording of the press release in order to make sense.
NASA says each Space Shuttle Launch would costs around $500 million per.
The average space shuttle (as an example of a reusable space vehicle) can carry 65,000 pounds of cargo each flight.
This means that each pound of helium-3 would cost $7,692.31.. and thats just at cost to cover transport from the moon. Not including the initial setup of mining operations and cost of running the facilities to turn it into energy.
Now, as for powering possible MOON colonies, understandable. But for eath? The money would probably best be spent in the (never ending) quest for fusion.
In a closed system, yes, you can't produce more energy than is put into it. But it's NOT a closed system any more than a water wheel or a windmill (or, for that matter, your car or truck...) is. The He-3 is a fuel source and is stored energy that is liberated in a fusion reaction.
What they're talking about here is the fact that man has been unable, to date, to produce a Fusion reactor that was sustained that liberated more energy from the fuel than was put in to IGNITE it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I believe the theory is that the ones they've built have just been too small.
Anyways is there not a plan to build a full scale one in France or Japan. Except that not surprisingly the 6 parties involved (E.U., U.S., Japan, Russia, ?, ?) are split down the middle.
Ah sure, they should just build two of them. Two for the price of one it sure would not be of course! But the E.U. and U.S. won't be good at sharing one. It's like kids - the only way to keep them happy is make sure they all get the same.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Call me old fashioned, but I think we should find a better solution to our energy needs. Either use less of the stuff, and/or find ways to meet our energy needs more efficiently. Something renewable, like solar or wind, would be nice.
So let's say we end up with a huge energy glut from this moon idea. Ubiquitous energy will mean no need for efficiency, and consumption will grow unchecked. We'll need a new moon in no time.
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11. That would bankrupt an insurance company instantly. It's not that the insurance companies are saying fission reactors are unsafe, just that if something went catastrophically wrong, they would be doomed. I don't think any company out there could survive a hit of $25 billion to their bottom line, which is probably a conservative figure for a large-scale (say, Chernobyl or worse) nuclear disaster.
If they are going to focus on getting the fuel before they have any means of using it for energy why don't they just jump right to talking about matter/anti-matter reactors? It would make about as much sense. What are we going to do, sit around staring at tons of H3 waiting for someone to invent a reactor for it? There is also the little detail of whether the energy it would take to fetch the H3 would be equal or greater than the energy you'd get from it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
They will not insure new reactors because the goverment does.
Homer: [scoffs] I know. And this perpetual motion machine she made
today is a joke! It just keeps going faster and faster.
Marge: And Bart isn't doing very well either. He needs boundaries and
structure. There's something about flying a kite at night that's
so unwholesome. [looks out window]
Bart: [creepy voice] Hello, Mother dear.
Marge: [closing the curtains] That's it: we have to get them back to
school.
Homer: I'm with you, Marge. Lisa! Get in here.
[Lisa walks in, chuckling nervously]
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Jeremy Baumgartner
was the green beret?
or maybe the greasy politician.
Bhopal, India didn't stop the chemical industry.
including ones for space engines
Great. Imagine the fallout when this recently exploded space shuttle would have been carrying one of those
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Let's see... Bush wants to go to the moon.
He's well connected to the energy industry.
He3 is a source of energy.
Is this just a big coincidence, or should I break out the tinfoil hat?
"They predict the moon has enough energy to last the U.S. over 1,000 years."
Note that it's not "enough energy to last the World", only the US.
Of course it would probably be enough for the US for 1,000 years or 10,000 years for the rest of the planet.
On another note covering 60% or so of the sahara desert in solar panels is enough to supply the entire world with more then enough electricity, so really you don't have to go that far from home for "unlimited" clean energy
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Haven't you ever read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". You really need to. :-)
A ton sounded way too large to me. Turns out that all the Apollo missions together returned 841.5 lbs of moon rocks. That's more than I expected, but still a lot than 1 ton per lander as I read your comment as saying.
I saw this article, and decided it'd be a piece of cake to post a witty or interesting comment.
First I though, something funny, about the moon being made of cheese or something, eh? I found it soon in enough:
"The moon has a virtually unlimited supply of cheese..." by macshune, 3, funny.
Then I thought, something about this being a farfetched goal without fusion developed yet. Well,
"I love it. We don't even have economic fusion yet..." by hcg50a, 3 interesting, and "fusion is only a few decades away..." by js7a, 5, funny.
At that point I had few options left. I could try something funny, about the man in the moon wanting his helium back for party balloons, or something like that. Or, I could try something insightful, which was certainly out of the question. Nothing interesting with facts to back it up either.
Finally, I could post something like this, and quickly modify the subject to something else to divert modrators.
I wonder if it'd be possible to mine iron on Mars, eh???
Slap a solar panel on top of everyone's house in America, and with proper energy-saving, energy-sharing, and energy-storing techniques we'd never need a conventional power plant again. It would be a sizable initial investment (mostly infrastructure), but the payoffs are invaluable. We'd annihilate much of the need for foreign oil, power bills would plummet, pollution would decrease, and Chicago wouldn't be a smog-riddled wasteland ;).
Heck. Combine just a little solar power with this H3 stuff (assuming they CAN do this) and the "energy crisis" is basically solved. Until the Moon runs out.
I think this is a really bad idea.
Research on sustainable environment and energy on Earth *now* are more important than considering using other planets for energy sources. Otherwise, we will continue to consume too much energy. What's to say that even if we can mine the moon, once that runs out where do we go from there? This is certainly never going to happen in my lifetime, but shouldn't we be more forward looking and more importantly, be more environmentally concious?
... it makes neutrons that are waaaay too convenient for people who want to turn uranium into bomb material. Also noted here by a previous poster.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I used to think the same, until I looked at the amount of heavy metals dispersed by a coal fuelled power plant (and by oil fuelled plants, unless the oil is low in contaminants to start with). These pollutants should be added in to the true costs of burning fossil fuels - I wouldn't be surprised to see coal/oil coming out more expensive than fission plants if the same standards of emissions were required.
Remember - coal power is cheap because thousands of tons of cadmium are thrown into the atmosphere every year, landing on the fields that grow your food, or the grasslands that produce your beef, or the reservoirs that provide your water.
Give me wind, wave or solar power anyday.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Is how they'll land a spaceship with that much helium on board. :-)
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Correct. What they're talking about is that they haven't been able to produce a fusion reaction that sustains more energy output from the fuel than what was put in to ignite it. No question!
;)
What the parent comment (and mine) were pointing out was that it wasn't what the article summary said. We're pointing out the humor that it said that the REACTOR (not reaction) would take produce more energy than it takes in. He-3 being part of the energy that is taken in, of course.
Thanks for totally running this into the ground in the pursuit of scientific truth!
In 10,000 years we will have something else we will saddle our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great..... grandchildern with.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
after all, it only killed 34 people, right? Besides, it happened somewhere in the Evil Empire, so it doesn't matter.
Perhaps you have missed the fact that a large portion of the Ukraine (and parts of other countries) is now contaminated with radioactive waste to the extent that it is uninhabitable. For the next 5000 years. Besides that, the population in the region has been affected: cancer and birth deformity rates have gone up significantly since the accident.
You may argue whether such accidents are likely to happen again (NEVER underestimate human stupidity), but to claim that Chernobyl was a minor mishap, comparable to a fire in a coal power station, is complete bullshit. It's a whole other ballgame once your contaminants are radioactive.
"...Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
WE ALREADY HAVE UNLIMITED ENERGY!
Just watch Matrix!
Billions of us lined up in our nifty battery-pods and snacking on yummy re-processed dead flesh!
Yum yum!
Hey it's been done in a movie. How long before it actually turns into reality?
Not to mention (but I'm going to anyway), that more radioactive shit gets put into the air every day from the burning of coal than the SUM of nuclear accidents world wide has ever released.
It's idiocy.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Chernobyl.
(Yes, I know that others have said the same thing- but allow me to expand on this...)
When Chernobyl reactor #4 exploded, it sprayed a radioactive cloud that would have killed everyone for many hundreds of miles around the damn thing if it weren't for the prevailing wind conditions and the local fauna dissipating goodly portions of the radioactive cloud. (To put what we are talking about here in perspective, the soldiers collecting bits and pieces of the moderator debris flung from the reactor recieved their lifetime safe dosage of radiation in the 90 or so seconds they were out picking this stuff up. They all died, by the way, over the following several years with various unusual conditions- as if they were irradiated with a very high radiation dose over several months' time.)
We were lucky with the Three Mile Island incident- had it gone just a little differently, we'd have experienced our OWN Chernobyl.
While I'm all for improving Fission reactors, the risks are still WAAAAY high for when something screws up (and invariably it does...) and the ash from the current fission designs is too damn dangerous to keep about and we've got no good way of disposing of it in a safe manner.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Ignorance: the greatest weapon of mass destruction.
OTOH, the full environmental costs of conventional power plants are NOT taken into effect, while all the costs dealing with nuclear power plants are. I wouldn't make a claim that conventional power is cheaper than nuclear without seeing some real environmental cost/benefit analysis done on both models of power plant.
Your math is way off. Energy density for thermonuclear reaction is several orders of magnitudes higher then that.
Think nukes. A few pounds of active material device yields energy equivalent to burning some million tons (2000+ pound per ton) of coal.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
This is more or less the basis for the course NEEP 533 which is offered through the department of nuclear engineering at UW Madison. Although I have yet to take it (I am only a lowly freshman), the notes from 2001 are available for download. Enjoy.
The real question is not what lunar mass removal will do to tidal waves, but to Earth's orbit. Our moon is Earth's orbit regulator. Mars doesn't have a big moon like Earth (big in relative terms, of course), and as a consequence it's orbit is much more irregular.
A change of a single tenth of a degree in Earth's tilt can have drastic consequences on everything we know on our planet.
The Raven
We came damned close to having our own Chernobyl with Three Mile Island. Had one or two more of the safety features failed at the same time as the ones that caused it, we'd have had a similar explosion and radioactive release.
Current designs just won't frigging cut it and calling Chernobyl just an industrial accident is really pathetic. Bhopal was an industrial accident- but the contamination pretty much subsided pretty quickly. With Chernobyl, we're going to have to deal with that contamination for EONS unless we figure out how to break it all down a lot quicker in a safe manner.
All it takes is one fuck-up to screw up rather large areas of the world for very extended periods of time with a fission power plant. Any engineer worth his trade will tell you to your face that things will break down- safeties will all fail under some conditions. You can only design in so much before nature itself will beat you anyway- and with fission power, the consequences of a catastrophic failure is dire.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If we put in a pipe from the moon to the earth, the oil should flow freely.
Sometimes I'm too damn literal for my own good... :-)
Blame it on being a Scientist and Engineer.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I spoke in person with engineers and nuclear physists who worked with Academic Alexandroff, who was a project leader to design Leningrad reactor which design has been used later in Chernobyl. Those guys know how it works. Moreover, Soviet nuclear phisists, who designed first Soviet nuclear bomb (Kurchatov and others) new exactly how nuclear physics works.
It was US engineers who learned from German physists. Saying that Soviet Nuclear engineers do not understand how the reactor works is the sign that you watch way too much TV and read way to many tabloids. Your brains are washed by US propaganda.
Coming back to Chernobyl, the Leningrad reactor was innovative in many ideas to reduce the cost of protection. That created an illusion that it's absolutely safe. It is safe, but not absolutely, just more safe than other reactors of that time. When its design has been re-applied in Chernobyl, they made more shortcuts on safity, thinking that it's safe anyway. Not only design shortcuts, but also in the technological process of the construction as well as n in organization of its support (like shift and like that). We all know the result.
Less is more !
but the fact remains that fusion is still a way off. here's some info: hydrogen bombs work by fusion. The fuse for an H-bomb is an A-bomb. Why? To get to the temperature of the sun (which, of course, runs on fusion). Now, how to get to the temperature of the sun (1,000,000 K) without burning up the container? Suspend the h2 in a magnetic field, of course, and fire lasers at it and hope. But once the reaction starts, the cooling required is massive (cool the reaction with water/liquid sodium, which becomes steam, which powers your turbines, which give the power, and recycle the water back to the container to get heated again -- a thermodynamic cycle) The cooling/energy extraction process has to be 'contained' somehow, and therein lies the stumbling block. If you can sustain the reaction long enough (ie your cooling fluid container _lasts_ long enough), a net energy output can be realized. But I seem to recall the record for sustained fusion being somewhere on the order of 110 seconds, whereas net energy OUT takes at least a few minutes to happen. Because one hell of a lot of power is needed to get to 1 million degrees K in the first place. Ummm, those are the basics, anyway. And that's why He-3 is still only a HYPOTHETICAL fuel source. Hell, we can't get hydrogen to fuse yet. What was that about GW's cart? Where is it? But once these stumbling blocks are overcome, He-3 could be viable, so maybe GW has something there. I'm so undecided, yet I know GW is an idiot. Therefore, I'll take a stand and say 'no way', and hope I'm right. Because ultimately, moon energy can only get to earth via the USA (in the near future), and wouldn't that be a pain in the ass :)
Incorrect. A melt-down would actually shut down a modern reactor. Older designs would result in a boiler explosion like the one in Chernobyl which killed a whopping total of 44 people. That's right, 44 people, 30 of whom were on site. While that's not good, it's hardly that much different than any other industrial accident.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Actually, a containment system could be made that could survive re-entry and impact in such a case.
If you remember, lots of pieces of the shuttle were completely intact even after they hit the ground...
It's of lower quality because it's composed of heavier molecules (tars, waxes and asphalts) or is full of sulfur and metals which have to be removed. Take the "crude" from Venezuela; it is closer to bitumen than anything you'd recognize as oil, and it has to be "cracked" into lighter fractions to be made useful. When you crack hydrocarbons you tend to get some of the carbon clumping together unusably as "petroleum coke"; the stuff might as well be coal for all the oil you can make out of it (though some powerplants burn it in place of coal because it's cheaper).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Maybe we could spend the money needed to blast hundreds of Saturn V-plus sized boosters and payloads to the Moon and back again *and* develop workable fusion reactors on mass-producing wind, tidal and solar plants for the next decade or so. That way, we're not dependent on oil, pollution is reduced, the western economy isn't at the mercy of a bunch of unpleasant repressive dictatorships that were lucky enough to form on top of large deposits of burnable goo, and we don't need to go and fight wars on dubious pretexts every decade or so to maintain our access to said deposits. *Then* we can make use of the booster and fusion research which has been done in the meantime as part of the standard R&D that any sane government should be funding anyway.
Oh, no, wait. That would conflict with the current 'Control all energy! Limit supplies to maximise profits! Start wars to benefit our friends in the armaments industries and declare peace to benefit our friends in the construction industries! Money at any cost!' policy of the shits (of all nations) who run the world right now.
At least there was an ideology, paranoid as it was, behind the Moon race. This is just all about making rich men even richer.
You must think in Russian.
Mining the moon would require placing the equivalent of heavy "earth" moving equipment on the surface. Doing that is expensive. So is getting the results back off the surface. He3 is only in the first few feet of moon surface because it comes from the sun. Go to the source.
A better design would be a sol-centric orbital platform, say in Mercury's L-5 point, collecting solar wind via magnetic trap (the "ram-scoop" idea) and using an on board mass spectrometer to separate the components, which are then bottled for use, storage or shipping. In that orbit, there'd be sufficient solar power to run all that.
Set up a veritable merry-go-round of solar sail craft to go pick up and return the He3, and whatever else you want, and pay nothing in fuel costs. So what if they're slow. They're cheap. Build lots. Build *them* on the moon, or better, out of asteroids. You don't want these things slamming into Earth? Don't nuke 'em, smelt 'em.
Gerard O'Neill gave us lots of good ideas. We'd do well to remember that he didn't get them from professional scientists and engineers with reputations to make and maintain. He got them from undergraduates, whose class project it was to think these things up. Having a reputation to lose to your less foresightful colleagues sure puts a damper on innovation.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Check out Mining the Sky
It talks a lot about this kind of thing.
sorry here's the correct link:m /20040118/pl_nm/space_weapons_dc
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/n
Chernobyl type situations impossible because a melt down situation will boil away the water that is used to keep the reaction going. In older designs, the water was under pressure and would super-heat instead of boiling.
Ummm wrong.... the water is the only thing that keeps the reactors from melting down. Its used to cool the reactor. With out the water the heat from the unrianum would melt itself and cause a meltdown.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Imagine the fallout when this recently exploded space shuttle would have been carrying one of those
:-)
That's why NASA puts radioactive materials/devices in "black boxes" that can survive an unshielded reentry. That way they can pick up the box, dust it off, and possibly even reuse it (as they did with one RTG). No fallout, see?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in
So let's see, the only thing in the way of their plans is this silly little law of physics that says energy in must equal energy out. period. you can't create energy, you can't destroy it.
On the same line, getting to the galaxy next door is right around the corner, we just need to figure out how to go 10,000x the speed of light.
Oh, and immortality is close too, we just need to get around that "death" thing.
Gimme a break.
no comment
The Middle East should be hitting the peak of the Hubbert curve about now, and there are alternatives waiting in the wings. When it starts becoming much more expensive to lift oil than it is now, those alternatives will start developing the economies of scale which have so far been the domain of oil. The result will be a rapid collapse of the markets for oil, along with the economies of the oil dictatorships.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Nothing can make an infinitely greater amount of energy than coal does. You could get several orders of magnitude more energy than coal, but not infinite! If infinity was the case, then since a single coal molecule reacting produces a few eV of energy, then a single atom of He3 would produce infinity times as much energy per reaction, or infinity energy. Thus, we wouldn't need the moon, only a single atom of He3, which we could find on earth easily! He3 reactions are only somewhere in the neighborhood of a million times more energetic than coal oxidation.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
Any chance you could use it to power your cluster?
The people you kill aren't the ones suing you. The people who sue you are the ones who's children have birth defects. The people who sue you are the ones that own radioactive land.
Chernobyl was extremely expensive. Pointing out that it was only 44 people is kindof silly. So what.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
There will always be idiots around, the "human factor" can't be removed completely. Nevertheless there is a big difference between having a bunch of idiots running a nuclear power plant and say a hydroelectric power plant in terms of what will happen when things go wrong.
They should use the H3 safely on the Moon, to power the construction of sustainable solar collection bases there, rather than waste energy in transport as dangerous matter back to Earth.
--
make install -not war
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
Wrong. We've seen a meltdown here in the US: Three Mile Island. Total area contaminated: the reactor containment building. Total costs: $975 million over fourteen years for cleanup. Total deaths: 0.
Hardly catastrophic.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
According to that `report', perhaps the few dozen people in my family who have Thyroid cancer are just imagining it.
Chernobyl may not be a big deal to you, but it certainly is a HUGE deal to the people in the area who are effected by it. And it is a HUGE area.
True, not many died right then and there, but does it take into account bald (from radiation) children, with life expectancy of a few years, that I've personally seen by the THOUSANDS! Or how about the fact that people are still being exposed to radiation there.
Why don't you take a trip there, and see the effect radiation had on plant life. You can't say that it's harmless. Radiation is bad bad bad!
On the other hand, I'm all for the idea of nuclear power (safe nuclear power). I just think that downplaying a true nuclear disaster like Chernobyl, where MILLION (in my opinion - screw the report) died or suffered greatly, is just plain wrong.
It was stated in the article that there was about 1.1 million tons of He3 on the moon, to a depth of several meters, half of it in about 20 percent of the moon's surface. Now lets get out our calculators kiddies:
.002 * 2.8 million = 5,600 cubic miles of moondust, to recover about 500,000 tons of He3. This much liquified He3 could be contained in only a few supertankers, but the amout of material to be moved would be enormous, and would fill a quarry the size of Connecticut nearly a mile deep. I worked out a similar problem trying to estimate the cost of building A Bridge to Hawaii. Assuming a specific gravity of about 3, this would require processing a staggering 84 Trillion Tons of material. Of course, 1/6 of the gravity would make it easier to lift, but the costs of getting the heavy equipment to move all of this moondust would be truly enormous.
Surface Area of Moon = 4*pi*r**2 where r is about equal to 1,100 miles is about 14,000,000 square miles, give or take.
Mineable surface of moon = 20 percent of 14,000,000 square miles, or about 2.8 million square miles. This is only slightly less than the area of the Continental United States.
Mine Depth: for sake of arguement, lets just say 10 feet, or about 1/500 of a mile, which is slightly more than 3 meters.
Total volume of moon to be mined =
but has issues with moral in the case the bomb fails.
Gee... I would think simply the fact that you're trying to explode one in the first place would be a moral problem.
It's even easier then the Apollo missions. All you have to do is throw it in a little container, something like a current cargo container that can go from ship to railway to truck, throw it off the moon via magnetic rail system and catch it in earth orbit for a nice ride down on a spacecraft.
OR design the system to reenter and land, parachutes are cheap and just strap some big ones on to keep it from hitting to hard and you don't even have to put the effort into going up for the material. This isn't exactly delicate stuff, no need to treat it carefully. If you're worried about landing it on land, parachute it into the ocean and then send a crew out to pick it up, either floating or land them in shallow water. It's probably way cheaper then building and operating a whole space system just to carry this stuff down.
Other options include making refineries in orbit to take the regolith and work on it there. Then send down stuff or, even better, use it for fuels in orbit. Now you don't even need to carry all your fuel into orbit with you, just enough to get up and then you top off. Much like the SR-71 use to do. Once you're up there the fuel consumption goes way down. It's just putting all that initial effort out that takes so much and ends up costing alot.
I have the (non bluetooth) Logitech MX duo, and I must say I'm impressed. I've tried wireless stuff before, and I've found the range and delay on older models to be unacceptable. Finally, someone's done it right. I'd say the keyboard and mouse have about a 30ft range, which is plenty for most any room you'll be using. They included a pair of 1700 mAh NiMH batteries, which are more than powerful enough. Even if you used the mouse non stop for the entire day (which I have) the mouse will still be going strong. Most people probably won't even need to charge it but every 3 days. It also charges rather quickly, so even an hour of recharging will give you quite a lot more time. The mouse also has a small LED that blinks red when the batteries are getting low, and I've found that it (thankfully) gives well over an hour's notice. The response on both the keyboard and mouse is so near instantaneous that I can't tell the difference between it and their wired counterparts. I play a lot of games where that is important, and haven't noticed any lag at all. They keyboard has a nice feel to it, and it can double as a remote control for your music and movies as it has many built in features to do this and work with winamp, powerdvd, quicktime, wmp, and real player. It's nice to be able to change songs, control the volume, and pause/play music while I'm sitting in my bed.
According to that `report', perhaps the few dozen people in my family who have Thyroid cancer are just imagining it.
Nope. According to that paper, Thyroid cancer was the biggest problem. Thankfully, only 14 people have died of it so far. You and your family were actually treatable.
I really don't want to downplay the fact that Chernobyl was a huge tragedy. You and your family have probably suffered quite a bit and I am not immune to that. My only point is that Chernobyl was not much worse than other industrial accidents. For example, a coal burning plant in London managed to kill 3500 people in one week back in 1952. Areas of the United States have seen their property values go to zero as chemical spills made the areas uninhabitable. There are much worse things that can go wrong than a nuclear melt-down.
There is no such thing as 100% "safe" industry and nuclear power is far from the worst. That is my point. Nothing more, nothing less.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Also Chernobyl didn't have the huge concrete walls we are used to see around nuclear reactors. I'm sure that would have helped.
And some of us don't.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Going to the moon for helium-3 is the MacGuffin for a book named 'Back to the Moon' by Homer Hickam of 'October Sky' fame. A decent read if a bit implausible. The heroes basically hijack a space shuttle launch and use a special engine that they've designed to go to the moon to get helium-3.
Fission power is a white elephant. I'll grant you a perfect safety record and no terrorist shenannigans and still demonstrate that fission power sucks.
Fission power has a nasty pollustion stream: the solid wastes produced by fission reactors are a big problem. No one wants to store them for the period of time it would take for the waste to drop in radioactivity to the level of backround noise. Breeder reactors are worse than the conventional reactors in solid waste pollution.
Mining of fissibles is a big pain too. Remember, plutonium is highly toxic from a chemical point of view as well as radioactive, so you have to keep it and it's tailings out of the water table.
And due to all the safety and security precausions you need, transportation of fuel and reactor wastes is a big expensive PITA too.
Solar heated sterling engine driven generators are the way to go for cheap, clean safe power, not nuclear fission. The technology is well understood. It's much safer than any other conventional power generation technology. You don't have the NIMBY issues or huge security isues to keep the terrorist wolves out.
Granted solar anything has power production reliability issues, but these can be ameilorated by having extra generation capacity which dumps excess energy into potential energy sinks (springs, flywheels, batteries, water tank with gravity feed discharge, etc.) for mechanical energy backup power production.
Not content with starting wars, and starving millions of innocents over energy resources, now they want to start strip mining another planet?
Will this lunacy ever end? The universe does not exist solely as a storage battery for greedy Americans!
This is the funniest thing I've read all day.
You do realise that nearly half a million people had to be relocated and that an area of 4300 square kilometres is still an exclusion zone. This was bad enough in the Ukraine, but it would have been much worse if it had happened in a more densly populated country such as the UK where there is simply not enough land to move large numbers of people.
A further sobering thought is that had the wind not been blowing from the south when the reactor exploded, then the city of Kiev, 57 miles away and home to some 1.5 million people, would have been liberally doused with radioactive material.
Realistically, long before enough time passes that a significant amount of MASS has been converted into ENERGY, we are *extremely likely* to have either alternate fuel sources for He3 or other power technologies.
Please explain to me again exactly where there is a significant problem?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
You're just looking at things and seeing what you want to see...
A mountRadiation
t m
Do you know WHY the background radiation levels are higher in Norway than Chernobyl? It's actually very simple, really...
Because the prevailing winds dissipated the deadly cloud out into the direction of Norway and beyond...
Here's a few links for you to digest...
http://www.chernobyl.info/en/Facts/Contamination/
This one's from an official Chernobyl information site. Click on figure 10 to get a feel for the radiation distribution. The first part of the time after the accident was where most of the radiation release occured. Note that it's blowing in the general direction of Norway...
http://www.grida.no/db/maps/prod/level3/id_1219.h
This one is a chart indicating the levels of Cesium-137 on the ground as a result of Chernobyl. To put this in perspective, Cesium is a VERY nasty element and all of it's isotopes are very unfriendly to all life on this planet. It's a beta emitter (meaning it's radiation is very damaging inside your body, but clothing, etc. will generally protect you from it's effects.)- however, having said this, it's decay product, Barium-137, which is a gamma ray emitter with a half-life of about 2.6 minutes. Cesium-137 produces the most energetic decay product with the longest half-life of approximately 30 years. Cesium-137 is a particularly NASTY substance for living organisims as it tends to replace the Potassium in your electrolyte balance. Think of all the rather unpleasant things that this stuff will do to you when it does that- it's a ticking timebomb, waiting to go off.
http://www.stoller-eser.com/FactSheet/Cesium.pdf
This is JUST touching on Cesium contamination, which will still be about for a little while yet- many years after the accident. It doesn't go into any of the other contaminants from the accident. Iodine-131 and other Iodine isotopes were also massively dumped into the environment. While short-lived, they won't kill you outright unless you're exposed to quite a bit all at once. However, they get into your system in minute quantities and dramatically increase your risk for Thyroid Cancer. Enough exposure and it's almost a certainty- and it won't show for years to come.
Then there's the one we all know about. The one that people worry about (and they should...). Plutonium. This one's rather tame compared to the others, really. It's an Alpha emitter. It's fairly radiotoxic, but only if you ingest or inhale it. Now, having said this, it was sprayed all over the place and covered everything with a dusting of this element wherever the radioactive cloud blew. If you stir it up, you can inhale or ingest it without knowing you did so. Inhalation of it will expose you to hightened risks of lung cancer. Ingestion at the levels in question is held to be relatively "okay"- only a slight increase in the risks at worst. It's going to be lingering around for some time- the half-life for the isotopes in question is some 87+ years.
Anyone that says that Chernobyl was just an industrial accident just doesn't understand what exactly happened and what all was contaminated by it. You obviously do not have a full grasp of the situation with the way you're going on about it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Click on figure 12 on the Chernobyl info link... Got to preview more often...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You have to look at both sides of the equation:
- "The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in."
- "helium-3...would yield about 1000 times more energy per pound than coal"
We can also assume that the weight of some quantity of coal (in pounds) and the energy it yields are both positive.In other words, the net energy yield (call it E(He3)) is negative.
So E(He3)/W(He3) = 1000*E(C)/W(C)
And thus E(He3)*W(C) = 1000*E(C)*W(He3)
From this we can conclude (since have that
by simple division) that the weight of a coresponding quantity of helium3 would be negative.I just hope their math holds on the moon, where there's no air to displace!
-- MarkusQ
Burns: Homer, your bravery and quick thinking have turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island. Bravo!
I doubt things have improved much energy-wise since Apollo days. Burning many tons of petroleum brought back about 200 pounds of moon rocks. Hey Man this He3 stuff better be powerful.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Everyone get ready for flying moon chunks and scary underground people.
As is Cesium.
Your body readily replaces the Calcium you're currently using with Strontium. There, the beta emitter is a good way to get Leukemia. It's also carried in the milk of mammals that eat anything contaminated by it.
Cesium tends to replace Potassium in your electrolyte balance. It too is a fairly long-lived beta emitter. It, too shows up in milk.
Both are produced in a reactor. Both have nice and nasty decay products that produce Gamma Radiation. Both are readily absorbed in your body.
Just because they're beta emitters and in moderately small quantities does not make them any less hazardous or problematic in the environment.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Any byproduct of a nuclear reaction, what you would call "waste" can be *safely* and *permanently* (100 million years) stored in Synroc.
Bury it in a geologically stable part of the world, Australia is perfect, and you've solved the Nuclear "waste" problem.
Why don't we do this at the moment?
1) Cost, it will cost more.
2) "Not in my backyard!" - Ignorant voters and scared politicians. No government would have a hope in hell of getting their populace to approve this, no matter how safe it actually is.
I thought the story title was "SCO Suing the moon for Helium-3" (the story above this one has SCO Suing in it)
Granted, the moon has no ecology, and it would take a Long Time to churn up a significant fraction of the surface (area = N. & S. America). However, imagine the uproar after a few contiguous square km/mi of the surface has been strip mined, photographed, and displayed on the terrestrial news media. Yah can't cover that shit up with trees.
Luke, help me take this mask off
There is no such thing as 100% "safe" industry and nuclear power is far from the worst. That is my point. Nothing more, nothing less.
That, I agree with.
What I don't get is if only 14 people died of it, why do the docs scare the hell out of you when they diagnose you with it...
He thinks things like Strontium and Cesium exposure is not a bad thing. He's read a few things showing the instant deaths and not considered for a moment the long-term effects of what happened. Don't confuse him with the facts- his mind's made up, you know...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I mean come on. We can't even get one watt of positive energy flow out of Fusion and they already want to mine the moon for it.
As impractical as moon-mining is, perhaps you've heard of thermonuclear weapons (aka helium bombs)?
You can get a LOT of energy to flow out of fusion.
Doing something productive with that energy, that's something else.
Eh? Flash flood? Dam Failure? Depends largely on location, but mismanagement of sluice gates and drainage rates can dramatically undermine a dam.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Every time I read an article about mining space for energy it makes me sad. Some day our greed for energy will kill us all. Let's revisit the second law of thermodynamics together to find out why.
In a relaxed form, the second law of thermodynamics states that no process can remove heat from one reservoir without adding at least the same amount of heat to another reservoir. This means that in order for your refrigerator to cool itself, it must at least add the heat removed from the refrigerator to the room around it. There is no refrigerator you can make that doesn't heat up the room it is in. Similarly there is no refrigerator we can build that will cool off the earth, without heating something else up.
If we build ANY sort of extraterrestrial energy collector and transport the energy back to earth and use it, then it will generate an amount of heat equal to the energy collected. This heat will be stuck on the earth, warming it up. The more energy we pipe in fromoutside the earth, the hotter we get.
The earth usually recieves X amount of energy from the Sun every day. Some of this energy is light, some is infrared, some is X and Gamma radiation, etc. If the earth isn't getting hotter or colder it loses about X heat every day, so it stays about the same temperature. The ability of the earth to exhaust heat is a function of the atmospheric conditions, the temperature of the upper atmosphere, and the volume to (atmospheric) surface area of the earth. Neither the chemical composition of our atmosphere or the surface area of the atmosphere is likely to change to allow more heat to exhaust itself from the earth (the former may be changing to allow less heat to exhaust itself). The only variable that can change is the temperature of the earth. The higher the earths temperature is (compared to space) the more heat we can exhaust every day.
Now suppose we build a huge energy collecter outside the earth that supplies Y energy every day. Now the earth's daily energy intake is X+Y, and our heat exhaustion is still X. This means Y energy is added to the heat of the earth every day. With just a small Y we would cook fairly quickly. Fortunantly nature puts a halt on anything that is going to grow out of control. The earth will change to be able to exhaust X+Y energy every day. However, the only factor in heat exhaustion that can be adjusted is the temperature of the earth, so the earth will heat up to a temperature that allows it to exhaust X+Y energy every day.
In conclusion - why don't you put your effort into some worthwhile cause, like better use of the solar energy we do get and can handle. Or changing US laws so that the government regulatory cost (capital investment*intrest rate^years waiting for approval - capital investment) of building solar power plants doesn't make it impossible.
...not of a US/German design. More of an original design that worked well and they thought they could shave part of the safety in the design off because they thought it was overdesigned to begin with. Look at it this way- we're still working out things, and "lack of understanding" can be applied to us as well. Three Mile Island was a near-miss that we got lucky with.
So far, the pebble-bed reactor design seems to be the safest of the fission designs to date. It shouldn't have issues of meltdown or similar, but it still has containment breach risks involved with it's design- and most of the same hazards that are involved with a meltdown/explosion of a current reactor design. The saving grace would be that it would be in a much more restricted space than if we had a catastrophic meltdown occur in a reactor. If we were to seriously embrace fission power around the world, something akin to that design would have to be done for the reactor- but only after it's been thoroughly proven out. We don't know all of the issues involved with a pebble-bed yet; there could be some unforseen hazards, as there were with Chernobyl.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yes. FUD.
People living near nuclear (new-cue-laar) plants glow when you turn out the light, don't you know?
Really, to make nuclear power free (in technical terms) of that nasty waste, you need to use the same technology that would allow you to make mushroom clouds. This makes people^H^H^H^H^H^Hpoliticians all over the world very nervous.
Nevermind that it makes CEOs of major petroleum corporations fidgety.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
We had one of those in Sweden. The R4 reactor in Marviken ended up being run on oil.
Where the He-3 on the moon comes from is the Solar Wind impinging it into the regolith on the Moon's surface. At some point, I'm sure we'll come up with something else, but it'll slowly replenish itself over time.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
We're only guessing that Synroc will do what they think it will for containment of waste. We've not been around for Millions of years- and they claim that it has contained Uranium, etc. for that length of time on the website from your provided link.
I have little confidence in anyone making such claims, even accidentally on a website.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Thank you. I once read (in the 9th grade, which has been a few years), that we are much closer to death every day on the way to work (if we work outside of our own house), than we ever were with the TMI incident.
That said, it all comes down to basic psychology--we use an availability heuristic to determine what we are afraid of. Unfortunately it feeds off of the most available information, which is generally those issues which get the most news coverage.
Stop and think about it--its EXACTLY the same reason that some people are afraid to fly, but don't mind driving, but statistically are much safer flying. BUT because plane crashes are liable to get far more coverage than even 1 fatality in a car wreck, many people believe flying is more dangerous. (As a note, there are some other reasons for being afraid of flying, but agoraphobia is rarely one of them (although I suppose claustrophobia might be)).
When you hear about nuclear power, people freak out about wierd possibilities that are frequently unsubstantiated (that is, the liklihood of a meltdown spewing radiation across the country).
I do have a theory though--one of the reasons that it is politically so unpopular is that so many politicians have strong ties to oil wealth. Now, anyone who knows my posting history can tell you that I am generally a Republican supporter, in this case I have to wonder. Not that democrats are any better in this sense--there are some very strange workings on Capitol hill, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they ALL hated nuclear power for the same reason--money.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Nope.
The blast would have still lifted the roof of the containment and the surrounding building- and we'd still have had the fallout, etc.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Coal: $.078/lb
So unless you can go to the moon, process the helium 3 and bring it back from the moon for less than $78.50/lb its not worth it. Currently it costs $10,000 to send a lb of material to Low earth orbit. Its at least 5 times as much to put a lb on the moon. Not to mention, How do you get it back to earth? you need to get it back through the atmosphere that means you have to send up some sort of capsule to bring it back with, again at great expense. Until you have enough manufacturing capability on the moon to manufacture all the stuff you need to send he3 back, its just not worth it.
We don't need lunar mining to do this. Helium 3 has been made in kilogram quantities over the years. Tritium decays into helium-3 with a half life of 12 years, and fifty years of tritium production for H-bombs has resulted in a stockpile of helium-3. It's a weird fuel cycle. Tritium is created by transmutation in nuclear reactors, loaded into H-bombs, allowed to decay, and replaced with fresh tritium after a few years. Helium-3 is then separated out from the decayed tritium.
The US's tritium production facility (Savannah River, K-reactor) has been shut down since 1993. A replacement facility is being built to do transmutation the hard way - with a big linear accelerator. This is hopeless as a power source, of course. But it might be acceptable as a way to make fuel for fusion rockets. Tritium is also being produced in some of Canada's heavy-water reactors, and one of the TVA's reactors is being modified to produce tritium. But right now, the supply is a bit tight. Not too tight, though; you can buy tritium-illuminated exit signs and watches.
The US tritium and helium-3 stockpile sizes are classified, because they give a hint as to how many US nuclear weapons are still functional. The Accelerator Production of Tritium facility is supposed to make about 3Kg of tritium per year, which provides a sense of what can be produced.
This isn't cheap, but it doesn't require a giant lunar mining infrastructure. If He-He fusion can be made to work, it's the cleanest and safest way to go.
Helium is a noble gas. It isn't reactive. The only way it could be more worthy than coal for power is if it were used in fusion, and we don't have fusion technology advanced that far, yet.
Yeah,
It can't pay for itself, unless you give the owner a free pass on cleaning up his own mess when the reactor gets too radioactive to use any more.
And even if they got the "Get out of cleanup jail free" card, utility companies that won nukes on average charge higher rates.
"Apparently no one knows how to build a nuke reactor safely enough for the insurance companies.
I have to wonder what type of design they want."
Exactly what we have. Being insurance companies, they like the high fear factor that lets them charge practically whatever price they name and they especially like never having to make a payout since nobody ever actually gets hurt by it. It's a win/win situation for them.
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
In the past I believed that public resistance to power reactors was founded in ignorance, and therefore without merit. It is, but some knee-jerk reactions are healthy.
Last Friday the Tennessee reactor called WATTS BAR was SCRAM-ed. A SCRAM is an emergency procedure where the core's control rods are rapidly inserted to halt the reaction. SCRAMs are routine. Reactors SCRAM themselves and are manually SCRAM-ed under a large number of conditions.
Here is a quote from the WATTS BAR report to the NRC on this "event"; "The licensee also reported that all control rods inserted on the reactor trip, no primary or secondary system relief valves operated, and that reactor temperature is being maintained using steam dump to the condenser. Steam generator water levels are being maintained using auxiliary feedwater. The station electrical system is available and in a normal configuration. All ECCS equipment is available. The reactor is currently stable at 2230 psig, 559 degrees Fahrenheit."
Something about having to report the condition of control rods and water levels directly to the Federal Government makes me doubt exactly how safe this stuff actually is. That paragraph follows a template that varies based primarily on which parts of the back-up systems fail post SCRAM, and this is an unusual report in that none did.
Machine's break, people mess up, things get neglected, overlooked and forgotten. The consequences at a coal or gas power generating facility are localized deaths and equipment damage. The consequences at a fission reactor range from trivial to catastrophic, in a biblical sense. We have never suffered the worst case. Chernobyl did not even begin to approach it.
Also, last Friday, the DAVIS BESSE facility in Ohio reported that, according to their simulations, a steam line break could potentially compromise all low-voltage systems and battery backups available at the reactor by overpressuring some doors. That's a useful discovery. Too bad it took 27 years to notice. It probably isn't coincidental that this particlar facility is being scrutinized with a microscope and thus rendering interesting new discoveries like this. Two years ago refueling workers discovered that boric acid had eaten through the steam generator casing down to the stainless steel inner lining. 8" of low alloy steel gone and all of the pressure generated by the nuclear reaction retained by a 3/8" layer of stainless steel.
I have no animus towards the power companies. I am not an activist exaggerating to support an agenda. Paranoia about nuclear waste is nothing more than trumped up NIMBY. "Deregulation" isn't causing a degradation of safety. It's just the nature of any large industrial system; everything breaks eventually. Hell, everything is already broken and we have simply failed to notice, yet.
I now believe that fission reactors are inherently dangerous, including recent improved designs. It is the nature of a fission reactor to melt down unless prevented from doing so. We are very good at preventing this. We are not, however, perfect. We are people operating machines.
In contrast, fusion appears much safer. The challenge of fusion is getting more power out of the reaction than you put in. By definition the reaction will stop if the input fails. It is the nature of a fusion reactor to stop unless prevented from doing so. Unless some foul-up closes the loop it can't spiral out-of-control.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
no...it is not one small step for a duck...seriously guys, we've got a mission to complete here...just load the helium and stop f%$#ing around!
...he's just an idiot.
Ummm wrong.... the water is the only thing that keeps the reactors from melting down. Its used to cool the reactor. With out the water the heat from the unrianum would melt itself and cause a meltdown.
You might want to recheck your physics. During fission, more "fast" neutrons are released than "slow" neutrons. The slow ones are useful for propogating the fission, the fast ones are not. Thus reactors use water or heavy water as a moderator to slow the fast neutrons. Without the moderator, the fission rate will slow and eventually come to a stop. The fact that water can be used for cooling is simply an side effect made use of by reactor designers.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Now we can replace all those coal powered spaceships with helium-3 powered shaceships.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
What I don't get is if only 14 people died of it, why do the docs scare the hell out of you when they diagnose you with it...
Doctors are people too. They only know what they've been taught. If they haven't been taught about nuclear physics (why would they) they'll be just as far in the dark as anyone else.
The experienced ones who understand more, are worried about the possible effects of radioisotopes on your body. Certain isotopes can be more harmful than others because your body will recognize them as things it needs and store them. Still, it isn't nearly as harmful as drinking hemlock or accidentally mixing bleach and amonia.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The blast would have still lifted the roof of the containment and the surrounding building- and we'd still have had the fallout, etc.
That depends on how strong the walls are. Despite all the toxic chemicals that can be released, Chernobyl was still a boiler explosion. You can't get any more force out of that explosion than the amount the reactor structure was built to contain.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Oops. That should read "morale".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Two things strike me about this: (1) As several people have already pointed out, Helium fusion is, to put it politely, "technically challenging." While both major tracks of fusion research (inertial and magnetic confinement) have made substantial progress in the past decade, they're nowhere near being able to build production hardware of any sort.
But second, and maybe a bit more relevant - if we're already setting up that sort of infrastructure on the moon, why the hell not just use solar energy? The main limiting factor in solar energy today is atmospheric damping - solar energy is more efficient on Mars than it is on Earth (despite its getting only a quarter as much sunlight) just because it has less atmosphere. If you're going to be on the moon, or for that matter in any vaguely stable fairly high orbit, it seems much more straightforward to simply set up large photovoltaic arrays.
(Of course, this brings up the problem of how one transports this power back down to the ground - not hard if the "ground" in question is a space station or a lunar facility, but somewhat trickier if the ground is on Earth. But I suspect that it wouldn't be much harder than setting up a permanent gas-mining facility on the moon - something which would be complicated significantly by the fact that, even if the moon has a lot of 3He, it's not particularly _dense_ there)
You don't think it'll still be expensive after being shipped in from the MOON
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I repeat:
0 06 30.html
I did a back of the napkin based upon the He3 info posted on space.com.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0
They said there is about 70 tons He3 per million tons of regolith.
That comes in at concentrations that would be a nice gold or platinum deposit on earth (about 1.75 oz/ton He3), but is a very low concentration for anything other than a precious metal. The extraction temp quoted in the article is 800C (1470F) and would require a lot of energy. This would require very large solar panels and MANY trips to get them up there.
No, you are not going to fabricate solar panels on the moon. The moon's regolith is composed of refractory minerals like anorthite that (while benched in a NASA lab yield silica) are not feasible as silica sources because of the high energy requirements and expensive crucibles needed.
Then there is the distribution of He3 in regolith. If it only occurs in the top few inches of regolith, you need the kind of equipment that can mine only that portion. Otherwise you dilute the ore feed and end up treating material devoid of the resource at great cost.
Then you have to deal with removing the gasses that come off in addition to H3. Water and O2 woudl be useful, but F, Cl and the other volatiles typically found in rocks and regolith would be a problem.
Assuming we come up with a feasible fusion reactor, it looks like it will be cheaper to deal with neutrons than import a clean fuel from the moon.
What we are talking about, is getting a reactor that output more total energy then the amount of not nuclear energy that's put in. In other words, if there may be more then 1000 times as much energy as a point of coal, but it doesn't matter if you need to burn 2000 pounds of coal to get enough energy to actual extract that energy. Or in the case with modern fusion reactors, a million tons of coal. Keep in mind that a lot of the energy will be useless heat after the reaction.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What? They's never been able to make a contunous fusion reactor produce more energy than it takes? This IS news.
Generally when we say energy is produced, we are talking about energy that can actually be used, as opposed to waste heat. Current Fusion reactors extract only a tiny amount of energy from the atoms, while at the same time creating tons of heat. Therefore, they produce much less energy then they take in, even without counting the energy in the atoms.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You are such a stereotypical clueless Slashdot user. - speaking with a sense of authority, berating people who disagree while making utterly incorrect assertions.
If you had done *any* research, you would quickly see that Strontium-90 is a *major* problem. Not because of the type of radiation it emits, but because of its bio-uptake and subsequent incorporation into bone material in place of calcuim. It then sits in bones, irradiating bone marrow and surrounding tissue for the rest of the poor subject's life.
Get a clue before shooting your mouth off.
Mine He3 from the Moon. Hogwash!
It's really sad that this is the year 2004 and completely safe pebble-bed reactor fissions plants combined with nuclear waste recycling (using the byproducts for more nuclear energy) are not putting the oil companies out of business.
Forget all the BS and hyperbole that you hear on TV and movies, you know the propaganda is really working when they have the young engineers convinced that one of the most marvelous energy technologies of the 20th century has been torpedo'd by the elite until we run out of fossil fuels or choke to death on the carcinogenic pollutants saturating our atmosphere.
Have you people forgotten that France, Japan and many other nations run mostly on fission? Hell, practically the entire US Naval fleet (including submarines obviously) runs on fission.
Which is more reasonable -- pebble-bed reactors that can be highly safe and secure or fossil fuel wars that kill people by the hundreds of thousands? Do the numbers.
At least with pebble-beds you can isolate the contaminants inside golf-ball size balls that prevent the reactor from ever going critical. You can also concentrate all your security on the production facilities instead of playing Big Brother and forcing everyone to have automobile-cavity-searches for polluting components.
The waste can be recycled until practically nothing is left, but you can thank President Carter for signing the bill that has doomed us all to a future of fossil fuel dependency because that bill prevents the recycling of nuclear fuels. This also forces current nuclear plants from reducing the waste to sub-hazardous levels and planting the really hot stuff in Nevada.
With all of the "myths" FAQs out there, someone needs one on Nuclear Power Myths.
The future is fission generated hydrogen fuel that powers our cars. If you have religious issues with fission you can even create your own hydrogen with solar panels made by BP, Shell, Kyocera or a bunch of other OEMs.
Spread the word. Nuclear power can still rescue us. Don't believe the myths. Grow a pair and think big. If you keep thinking like sheep you are dooming the planet and your children to endless war and pollution.
Go out and learn some damn physics people.
Sheesh.
...yield about 1000 times more energy per pound than coal...
Anybody weighed helium lately? Now that's a whole lot of gas from a place with not much atmosphere. Let me guess, that's the entire atmosphere of the moon compressed into one lb?
Everyone has an agenda. Except me. --Michael Crichton
[bangs head against keyboard] ...heat ... is ... energy ... ;)
[bangs head against keyboard]
[bangs head against keyboard]
The waste products from most other types of power production plants (and the manufacturing of solar panels) also cause horrible birth defects. Sadly, you don't hear about these often, but then, how many birth defects due to a RECENT NUCLEAR ACCIDENT have you read about?
Chernobyl was a fluke that resulted by horrible accidents; current nuclear reactor designs would never have the same type of accident Chernobyl had. The designs have made it impossible.
the moon has been retating around the earth for millions and millions and millions (billions?) of years. the only way that is possible is that the mass of the moon is in perfect balance with the distance it is from the earth and velocity that it is moving. if this was not perfect, it would have either floated away, or crashed into the earth years ago.
You absolutely do not know what you're talking about. Please, for the sake of humanity just shut up.
The reason the moon is moving away from the earth is because fo tidal drag slowing it down. The slower it gets, the larger the orbit needs to be. It dosn't matter how much something weighs, or how fast it's moving or whatever. It will always find some orbit. Some of the 'orbits' will take it so far out fo the gravitational well that they will be more affected by other things before completing them, and some orbits will have the thing crash into the earth, but there are plenty of stable orbits.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No fallout, see? :-)
Yeah, let's see what you say when one of those black boxes hits you in the head on the way down...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Perhaps I overstate them slightly, but in consideration to things that do long-term damage, I'd rather err on the side of caution. The fact that you understate things is concerning to say the least.
Most of the "dangerous" (Sadly, this is a rather relative term- the truely dangerous chemicals tend to be things like nerve-gas, etc. and these are rarely released in an accidental manner...) chemicals break-down quickly and the byproducts of the break-down typically aren't as dangerous as the original chemical- typically, for most of the chemicals out there, it's an initial exposure risk. In the case of radioisotopes from a fission reactor, on the other hand, the dangerous substances can be lurking around for decades or centuries and they can zap you, oftentimes in a bad way, without being anywhere near lethal levels- moreso than most of the more dangerous chemical compounds. For radioisotopes, it's an initial exposure risk AND a long-term exposure risk.
To say that it's any safer than coal fired plants at this point or any point in the near forseeable future is really picking one evil for another.
I'm all for people researching into whether or not it can be made clean (Pebble bed reactors look REAL promising, but not proven out yet...), but until someone thoroughly proves out a small-scale design, they shouldn't be allowed to do ANY other designs in production. They're nowhere near safe enough- the risks of a failure are moderately high, terrorist attack potential is really high (Lots of damage, little effort compared to other mass destruction attacks...), and the stakes are at least slightly higher than almost any chemical plant.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
9/11 deaths: 3,000.
Chernobyl deaths: 44.
And the destruction of the WTC left toxic material around in the most densely populated location on earth. A simple melt down in an unpopulated location would be much less harmful then 9/11.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
2. Use a computer model. This is why Saddam wanted Playstations.
Please. That's why playstations were not allowed to be imported under the embargo, but that's not why he wanted them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My parents bought me land on the moon for xmas. *big evil grin*
Yes, there are bad chemicals in the world. But there are worse chemicals in worse configurations all over the planet. Just look at Borpal india. No nuclear reactions were going on, but 3000 people died. A lot of human industry is very dangerous, and Nuclear stuff isn't any worse then lots of other things, just more 'scary'.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You like the number if ifs and mights in that sentence enough to put bucks into the fusion project? Use your own. Unless the university researchers can point at a working He3 reactor,they are wasting our time.
The price to first power for a 250 Mw SPS is estimated at $10B using launchers we don't have yet with a $400/kg cost to orbit. However, the price to first power using Russian launch vehicles available now (roughly $4000/pound) shouldn't be more than roughly 10x that... i.e. building one should be no more expensive than the War on Iraq has been so far. Once we know it works, we can expand it using cheaper launch systems like the Space Elevator or railgun technology, hopefully including railgun launches of raw material from the moon. (cheaper than earth in terms of energy, if you don't know why, what are you doing here?
Which would we get more security from, a technology being actively researched that'll make the Middle East unnecessary or a war that at best, secures part of our energy supply for a few years?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Am I the only person who didn't hear Bush address the need to invade Mars during last night's State of the Union speech?
[o]_O
Chernobyl killed a lot more than 44 people. If you count the effects from a decent fraction of the core going up into the atmosphere and being breathed in by the surrounding population, the expected number of cancers is somewhere around 3000-5000. Furthermore, Three Mile Island was a near disaster. The fuel partially melted, and if a few things had gone differently, there could easily have been a loss of containment. You might say that things are different now, but just last year you had the Davis-Besse situation where there could have been an explosive loss of coolant accident. I am a big supporter of nuclear power in principle. The problem is that safety is not necessarily the #1 driver in day to day operations. Companies want to make as much money as possible, so they will keep plants operating that should be shut down for repairs. They know that in the unlikely event that there is an accident, their insurance and the government will bail them out. It should be a criminal offense to be an officer of a corporation that has a major nuclear accident. Safely operating a nuclear plant is very complicated and requires a great deal of dedication. Unfortunately the incentives are not right in the deregulated electricity industry for this to happen.
Not true. The standard way to reprocess fuel is using the purex process, which produces plutonium. There is another process, however called pyroprocessing which does not produce weapons-usable material.
I love my Alma Mater.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Then would you like to explain why we're not all dead yet. Unlike a typical slashdotter, I *have* done my research. I'm not always right, but that's why I'm willing to listen when someone has a point. In any case, I was referring to it being buried. It doesn't last millions of years like some of the other stuff. In fact, it wouldn't be much of a hazard at all within about a century. Of course, the stuff that lasts millions of years isn't really the hazardous stuff anyway. People just forget to mention that fact.
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You should read the link you posted - it describes that sr-90 as a significant health problem. I don't understand the point you are trying to make about us being all dead - most of us aren't exposed to it in any significant quantity (because people realise how what awful stuff it is). Besides, sr-90 won't kill you in days, just condemn you to cancer (mainly leukemia) in later life.
If you had also read the link, you would have read: "Strontium-90 was widely dispersed in the 1950s and 1960s in fall out from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons."
In other words, there are significant deposits of Sr-90 all around us from the nuclear testing. The levels have been dropping simply because nuclear testing was banned. If Sr-90 condems us to death, why hasn't the entire 50's-60's generation already died? Why is it instead that lifespans are longer than they've ever been in recorded history? (Save for Biblical references.)
The answer is that we recognize these dangers and do our best to mitigate them. When you drink water, you don't get it directly from a stream. You get it from a plant that has processed it and deemed it safe. When you get milk, cheese, corn, or other foods, they were tested to make sure that they didn't contain harmful materials. Even salt is fortified with Iodine so that Iodine radioisotopes don't have a chance to take hold of your system.
Dangerous chemicals are a way of life for us today. We learned how dangerous they were in the Industrial age. But instead of sticking our heads in the sand and crying for our mammas, we decided to apply what we learned and make sure that it doesn't become a problem. Anti-nuclear activists would have us stick our heads in the sand and say that nuclear power is too dangerous. That's despite the fact that all the nuclear power plants in the world have yet to kill as many people as a SINGLE coal burning plant.
Now you can decide that nuclear power isn't worth it, and live in dirty cities where the very air is slowly poisoning people, but I myself would rather see a day in age where we embrace nuclear technologies while at the same time recognizing its dangers. Not only will our cities be clean and our children healthier, but we will be able to explore our Solar System or visit the moon. The only thing holding us back are people who are too afraid. Are you willing to take that step?
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Ok, I have to admit. I chuckled at that one. Kudos! :-)
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You quote:
"Strontium-90 was widely dispersed in the 1950s and 1960s in fall out from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons."
and wonder why we aren't all dead or dying.
"widely dispersed" is not a quantitive term - so you can't go basing judgements off it. But consider the volume of the atmosphere (vast), the amount of fissile materials in the nuclear tests (way less than 1000 kilograms per test), the conversion rate of u-235/pu-240 into sr-90, the locations of the tests (remote, or over water) and the likely dispersal pattern.
BTW I suggest that you stop your poorly-informed ranting about the safety of nuclear power (which I personally *prefer* nuclear to burning fossil fuels). You aren't going to have any credibility to argue your position if you make factually incorrect statements, just because they sound nice.
we haven't gone to a breeder because?
current nuclear reactor designs would never have the same type of accident Chernobyl had. The designs have made it impossible.
So they'll have different ones.
I'm not against nuclear power, but it's foolish to say "X can never happen!", as chances are it (or something similar) most certainly can.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
they are talking about fusion. matter to energy conversion
A better idea is to extract raw materials
from the asteroids. In the system Earth-moon
the smallest mass change would cause, in the
long term, gravitational instabilities that
could perturb Earth's orbit around the sun.
Consider that at the time I was living in western Norway, more than 2000 km (1200 miles or so) away from Chernobyl, and here is a short sample (by no means complete !) of claims from my tiny little part of the fallout, limited to food-safety:
The list is by no means complete, and that's only for one of the many areas that where hit by the fallout, and only for problems related to food-safety. What is fair compensation for this ? Times how many million ? Notice that I didn't even *mention* problems like increased birth-defencies and cancer-occurences for the following *decades*, nor ask what fair compensation for a chromoson-fault in your kid is.
Fact is, while 44 direct deaths is not at all unheard of for a "normal" industrial accident, I've never heard of a "normal" industrial accident that had consequences like this thousands of miles away from the accident-place.
I agree, by the way, that Nuclear-done-rigth can be quite safe as power-plants go. But it is stupid and counterproductive to compare Tchernobyl to other industrial accidents with 44 dead.
TVO in Finland just signed a deal to buy a nuclear power plant from french-german Framatom. It is scheduled to come online in 2009. If some countries aren't building them, it's not for fiscal or technical reasons. The reasons are political and social.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
You mean you've never heard of coal burning? Oh sorry, I take that back. Coal burning is not a "normal" industrial accident. It is just normal.
I think that it is more likely that asteroids (esp. Earth-crossing asteroids) will be the source for heavy elements and compounds (nickel, steel, etc.) for structures built in near-Earth space, although the Moon may be a source of heavier materials for structures built on the Moon, as well as lighter elements and compounds (e.g., He3, O, and possibly Al) for space that asteroids may not provide.
I don't know whether it would be more cost-effective to send aluminum up from the Moon's surface, or to capture iron-rich asteroids.
My guess is that steel structures would provide more protection from solar radiation, etc., and so they would be preferable to aluminum for habitats.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Atomic mass:
H : 1.007825
D : 2.014102
He3 : 3.016029
He4 : 4.002603
Atomic mass loss per kilogram He3: ((D + He3) - (H + He4)) / He3 = (5.030131 - 5.010428) / 3.016029 = 0.0065327
Energie per kilogram He3 : 0.0065327 * c^2 = 5.88 * 10^14 J (is about the 19 Megawatt years quoted in the article.
Energie per kilogram coal is about 29 * 10^6 J.
5.88 * 10^14 / 29 * 10^6 = 20 * 10^6
So 1 kilogram of He3 produces about the same energie as 20,000,000 kilograms of coal.
Oh well, being wrong by a factor of 20,000 is not too bad for slashdot.
Fusing 1 kg of He3 yields 20,000,000 times the energy as burning 1 kg of coal.
You're absolutely correct, He3 yields about 20,000,000 times as much energy as coal. Oh well, only of by a factor of 20,000 :)
Well, I have to take your word for it, but cannot believe it, since Uranium has a greater atomic mass than Gold, which would make it less common fission product than Gold and is more unstable than Gold, which makes the product even rarer.
> All you need is a process to separate and enrich the stuff.
Which requires next to no technical expertise and doesn't enables one to build atomic bombs (Hint: Sarcasm)
> 2. Use a computer model. This is why Saddam wanted Playstations.
In order to make a computer-model and to verify it, you need to make tests. That is why the US-goverment is thinking about resuming nuclear tests. Because they have next to no data about mini-nukes, and they want to build them.
> Just about anyone with the proper resources can build an atomic nuke
I did not meant that terrorists will build an atomic bomb (there are cheaper ways to scare and kill people (dirty bomb)), but that nuclear reactors are highly profilic targets for terrorists (dirty bomb for free), so they are in need of special protection.
In order to build an H-bomb, you need a A-bomb, as the fission ignites the fusion reaction.
For a controlled fusion this method is unpractical.
The technology to make a controlled fusion reaction is most likely useless to built an H-Bomb, because the apparatus is too large to be movable.
> 1. Breeder Reactors
Source Hence the name "breeder".
This eliminates all the problems I wrote above (Hint: Sarcasm).
> 2. Atomic Batteries
Sorry, the link you provided does not explain how they can replace power-plants. As far as I can tell from the responses and a quick search on Google, their task is to generate some Watts, like fuel cells, not some Gigawatts, like fusion or fission reactors.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
My argument was not for conventional power-plants, but for research of new energy sources in contrast to improving fission.
> coal power is cheap because thousands of tons of cadmium are thrown into the atmosphere every year
Well, it is not my field of expertise, but it isn't like fossil power-plants are allowed in Japan to "belch their filth into the sky" like they want either. I think the Air Pollution Control Law regulises it.
Furthermore, in accordance with the Kyoto protocol, a law has been enacted, which requires them to pay for CO2 emission rights.
Surely, the real costs aren't reflected in what conventional power-plants have to pay, but it isn't like they get their emissions for free.
> Give me wind, wave or solar power anyday.
Well, I don't think one energy source will solve our problems. I prefer a highly diversified and decentral power-generation. This should include wind, wave and solar power
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
So, let's see, a reactor in an isolated area melts down and kills 5000 people in two towers in manhattan? ;)
Anyway, a reactor meltdown doesn't look like a mushroom, sorry. The reason insurance companies won't insure it is almost certainly entirely political and stupid society.
First, we built the A-bomb to kill *lots* of people as fast as possible. Remember, rate of fire is how wars are won, and it translates to rate of destruction. So we built one bomb that could do more damage than hundreds of our other bombs, dropped it twice, doing far less damage than we had already done, and the war was over. Right?
Then, for whatever reasons I've never bothered to find out, several other countries got ahold of "the bomb" and started building their own.
Somewhere along the lines, some scientists figured out how to use the nuclear reaction that was originally discovered and developed for the purpose of killing people instead used for generating power so people can live.
Then the effects of dropping bombs and various other nuclear testing comes out and we get to learn about radioisotopes and nuclear winter and so forth.
Then we get all these public campaigns trying to ban anything that says "nuclear" on it because they're afraid of the doctrine fondly known as Mutually Assured Destruction, toted as the reason the Soviets didn't nuke as and we didn't nuke them.
Chernobyl happens somewhere in the mix and people in the US go crazy because a Russian reactor exploded and killed thousands of people!
Later on, it's quietly published in the US that the Chernobyl disaster didn't really do that much damage after all. It's never mentioned that a fission reactor meltdown doesn't explode like the bombs we dropped in Japan did, because we're all taught that in schools. OR at least, we used to.
Over the next, what, 15 years or so? reporters in the US and others find all kinds of reason to point at Chernobyl as being the entire reason nuclear power is so *bad* for us. These are the same reporters who selectively report on Hussein's murderous past but ignore Bush's murderous present. The same reporters that selectively report what gets people's attention so that more advertisers will pay them more money to keep reporting that tripe, and talking trash about nuclear anything has been getting people's attention since the early parts of the cold war.
IT's really fucking annoying, when you get right to it, that the reason people block nuclear power is because they're too chickenshit to use it. It's actually cleaner than anything we currently use to power ourselves. Sure, storage of waste is a problem, but it's not insurmountable by any means. THere's no pollution dumped into the air hour after hour, and no big payload of pollution dumped anywhere, ever. Just because something says "nuclear" doesn't mean it's bad. My mom got her thyroid under control through "nuclear therapy". WIthout it, she'd be dead as a doornail. Nuclear warfare is bad, just like chemical warfare and biological warfare are all bad. Hell, you don't need a specialized version, you can just say "warfare is bad" and that's good enough. But chemical anything and biological anything both produce lots of good stuff for us.
So, yeah, anyway, the point is I agree with the general consensus that nuclear energy is good, Chernobyl was bad, but if Chernobyl is the worst disaster nuclear power can suffer it's definitely safer than pretty much any other power plant on the planet.
All the bad stuff you hear about Chernobyl is mostly politically motivated anyway. Just because the Russians aren't commies anymore doesn't mean US citizens view them with any less paranoia. And we just like to pull out Chernobyl especially when them Russians start dogging on us for anything in particular. ;)
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Stop and think about it--its EXACTLY the same reason that some people are afraid to fly, but don't mind driving, but statistically are much safer flying. BUT because plane crashes are liable to get far more coverage than even 1 fatality in a car wreck, many people believe flying is more dangerous. (As a note, there are some other reasons for being afraid of flying, but agoraphobia is rarely one of them (although I suppose claustrophobia might be)).
Heh. You reminded me of something. On September 11, 2001, a coworker of mine told me in a much aggrieved voice (and almost got slapped for acting so stupid) that now it's not safe to fly anywhere! Those people will take the planes and crash them all over the place!
I calmly pointed out that even if there were thousands of people in those towers, planes, and surrounding area that were killed, it was still statistically more dangerous to drive. I tried to get him to give me his car, but he was too busy being scared of terrorists to give me those. Had it been a different disaster that didn't provoke paranoia I probably could have gotten his car...
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Solar wind windmills. Can make them giant since lower gravity and the lack of atmosphere gets you enough solar wind.
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
9/11 deaths: 3,000.
Chernobyl deaths: 44.
I'm not sure where you get the 44 deaths from but the long term death toll is likely to be much higher. I'm not sure what the most accepted figure is but 44 isn't even close. This page, for example, suggests 47 000. Unless someone can provide links to a more definitive study, I think one order of magnitude higher than 9/11 is about right.
I think they are smoking the helium. I've seen "Time Machine", and recall the freakiest part of the movie to me was when people populated the moon to mine it, then successfully blew it in half and crashed it into the earth. Can't wait to see what a "Morlock" really looks like.
Well, I have to take your word for it, but cannot believe it, since Uranium has a greater atomic mass than Gold, which would make it less common fission product than Gold and is more unstable than Gold, which makes the product even rarer.
Actually, Uranium is about 500 times more common than gold. It's a *very* common substance. IIRC, most of it gets deposited on earth from meteroites (including the ones that burn up). You'll be pleased to know (sarcasm) that coal generally contains high levels of Uranium and that coal burning disperses large quantities of Uranium in populated areas.
Which requires next to no technical expertise and doesn't enables one to build atomic bombs (Hint: Sarcasm)
I didn't say that it doesn't require expertise. I said that anyone with the proper resources (ususually enough money to train or hire scientists and buy or build equipment) can enrich it. I don't know the details, but they probably use a fairly standard process of melting the metal and impurities, then using a centrifuge to separate lighter from heavier.
I did not meant that terrorists will build an atomic bomb (there are cheaper ways to scare and kill people (dirty bomb)), but that nuclear reactors are highly profilic targets for terrorists (dirty bomb for free), so they are in need of special protection.
"Dirty bombs" are not effective weapons. All the building materials in cities would tend to shield against radiation. An atomic bomb is far more effective, but takes more resources to build. An H-Bomb is all but impossible for a terrorist to build.
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The coal and oil industries probably don't like it too much. According to the section I quoted below the coal industry alone has an annual production value of about $100 billion. I'm sure oil isn't hurting, either.
i nance/further info/energy/coal.html
It's amazing how much you can make people agree with you if you have billions to spend on campaign donations, advertising and astroturf (corporate run grass roots).
"The size and global reach of the coal industry is unparalleled in the mining sector. Almost 500 million tonnes of coal are shipped annually around the world at a traded value of around US$15bn, but the total amount of coal mined each year amounts to some 3.8 billion tonnes. This puts the total value of annual production at around US$100bn - far higher than the next most important mined commodity, aluminium."
http://www.woodhead-publishing.com/f
The people who sue you are the ones who's children have birth defects.
People sue you when their dumbass kids eat lead paint chips or because the air conditioner is moldy. The hell with the lawyers, I'm sick of living in the goddamned 19th century.
Pointing out that it was only 44 people is kindof silly. So what.
Because it's 44 vs. thousands dead from asphyxiation due to asthma generated by pollution from burning coal and oil.
Mining Helium-3 on the moon is a good idea. Packing it up and throwing it down the deep gravity well of the Earth is not. A prefect example of the insanity of our economy.
Better yet to use this gift as energy to built solar panels that will collect energy for years. Then built mass drivers and then cites in space. We have to get away from the planetary mentality and learn to build our own biospheres - a much better solution than trying to get to other habitable planets (which there are none in this solar system) or attempting to terraform another world.
Eventually, the Helium-3 will make an excellent rocket fuel. As for power on the Earth - giant solar arrays that transmit microwaves is a far better solution - and will contribute far less waste heat than the fusion of Helium-3. Not to mention that it could never be used in a bomb.
Well, Chernobyl directly killed 14 technicians (IIRC). And according to a study done in Finland, it increased the cancer-rate in nearby areas by whopping 0.2%. And Chernobyl was by far the worst nuclear-disaster there has ever been. And it happened because of flawed reactor and repeated mistakes made by the technicians.
So it's not THAT bad
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Cancer-rate in Ukraine increased by 0.2% due to Chernobyl. I don't know about birth-defects though. But the point is clear: it's not the end of the world.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Like I commented elsewhere, there are studies (link in Finnish, sorry) that say that overall, the cancer-rate in the nearby areas increased by a whoppin 0.2%. They estimated that Chernobyl caused about 3000 cancer-related deaths, while there was 1.3 million cancer-related deaths taking place that were NOT related to Chernobyl.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
What about Homer Hickman??
Sorry, I had to run so I didn't finish answering. Here's the rest:
8 &oe=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=33fe4f52.0312121455.3c1c11 7d%40posting.google.com
Sorry, the link you provided does not explain how they can replace power-plants. As far as I can tell from the responses and a quick search on Google, their task is to generate some Watts, like fuel cells, not some Gigawatts, like fusion or fission reactors.
That's because I'm not talking about generating power for the grid. I'm referring to generating power for devices such as cell phones and laptops. The nuclear "waste" is still usable for generating tens of watts of power on a constant basis. Not enough to light your home, but more than enough for many of the portable devices we use today.
BTW, it looks like I posted the wrong link. Here's the correct one:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-
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Hey, *I* don't have a problem with nuclear reactors. I have a problem with the government indemnifying their operators. If they can find a private corporation to carry their insurance, then let them build nukes.
But they can't, which is the only reason we don't have any new nukes.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
And do you think that the Finnish government is backing up the insurance company that's going to insure these new nukes?
If not, then I agree. I highly suspect that they are, though. I don't see any reason why our government should do that. If it is too risky to insure, then it is too risky to build.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
That figure means nothing to me. If the baseline cancer-rate was 0.002% and it went to 0.202%, I'd say that was a big deal. If it went from 0.002% to 0.00204%, then I might agree with you.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The potential cost of a nuclear accident is so astronomical that even with a very low risk of it actually happening, that they would have to charge very high premiums in order to cover the risk.
But consider the volume of the atmosphere (vast), the amount of fissile materials in the nuclear tests (way less than 1000 kilograms per test), the conversion rate of u-235/pu-240 into sr-90, the locations of the tests (remote, or over water) and the likely dispersal pattern.
:-)
So you're saying that Sr-90 can't be a worldwide issue because the concentrations will decrease the more it disperses? So that means that Sr-90 is just like any other dangerous chemical in that it is most dangerous only to the immediate area of the accident.
Thank you for making my point for me.
BTW I suggest that you stop your poorly-informed ranting about the safety of nuclear power (which I personally *prefer* nuclear to burning fossil fuels). You aren't going to have any credibility to argue your position if you make factually incorrect statements, just because they sound nice.
Where was I factually incorrect? I honestly would like to know so that I can get them correct next time.
One thing that is a proven fact that you need to consider, is that some Sr-90 does get into your body. It's not much, but it is there. That's why I get annoyed when people say it instantly condemns you to a slow death. The truth is that there's always a chance you could get cancer just from cosmic rays. The chances simply increase as your body stores radioisotopes.
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Unless someone can provide links to a more definitive study
I believe I already did that. Where do you think this "44" figure keeps coming from?
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about as high as your brain was when you wrote that comment
ok..you're right. they are safe. why don't YOU go live by one.
I guess we're already screwed. Those several 1000 tons of meteorites, micrometeorite dust, etc that fall on Earth, plus the same amount that falls on the moon have doomed us all! After all, you said the samllest mass change! I imagine that the amount of meteor accumulation is AT LEAST equal to the several 1000 tons of He3 being discussed! Even if we're talking several million tons of He3, it just takes a good sized impactor to make up that mass. CLUE: check the surface of the Moon - those DO happen now and then.
Where was I factually incorrect?
Ranting about how sr-90 is not a problem based only on its half-life and emissions.
Ranting about how sr-90 is not a problem based only on its half-life and emissions.
Descriptive.
Let's try this again. Sr-90 is a beta emitter with a half life of 28.5 year half-life. This means a few things:
1. Sr-90 gives off a *lot* of radiation.
2. The radiation is in the form of beta particles which are only mildly harmful as an external source in large quantities. (Burns being the primary problem.)
3. If ingested, Sr-90 *may* replace calcium in the bones.
4. Once in your body, Sr-90 increases the risk of cancer, but does not guarantee it. The more Sr-90 your body stores, the greater the risk of cancer.
5. If buried, Sr-90 will have degraded to a nearly nonexistent amount within a century and as a result does not pose a hazard for "millions of years" as critics claim*.
6. In the case of a reactor explosion, the more dispersed Sr-90 gets, the less of a dosage the population can expect to have to deal with.
Now, what did I get wrong?
* The stuff that does last millions of years is not radioactive enough to be concerned about. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to last millions of years. --Captain Obvious
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What Bush actually said was "The Moon is MINE! Mine mine mine all mine!"
Bill Stewart
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My girlfriend had to get X-rays for a possible sprained knee, and noticed that the radiologist didn't bother to leave the room, don a lead shield, or take any other self-protective measures. Needless to say, she asked why.
Turns out this woman had grown up 80 miles downwind of Chernobyl. Her attitude was "Why bother? I grew up absorbing 1000 times as much radiation as I'll absorb in a whole career here."
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.