Orbital Power Grid

Ever since the advent of communications and navigation via satellite, there was always a demand for more and higher quality satellites to service the new systems. Thanks to the large bulk of most commercial satellites and the high cost of launching payload into orbit, currently around 3,000 USD per pound for a small rocket, the satellite industry in general has barely grown since its inception. In an economy plagued by speculation and lack of consumer demand, there are always telecommunications companies, oil and mineral companies, military organizations, and even third-world countries seeking a chance to put their own platform into space, and the industry of making that task easier could be quite a lucrative one indeed.

If we take a closer look at today's satellite systems, every continuously functioning satellite in orbit uses large solar power cells that can sometimes account for up to half of the mass and/or volume of the satellite which they power, if only there was a readily available power source out there in orbit, then future launches will only have to send up the core components absolutely critical to a satellites function, reducing the bulk and weight of the launch payload and making the process a simple matter of designing the most compact and efficient transmitter/receivers, taking the concern of power generation and management off the list of engineering worries.

Although setting up a commercially viable power grid in space seems a daunting task of astronomical proportions, I believe it is quite possible given that the earth acts like a giant magnet in space. Given this fact, our orbital power grid does not even need generators, all it really needs is a large web of conducting cables connected by transformer pylons. Cables of a strong and conductive metal alloy stretched over a long distance and quickly rotating around a magnet that is our earth effectively acts as a huge DC current generator, and the resulting power is then converted and redirected to functioning satellites at key pylon satellites which by their paths of orbit keep the cables taunt.

An advantage of this system is that all an incoming satellite needs to do is to reach very low earth orbit, connect itself to a pylon via cable, and then drag itself along the cable to a higher orbit. With this in mind, not only now would we need to send up less material, we also don't have to send it up as high. These factors working together should make it possible for even small companies to send up their own private communications satellites.

Dyson Sphere, Take II

A long long time ago some genius physicist by the name of Dyson predicted that as technology evolved and population grew, the only way to meet an advanced civilizations energy demands is to build a massive superstructure that would completely enclose the sun, capturing most of its energy for our use. Simple mathematics will reveal that such a massive undertaking is simply impossible because the amount of matter required to construct such a large structure simply does not exist within our solar system. This mathematical argument convinced me for a short while, but then an alternate solution presented itself.
The sun emits so much energy across so broad a spectrum that if we only captured a small spectrum of its emission, the energy gained would still be significant. While the Dyson sphere will capture all of the sun's rays, it would be possible to capture only the ionized energy by projecting via magnetic containment several panels of plasma-state gasses with distinct focal points on generators. While most of the visual light from the sun will pass through the plasma, ionized particles will be reflected to energize a generator. The same particles that power our auroras will then be shoved onto conductors where their excess electrons energize the circuits projecting the plasma barrier, and excess energy is shipped off elsewhere for consumption.
The concept is still a far ways off, but its a lot closer to reality than the massive Dyson sphere. The technology to contain plasma already exists, as with the ability to produce electricity when given a supply of ions.

Barometric energy generator

This is just a crazy concept for renewable energy that i came across, I'm not saying that it will work, I'm saying it could work.

Basically, this is a scheme of sorts to generate energy by abusing the pressure differences on this planet. What we need is a decently deep body of water and a gas medium preferably denser than water. A flexible "bag" of gas is dropped from a factory down a pipeline into the depths, where the gas becomes pressurized. A simple mechanism at the bottom of the lake transfers the gas from the flexible container to a rigid one. The rigid container is large and takes several bags to fill, once it becomes filled to capacity with pressurized air, it is brought up to a surface generation plant where the pressurized gas is either packaged and sold or used to power gas turbines for power.

High Efficiency Launch Unit

There has been a lot of recent talk in regards to the development of space beyond earth's mesosphere, several plans have been proposed by the scientific community and the most popular, or rather, the most debated plans are the deployment of a system of space based solar power plants, a plan to send mining missions to the moon for Helium-3 ore, and the time tested space based ballistic missile defense plan.

As absurd as some of these plans sound, there is merit, or the public believes there to be merit in all of them. We've all seen the James Bond movie where the bad guy puts a giant mirror into space and beams down the suns energy by reflecting and concentrating it. NASA has recently smashed a probe into the moon to create a cloud of lunar dust for analysts, a stunt which revealed that the moon does indeed have deposits of potentially valuable Helium 3 ore, and the United States have been dreaming of a "Star Wars" orbital missile defense system since the cold war.

The reason that these plans are not already becoming reality is not that they will bring no benefit, but the sheer economical cost alone to implement them far outweighs the results. All 3 plans call for large amounts of material to be launched into space, and the most efficent launch rockets we have right now costs about $5,000 per POUND of payload. This means that a mining probe, a solar panel, or a laser would cost millions to launch apiece, and even if we get a significant amount of these things into orbit, we still need to send stuff up, most likely human astronauts (which are very prone to dying), to repair and resupply them.

The scientific community has some good stuff going with the whole development of space thing, but what it needs to do is to take a step back and realize that before we can build castles in the sky, we have to get our feet off the ground. The absurd amounts of funding going towards prototype defense satellites and mining probes are much better used to develop new launch vehicles, some of which I hope to propose in later articles.

The Lost Oil

Oil, the most precious energy resource since the advent of the internal combustion engine, the lifeblood of nearly all of mankind's creations. Prospectors have searched for the last century for this black gold, and after having turned over every last inch of land on this planet in search of it. Now, after every rock has been turned, we fail to find new reserves and this limit has caused a wave of terror in the commodities market since the last decade. Prices of oil are rising, and with it, the price of nearly every other commodity, but is this planet really running out of oil?

To realize the full implications of that statement, one has to realize that only 30% of the earth's surface is land, the other 70% water, meaning that if the concentration of resources is the same on land as under water, there lies more than twice our current assessable reserves of oil and metals under the ocean.

We have only recently developed the technology to develop and extract resourcess from the ocean floor, and by recently I mean think back about 2 years, Gulf of Mexico, BP oil spill. Sure, the whole event was an embarrassment, but the fact that one poorly laid out oil well could leak enough oil to cloud up the entire gulf of Mexico literally speaks volumes about how much oil is out there, under the waves. For those who like hard statics over comparative imagery, a very gloomy estimate puts the worlds oceanic oil reserves at at least 30 trillion barrels, 800 billions of which are within the shores of America, compare that to the 1.4 billion barrels tucked away in Siberia.

The good news dont even end there, there are far more frequent and violent seismic activity occurring under the waves than on land, and while this is a good thing for us humans who live on land, its a great thing for underwater mineral reserves. In the Pacific "Ring of Fire" alone, where several tectonic plates come together to grind under each other, millions of tonnes of iron, nickel, copper, and even gold are being brought near the surface and deposited on the ocean-floor. There are already companies such as Nautilus who are expressing interest in these reserves which could very well hold enough metals to run the world for another century.

As mush as prices are rising, this planet is not going to run out of the black stuff any time soon. There wont be wars over petroleum or any other resource, just a lot of red tape about who gets to develop what, and speaking of red tape, my next post is going to cover one UN treaty that just so happens to get in the way of the development

Solar Farming

Ever since the use of fossil fuels raised enough worries to begin a quest for a renewable energy source, sunlight has been one of the most sought after methods of power generation. From this quest to harness the sun mankind has created inefficient, but workable solar cells that convert light into electricity, along with monterous fusion reactors in an attempt to make our own "sun in a bottle". Despite these inventions, I'd say that without a significant breakthrough in either of these alternatives, we wont be able to power anything other than individual households even if they are implicated into our power grids en mass.

Fusion reactors are promising, so I wont shoot that idea down, but why did we go through all the hassle of creating chemical substances that react with light to give off electrical energy when a much more complex but very well engineered natural substance does pretty much the same?

Chlorophyll in plants convert sunlight into ATP and then from that, glucose. Its been around since the dawn of life on the planet, and, creation or evolution, it works at an efficiency much higher than machines. The only reason that we haven't been able to use it for fuel purposes is that the plant does not see the need to excrete fuel, only to grow and reproduce. Of the energy generated by a plant, a massive amount goes into growing its supporting structures, extracting nutrients from the soil and manufacturing chemicals used to reproduce, only a small amount by comparison is turned into stored sugar, which is of interest to us. What should be done is to engineer a simple plant cell that will at first take nutrients from its surrounding and divide for a set amount of cycles, then begin to grow massive amounts of chlorophyll and store large amounts of sugar, at a chemical que, the stored sugar is released into its surroundings, which would later be collected.

An outdoor pool given sufficient nutrients and a sterile environment could easily house millions of such cells. Given if one cell could produce but one gram of sugar per day, the energy yield of such a pool will be much larger than if it was covered with conventional solar cells, artificially engineered enzymes and chemical cycles could be implanted onto the cells and speed up production, the whole process is very skin to a nuclear one in the sense that the energy created by one reaction is very little, but the number of reactions make the total substantial.

U238 (depleted uranium) reactor

Depleted Uranium, its heavy, its hard to dispose of, it makes good armor piercing shells, and we have piles of it sitting around from nuclear reactors and mines waiting to be processed. Despite us having so much of the stuff, the fact that it is unsuitable for use as weapons grade fissile material resultes in research into its potential limited to it being incorperated into anti-tank rounds, and the fact that this stuff has the potential to power a reactor seems to have slipped the scientific community until now.
A reactor burning depleted uranium cannot produce any weapons grade material, we can just build one and shove it over to Iran and say "look, this stuff burns cheaper fuel, gives more power, has almost no risk of a catastropic meltdown no matter how incompetent your operators are, and is way better in every respect except that you cant make a bomb with it. If your nuclear intentions are peaceful, replace your reactors with this."
As for the reactor design itself, there is already one being looked into called a traveling wave reactor which will use enriched uranium to start a self sustaining reaction in a field of depleted uranium using neutrons released from the enriched reaction to enrich/destabalize the surrounding depleted uranium in order to keep the reaction going. Once fueled, such a reactor could run for decades before the entire field of depleted uranium is brunt, and its output will only increase unless checked for the "burning front" will increase in legnth as the reaction spreads. Despite the increased output, the fuel starts out unsutable for weapons and never actually gets close to a critical mass except when the reaction is first started, so although the risks of a meltdown are there if some idiot turned off the cooling system, the chances of the reactor turning into a bomb are slight.
Another design I was going to propose was slightly more complex and involves a series of faceleted and interconnected chamebers lined with depleted uranium, one central chanber will have a small neutron fuse like the ones used in bombs, but neutrons from the fuse will not be focused onto one point like in bombs but released to bounce along the chamber whose geometrical design allows the escape of neutrons into a similar neighboring chamber. The neutrons arnt actually "bouncing", rather, they are exciting and causing fissile reactions whenever they hit the sides of a chamber, causing more neutrons to be released.

Nuclear Powered Flight and its Practicality

Ever since the world entered the atomic age predictions were made that one day just about everything would become nuclear powered. Today, the world sees wonders such as nuclear powered aircraft carriers and many other naval engineering marvels.

Despite all that, there has yet to be any sort of nuclear powered devices on land, and for good reasons. Any military vehicle to be powered by nuclear power will require huge amounts of shielding and armor around the reactor to make a possible tank capable to withstanding damage. The raw power of a nuclear reactor could not be directed for offensive purposes unless such a vehicle carries a large arsenal of conventional or a very bulky directed energy weapon. And at the end of all this, the speed of such a thing is limited due to the huge amount of weight it has to carry, making it out of place in a modern battlefield where speed is key. For civilian uses, conventional power is simply much cheaper and much more reliable, not to mention much more safe. The thought of a literal thermonuclear train wreck alone should discourage the use of nuclear power on land for transport.

But in the skies, I believe, lies a different future for the fruits of the Manhattan Project.

Say we built the smallest safe reactor the modern world could build, and around it built a engine which takes magnetized or electrically charged conventional fuel pellets, accelerated them into the combustion chamber of a normal ramjet engine, and pressurized even further the combustion chamber itself with intense magnetic fields powered by a small nuclear reactor. Such a hybrid jet engine, even if it can only provide the thrust of a normal rocket motor, would use up much less fuel compared to a liquid fueled rocket and would be able to lift a relatively large fixed wing aircraft and accelerate it to immense speed.

At this point, assuming such a device is capable of flight, one could argue that all we have created is a very large and bulky target practice drone which can be seen by even the most primitive of radar, and shot down by even more primitive weapons. Even if we stealth-coated such a beast, which would no doubt be several times larger than most aircraft due to the sheer bulk of a nuclear reactor, this aircraft would not be maneuverable enough even for commercial use as a cargo plane, assuming it is even capable of taking on cargo.

Well, once such an aircraft gets off the ground, I would like to remind everyone that there is no speed limit in the skies. Using the same electromagnet-boosted engines we continue to accelerate the aircraft past the efficient speeds of conventional aircraft, and eventually reach a speed where the plane is constantly falling towards the horizon, or extreme low earth orbit. At this point, the engines can be shut off, and the plane is essentially invulnerable from surface threats as it would be moving so fast relative to the ground that no weapons system could react to it. From this immense speed, one could observe, command, and even fire ordnance onto virtually the entire globe without fear of retaliation.

Containment

A few days ago I found myself looking at the mess which Japan has created for the world to clean up, and I approached the broken containment vessels and runaway fission reactions just like any other problem. But after a few days of thought and moderate research I will now say with reasonable confidence that at this point, all we can do is cut our losses.

There is no way that any uranium or plutonium (the latter of the two is not even supposed to be in the reactors in the first place) that was released into the environment can be cleaned up, and there is also no way of stopping the leakage of additional radiation.

Why? What you are trying to do in cleaning up radiation is to find every individual granule of uranium out in the environment, a task which at best is comparable to sorting out a handful of sugar spread out in a beach full of sand. Stopping the leakage is also impossible due to the same issue, there is no way to stop something as small as individual molecules from escaping such a large area.

So what should we do? Well, nothing is certainly not the answer, and nothing is what the Japanese seems to be doing.

If we want to be humane, I would say to open a chute into the now broken containment vessels, and dump tons and tons of sand mixed with cadmium and graphite shavings. Not only do you provide a heat sink, you also absorb neutron radiation from decaying fuel, slowing down the rate of decay and preventing the reactor from turning into a nuke.

But if we want to be practical, find some patriot ready to die for country and ask the poor chap to go in, grab the fuel rods, encase the molten pile of radioactive shit in concrete and dump the mess into the ocean.

Thermite Reactor

So earlier on I designed a weapon that incorporates thermite, and mom's not too happy about my destructive nature. So here is a reactor that generates lots of power with the same concept, the power from which can be used to power cities or weapons to defend/destroy cities, that outta make the world a little happier...

It is a grim fact that we are running out of fossil fuels, big deal. As long as there is demand for power, we can always switch to something even more powerful and damaging to the environment, as long as its cheap...
The core of the earth is made almost entirely out of iron and about 35% of earth's mass is entirely iron, so no risk of iron, the metal which burns in thermite reactions, from running out. The other ingredient for a termite reaction is alumnium, which is 8.1% of the earth's crust, and so we also have plenty of that ingredient. Although it is expensive to extract and purify, for something as crude as a burning reaction we dont need it to even resembol a metal.
Instead of burning fossil fuels or using nuclear fuel to heat a vat of water, sustain a thermite reaction in the center of the coolant vat (water) by accelerating chunks of iron rust and aluminum into an already started thermite reaction, creating a little thermite "sun" in a vat of coolant(water). Thermite burns at like 3,000 C, and its also self-oxidizing, so the water wont snuff it out, it will absorb heat with more effiency than other reactors. By skipping the contaminated to uncontaminated coolant stage in nuclear reactiors, and the metal container keeping the water from the fire in conventional generators, power is transferred with almost 100% efficiency from heat source to water, because the heat source is in the water. Water exposed to 3,000 degrees will obviously vaporize into steam, and that will be directed up a tower through a bunch of gas based turbines, and instead of going directly back down, it will be collected in an condensing tank at the top of the tower. Condensed water will drop down through the tower, powering yet another set of fluid based turbines on their way back down to the reaction chamber, only to be vaporized again there and set off on another ride through both sets of turbines and so on and so on. On the way up, some steam is siphoned off to push powdered fuels into the chamber. Any solid reactor waste is collected in a fine mesh net below the reaction in the water, and removed and replaced remotely without stopping the reactor.
The only problem I can find while writing this thing is that to mine the fuels needed will actually require more energy than the energy generated, seeing as how purifying iron(not really, seeing as how we want iron trioxide, which is common iron rust) and aluminum(which is really hard) are challenges in and of themselves. But this problem is softened seeing as how we don't need the fuels 100% pure, just like coal. The bad stuff that wont burn will bet caught up in the mesh nets and filters, so there are problems, but they can be solved.

River Resupply

Apparently nature cannot keep up with the rate of mankind's natural abuses, so on several occasions, mankind has had to help nature with mankind's abuses. The main problem that I will now address is the fact that our rivers are losing their freshwater sources, and should they dry out, which they will, it will be much harder to bring freshwater into cities that used to have the river as its water supply. So I propose, that at the base of a dying river, we place a giant water treatment plant whose sole purpose is to convert the water in the river into hydrogen and oxygen by means of electric current. The hydrogen gas released will have a naturally high potential energy, due to its light weight. The hydrogen will be fed along a pipeline at the bed of the river back up the river floating from a lower elevation to a slightly higher one. Once the gasses reach the top, they will be burned in a large and extremely tough container such as a natural cave, and the resulting water fed back into the river. To cover expenses, pure water can be diverted and sold and the river dammed to produce both revenue for upkeep and electricity for hydrogen generation.