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.