From: utzoo!decvax!cca!REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.space
Title: Power on the Moon
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.3391
Posted: Tue Sep 21 04:18:08 1982
Received: Wed Sep 22 01:50:29 1982

From: Robert Elton Maas 
On the moon there'd be vast areas of uninhabited terrain relatively
near to the nuclear reactor. For example, the reactor could be put
south of the work area instead of in its center, and then the area
south of the reactor could be uninhabited.
The solution to cooling the reactor would then be to pipe liquid
sodium thru miles of tubing along the surface. During the day the
sodium wouldn't be much effective, but at night it'd be great. You'd
thus need a large tank of reserve sodium to act as a heat storage
device, absorbing excess heat during the day and then distributing it
to the radiator at night. (I picked sodium because it's been used on
Earth and if we sent a reactor using sodium as the primary coolant we
could avoid the need for a heat exchanger to transfer heat to a
secondary coolant (water) like we do on Earth.)
Would the idea work?