From: utzoo!decvax!cca!dietz.usc-cse@UDel-Relay@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.space Title: Power on the Moon Article-I.D.: sri-unix.3372 Posted: Mon Sep 20 17:58:58 1982 Received: Tue Sep 21 10:36:49 1982 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.