dietz.usc-cse@UDel-Relay@sri-unix (09/21/82)
In "Colonies in Space" Heppenheimer (sp?) proposes putting two nuclear reactors on the moon. The first is the provide power for the first team, which builds a mass driver. The second and larger plant is to power the first mass driver. After you get a mass driver working and are building solar powersats the team builds a rectenna to receive power from a satellite at the L1 point (between the moon and earth). The reactors are shielded by putting them in craters and covering them with several meters of lunar soil. One big engineering problem with reactors on the moon is waste heat. On Earth you can heat up fluids (air, water) but in space the only way to dispose of heat is to radiate it away.
REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix (09/21/82)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC> On the moon there'd be vast areas of uninhabited terrain relatively near to the nuclear reactor. For example, the reactor could be put south of the work area instead of in its center, and then the area south of the reactor could be uninhabited. The solution to cooling the reactor would then be to pipe liquid sodium thru miles of tubing along the surface. During the day the sodium wouldn't be much effective, but at night it'd be great. You'd thus need a large tank of reserve sodium to act as a heat storage device, absorbing excess heat during the day and then distributing it to the radiator at night. (I picked sodium because it's been used on Earth and if we sent a reactor using sodium as the primary coolant we could avoid the need for a heat exchanger to transfer heat to a secondary coolant (water) like we do on Earth.) Would the idea work?