The 20th Century was the century of Aviation andthe century of Globalization. The next century will be the century ofSpace, and in the next millennium Globalization will explode into thefar reaches of our galaxy. For this I coin the word 'Galaxian', withapologies and due credit to Isaac Asimov.
We will be driven by the need for new energysources. By the year 2050AD we will have run out of all theeconomically recoverable fossil fuels, like oil and natural gas. Westill will have adequate supplies of coal, but only if we are willingto ignore its enviromental consequences. Also we will have run out ofplaces to put the toxic residues of our present nuclear fissionreactors. West Valley NY doesn't want them and neither does Nevada.Worse yet, in 2050AD all the alternate sources of energy, likehydroelectric, wind, wood, tidal, geothermal and solar, will notsupply even 25% of the energy we will need to feed the 10 billionpeople that will populate Earth by that time. We will have no placeto go but nuclear fusion.
Our nuclear fission reactors operate like a slow'A' bomb, splitting heavy plutonium or uranium atoms into smallerelements and giving off power. American and Russian nuclear engineersand physicists have succeeded in slowing down the fission reaction toproduce useful power, like Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl, (a mixedblessing!). Others have accomplished this more successfully. Francegenerates a significant part of its energy requirements from fissionreactors and these have achieved a perfect safety record. Theirreactors are all of the same design and are run by nuclear engineers.We build ours all differently and mostly leave the actual operationof the reactors to technicians. But France still has the same problemthat we do in the disposal of the toxic residues.
We have never succeeded in slowing down ournuclear fusion reactors, at 'H' bomb, fusing light atoms likehydrogen or helium. Our present nuclear fusion reactors areclassified by the methods used to support the nuclear fusionreaction, which takes place at a temperature much hotter than thesurface of the Sun. No material bottle on Earth can hold it. Thereaction must be suspended by either electromagnetic, electrostaticor gravitational (inertial) fields.
The TOKAMAK at Princeton NJ operates by magneticconfinement in a huge 250 ton watercooled electromagnet. Theelectromagnet exquisitely controls and shapes a magnetic field whichphysically supports the reaction. The TOKAMAK has never operatedlonger than a few seconds at a time and now the federal governmenthas withdrawn its support.
With inertial confinement, hundreds offantastically powerful lasers are pointed concentrically at a goldcapsule containing a small amount of hydrogen. The pressure and thetemperature of the capsule are raised to fusion levels and produce aburst of energy. This process must then be repeated, perhaps 100times per second to provide a reasonably continuous flow of power.Two such reactors exist in the USA, one in Rochester NY and one inLivermore CA. Neither has ever approached 'break-even' in powergeneration.
With electrostatic confinement (remember pickingup paper scraps with a comb which you charged by drawing it throughyour hair?) the reaction is confined in a 3 ft., 1000 lb. spherical,vacuum-sealed cage with a very strong electrostatic field inside it.Ions of helium-3 (He-3) are dropped into the cage and fall through a'polywell' into the electric field where they oscillate backwards andforward at increasing speed until two He-3 ions collide, fusing intoa He-4 ion. Two protons are left over from this collision, which comeoff at a half-million volts of DC electricity which can be directlyconnected to our existing high-voltage power distributiongrids.
Nearly all of our existing power sources aregenerators which use a heat cycle. This includes our coal, oil, andgas fired utilities, our automobiles, trucks, and trains, and evenour nuclear fission utility power plants. All are 'heat engines' andthus are confined to a theoretical efficiency of about 40%. Did youknow that when you buy a gallon of gas that over 60% of the energyyou pay for goes out the radiator in the form of waste heat? In factthat's why you have a radiator in your car in the first place. Thisis a basic law of physics and there is absolutely nothing you can doabout it. This is also why our fossil-fueled power utility plants arebuilt by rivers.
But He-3 nuclear fusion reactors are NOT heatengines. They generate electricity directly and are not limited bythe 'Carnot cycle' efficiency.
More importantly, The He-3 nuclear fusion reactordoesn't generate carbon dioxide or any of the other 'greenhouse'gasses. By going to future global He-3 power generation, we can wipeout global warming in one fell swoop! Of course, we will still havethe global warming of volcanoes and forest fires, but most scientistsagree that it is the excess produced by civilization that is doingthe damage.
Enough said!
The beauty of this reaction is that the fuel(He-3) is non-radioactive, the process producs no residualradioactivity, and the residue (He-4) is non-radioactive. In fact,the residue, He-4, is what we put in kids' balloons. Thus, He-3 isthe perfect fuel!
Does this sound too good to be true? Yes, thereare a couple of caveats. The first is that the reaction takes placeat a temperature much hotter than the surface of the Sun. But weengineers can handle that. The other is that there is practically noHe-3 on Earth! But I tell my engineering students that these are justminor engineering challenges.
He-3 comes to us from the Sun in an ionized formon the solar wind. The ions hit the Earth's magnetic field and getdiverted away. They cannot land on Earth, so they drift around andeventually land on the Moon. They have been landing there for fourbillion years. There is more He-3 energy on the Moon than we haveever had in the form of fossil fuels on Earth. All we have to do isto go there and get it.
There is a tiny bit of He-3 deep in the Earth,from when the Earth was first formed. It comes up to the Earth'ssurface as a tiny percentage of natural gas. There is a smalladditional supply of He-3 in our old nuclear bombs in the form ofradioactive tritium gas (H-3), which decays into, of all things, He-3in about 13 years (half-life). Thus, we have enough He-3 here onEarth to build one big earth-bound reactor and one small orbitingreactor. Then we must go to the Moon! My friend and colleague Dr.Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at theUniversity of Wisconsin in Madison WI presently has a reactor runningon deuterium-helium, and expects to demonstrate the helium-heliumreaction in a few years. We in Buffalo are trying to help him. Foryears he has operated on a budget of only $35,000 a year; enough forone graduate student. I have long felt that an investment by theDepartment of Energy (DOE) of a million dollars a year for the nextthirty years would pay a higher return than any other investment thiscountry could ever make.
Most of what I have said here, so far is either'le fait accompli', a done deal, or something reasonably achievablewith present technology. But now let me dream a little:
He-3 on the Moon is contained in an ore calledilmenite (iron titanate), which contains titanium dioxide. He-3 comesadsorbed on the titanium dioxide. The ilmenite must be scraped offthe Moon surface and refined to obtain the titanium dioxide. Thiswill produce by-products of water, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and otherelements needed to make the manned Moon-colonyself-sustaining.
Having little atmosphere or gravity, theMoon-colony could then be an ideal space station from which to blastoff for the stars.
The recovered titanium dioxide would then beplaced under a large transparent plastic hood and held there twoweeks, until the Moon rotated around towards the Sun. It will becomevery hot under the hood and boil off the He-3. Then we would wait twoweeks until the Moon rotates around away from the Sun. This wouldresult in very cold temperatures under the hood which would go a longway toward liquefying the He-3. Aerospace scientist Robert Zubrinestimates that the lunar temperature 'in the shade' of lunar cratersis as low as -230 degrees Celsius. A single shuttle load (25 tons) ofHe-3 brought back from the Moon would supply all of the energy needsof the USA for a year.
The cost of the He-3, including the shuttle, theMoon colony, and the ilmenite refinery, amortized over a suitablenumber of decades, has been calculated to be an equivalent oil costof about $8 per equivalent barrel of oil. We now pay about $22 (inearly 2000AD)! The whole project is not only technically feasible, itis economically feasible. In fact, in the opinion of many, includingthis writer, it is inevitable. There is no reasonable alternative.But if we want to get there by 2050AD, we had better startNOW!
Another thought on the space station on theMoon:
Rocket scientists agree that we have about reachedthe limit of our ability to travel in space using chemical rockets.To achieve anything near the speed of light we will need a new energysource and a new propellant. Nuclear fission is not an option forgalactic travel, but nuclear fusion of light elements like hydrogenor helium would permit approaching the speed of light. To thispragmatic engineer it seems very attractive to refuel your spaceships where the fuel is, rather than transporting the fuel to a(Russian?) space station.
History has repeatedly shown that when a newmethod or material becomes available, new uses for it arise. He-3 isno exception. In only the last few months reports have emerged fromThomas Daniel at the University of Virginia Health center and fromother sources, of the use of He-3 to greatly augment the utility ofthe Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) procedure in visualizing lunglesions. The patient breathes a few breaths of He-3 which has beensuper-polarized by laser irradiation as he breathes it. The gas holdsthis polarization for a few seconds and the resulting polar responseis many times more effective than that of the normal water responsethat the MRI usually sees. This permits visualization of lung lesionsdown to a resolution of 1 mm. When gasses are 'hyperpolarized', itmeans a large quantity of the atomic nuclei's 'spin' - a magneticproperty of quantum particles - point in the same direction. Thehyperpolarized gasses provide an MRI signal that is about 100,000times stronger than the signal produced by water, the substance thatis normally visualized by MRI scans, according to Dr.Daniel.
Physicists Gordon Cates and William Happer atPrinceton University, along with Mitchell Albert of Brigham andWomens' Hospital in Boston are primarily credited with the idea ofusing polarized gasses for medical imaging.
Unfortunately the present cost of the He-3 (about$400/litre) rules it out for routine clinical use and much effort isgoing into trying to use the less effective, but cheaper, xenon gasfor the purpose. Certainly the availability of reasonably priced He-3would encourage more research into other possible uses.
So, the challenge of the Moon is clear. Therewards are manifest. But, who should do it?
Only one nation has the equipment, the know-howand the need for energy to drive this idea forward. That nation isobviously the USA. And we must do it alone. This is no job for a UNcommittee. It needs the same kind of unwavering dedication and thekinds of people that got us the first nuclear submarine and the firstman on the moon. We need the kind of leadership exemplified byPresident Kennedy who ignored the negatives relating to a'man-on-the-moon' and convinced us to 'just do it!' But we must do itas good stewards, aggressively (but not forcefully) exerting controlover the moon. We can best do this by going there. We are the onlynation that has the capability to do it. However we must exert ourstewardship in a generous and altruistic way, making the completedfacilities available to all comers, especially including the have-notnations, on an equitable basis compatible with their economies. Also,we must do it soon, while we still have the technological lead toaccomplish it, and while the energy shortage is not yet so severe asto encourage terrorist elements (and even our friends) to takeextreme steps to block us. Our objective must be, not only toalleviate our own energy needs, but also a strong altruism thatrecognizes that helping to alleviate the world's needs would deterthem from extreme and desperate acts if they find themselves with theimmediate prospect of NO energy. In the coming millennium we must getused to evaluating national and business (and Galaxial) options on a100 year basis, rather than on a quarterly basis. Our survivaldemands no less. Procrastination on this item will proveprohibitively expensive in the long run.
It is clear that the nation that assumesstewardship of the Moon now will inherit stewardship of the galaxy inthe coming millennium. I think the USA is ready for that challenge! Iknow I am.
Copyright C 2000 by Wilson Greatbatch.
About the author:
Wilson Greatbatch is an American Academician, alongtime member of the USA National Academy of Engineering. At 81years of age, he has been granted over 200 patents and is theinventor of the implantable cardiac pacemaker. He was named 'Man ofthe Millennium' by 'Living Prime Time' magazine. He has been electedto Fellow Grade in nine technical societies, has been inducted intothree 'Halls of Fame' and was awarded the National Medal ofTechnology by President Bush in 1986. He is a decorated veteran ofW.W.II, having served as a rear gunner in dive bombers flying off ouraircraft carriers in the South Pacific. He prides himself on being amember of Tom Brockaw's 'The Greatest Generation'.
Between speaking to 4th grade elementary schoolclasses and lobbying vociferously before Congress about the PatentLaws, Wilson Greatbatch lives in Clarence NY in a 150 year old formerone-room brick schoolhouse with Eleanor, his wife of 55years.