Static & Crosstalk
Dr. E. Thomas Chesworth
A Lunatic Idea
If you believe the Gore-y inconvenient stories coming out of Hollywood, then you believe that we must stop using fossil fuels to avoid global warming. If you've ever been in Taipei or Bangalore, you know it doesn't make a bit of difference what you do ‚ the air there makes Los Angeles smell clean and fresh. We must all quit using oil. And we will because it takes millions of years to make the stuff and only a few score of years to use up all of it that has ever been made. We are going to run out. In the forty-eight, crude oil production has already peaked and is on its way down to Pennzoil levels. The consensus is that oil production has recently peaked in Saudi Arabia too. There may be oil under the Pacific and there is oil in the Arctic and oil shale in the Rockies but it will be used up soon because people in China, India, Brazil and so on are hungry for oil. In fact, the oil is going to be burned in ever increasing amounts till the wells run dry ‚ soon.
What to do? What to do? Ask the politicians who, of course, are lawyers. They know everything. We can all use renewable energy can't we? The answer is inconveniently no. Most renewable energy comes from the Sun. The Sun is used by the corn plant from which we make ethanol (which, by the way, is better drunk than burned). The sun drives the weather ‚ specifically the wind. And the sun evaporates the water that falls as rain and is used to make electricity by those darned dams.
Solar power is limited. At Earth's distance if you intercept it all, you get only one kilowatt per square meter. The sun doesn't shine at night and in the day time clouds and the air itself reflect one-third of the sunshine back into space. If you do the arithmetic you find that you can get no more than a maximum of 300 watts per square meter at the ground. As my old meteorology professor used to say you would have to cover both Ohio and Pennsylvania with solar collectors to meet Pennsylvania's energy needs.
Believe it or not there is a way out. It seems to require that we mine the Moon, so we need to get behind the NASA program to set up a base on the Moon. Forget about Mars ‚ we can do that later. The power source is clean and will last several millenia even if all of us use as much or more energy as an affluent American now uses.
It seems that for a couple of billion years the solar wind has been blowing on the Moon but missing the Earth because we have a magnetic field. The Moon does not. The solar wind is mostly hydrogen but partly tritium (a hydrogen isotope). Since the Moon has no atmosphere to slow the wind down, the atoms arrive at the surface with enough speed to bury themselves in the lunar rocks. This is not a theory ‚ we brought back lunar rocks and they're rich in tritium.
Meanwhile back at the pub, the British were building a hot nuclear fusion machine that works but needs tritium as "fuel". There is very little tritium on Earth so people ignored this nuclear reactor. But then somebody put it all together: We know how to bring Moon rocks to earth and we know how to make energy ‚ lots of clean energy from moon rocks. We are out of the box for a few 1,000 years more and by then we should be able to get tritium from the asteroids.
We will find better and easier ways to do this thing but we don't have to. We know how to do it with the technology we have that works. So next time someone tells you that the U.S. space program money should have been spent to help the poor people, tell them that it was. It may turn out to be the most important thing we did for everyone poor and rich alike in the 20th century.