Lunar Ring or Lunacy?

I am interested in the date of first publication. I fully expected that, after mining the story to an original source, it would be a paper or an article dated 1 April.

I tracked it back to April 2002. However, this appears to not be an April Fools' Day prank, and seems to be getting some traction as viable and constructable. Wow.

The question is "...since the Fukushima nuclear power station disaster, does it merit serious attention?" Well, let me see: "...use robots in constructing a 12 mile-wide, 6,800 mile-long solar panel system on the moon. Microwaves and lasers would beam power directly to Earth." Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

What would possibly go wrong?

Human are tempering the nature too much. Besides, with such solar panels also, hunger for power will not be satisfied. It is ever increasing.

Many things can go wrong.... as other post by Harryburt says, wrong aim, un-intentional or intentional can damage much of the lives and property on earth. Besides, we don't know possible effects of possible scattering or diversion of the microwave beam.

Mounting of so many panels on moon will change the effective albedo of the moon, and it will be too bright for us ... nights may be brighter.... don't know what are the effects of this brightening.

Also, conflicts between countries may start on the matter of ownership of the regions of moon. Mighty will win.

Whenever I see ideas like this, transmitting power from space to earth, I wonder what would happen if the beam were to be mis-aimed, or deliberately aimed at a target other than the receiving station.

In order to be economically feasible, the power density must be high, probably high enough to damage property, kill people, etc.

What happens to the waste heat that is generated once the lunar energy has done its job? Aren't there already enough problems on earth being caused by the rejection of waste heat, such as Climate Change? And what happens when the Moon isn't big enough any more?

Moon big enough? Is the moon size going to change in near future?

The issue is not rejection of waste heat. That is a tiny fraction of the solar energy hitting the planet and being trapped by Green House Gases. (GHG). The bigger issue really is the aiming of the beam from a moving body and when that mechanism eventually fails. Everything fails eventually!

There is not a chance that anything like this could be economically feasible.

Currently I'm working on a solar hot water heater on Mercury....

Hey with that news just started hose company how many feet you need?

I'm not sure, seems I have a melting problem. I'm still in the testing phase but I'll keep you in mind for all my hose needs.

Hey, where on mercury? I am also there, I am designing moving panels, which will always be at twilight zone, where melting problem is not there. I am at evening twilight zone, you may come and meet me at latitude 0

This is old news. I remember this scheme from the computer game Sim City maybe ten years or so back. Steering errors in the earth-bound beam were a problem in the game, with big chunks of your 'city' getting cooked if the beam wandered. The game programmers had the physics about right. I think importing more energy into a planet that already appears to be heating up might be a bad idea. Energy in whatever form seems to turn into heat eventually. Besides, why the moon? Half of every month the solar panels will be in the dark. If you really wanted to do this I'd think a fleet of collectors in geo-synchronous orbit would work better...

The issue is not rejection of waste heat. That is a tiny fraction of the solar energy hitting the planet and being trapped by Green House Gases. (GHG). The bigger issue really is the aiming of the beam from a moving body and when that mechanism eventually fails. Everything fails eventually!

Brillouin Energy Corp. (BEC) is developing Intellectual Property(IP) that represents the ultimate in clean green renewable energy.

Be sure to check out our Phase 2 results paper at

http://www.brillouinenergy.com/Brillouin_Second_Round_Data.pdf

Brillouin Energy Corp. (BEC) has now exceed twice the thermal equivalent energy out as electrical energy fed into the boiler or (2X) under stable controlled operation. BEC expects to far exceed that making the technology a valuable industrial heat source that can dramatically reduced the use of carbon and fission based heat sources (i.e. coal, oil, gas, and existing nuclear). At 10x the technology can generate electricity and at 15x it will fit under the hood of a car for a hybrid electric vehicle with no toxic or green house emissions and virtually unlimited range.

If you know people investing in green energy I would appreciate you forwarding them a link to our website

http://www.BrillouinEnergy.com

The typical 3 points of disbelief are and addressed as follows.

1. Over coming the coulomb barrier

• LENR is a weak interaction and only involves the accumulation of low energy neutrons.

2. No fast neutrons.

• This reaction is due to the accumulation of cold neutrons and Beta decay. Similar to the S process in solar nuclear synthesis which is responsible for the valley of stability in the Chart of Nuclides.

3. No Gamma rays.

• The 4H system is formed well below 1eV and does not change parity or spill with the Beta decay event. With no spin parity change, electric dipole radiation of gamma rays is forbidden and the energy is transferred to the lattice as phonons. (Julian Schwinger)

Based on the Brillouin Energy Corp.(BEC) hypothesis and supporting experiments at Brillouin Energy, LENR is driven by a weak interaction. Any material with a unit cell or molecule able to include hydrogen nuclei and obtain or exceed a Molecular Hamiltonian of 782KeV due to the superposition of phonons (dT < fSec) has the potential to run a Controlled Electron Capture Reaction (CECR) process, providing the system has conduction or valence band electrons available for capture. Peter Hagelstein showed that this is possible starting on page 24 of his article in RLE Progress Report 145. The electron capture event provides a natural reduction in energy of the system instantly removing 782KeV of energy from the unit cell nanoparticle or molecule. That energy represents the removal of a proton from the bounding Coulombic box, an electron, and conversion of energy to mass.

A detailed paper / Hypothesis is available at the links below. It stays within the current (2011) standard model of physics. This reaction involves several steps that require some knowledge in several different disciplines. The first link provides the background necessary. I strongly recommend LISTENing to the power point at
http://www.brilloui nenergy.com/ BE25Tec.PPS at least once before reading the full hypothesis at
http://www.brillouinenergy.com/BrillouinEnergyHypo thesis.pdf

BEC is not the first mover in this field but our technology will grab the market as our technology comes on line. people should Google Rossi Swedish skeptic society for information on the first mover in this field.

In Rossi's reactor the neutrons accumulate in the Ni lattice / nanoparticles, The xms spectra I saw did show some accumulation of some Zn in the system as well. Because Cu is less reactive than the Ni due to the electron shell structure Cu tends to be the main end result of Ni transmutation through the accumulation of neutrons (Google S process). I strongly suspect and the hypothesis predicts that if someone were to use a good Helium detector they would also find 4He coming out of a Rossi system.

Yeah, we saw your ad...twice now.

Guys,

we have been here many years ago with the proposal of a Space Geo stationary solar panel collecting energy from the sun.

OK that part should work,

Next part is to turn energy into electricity and then into microwaves with very effecient magentrons or Klystons.

Then beam the Microwaves to earth at the marvellous frequency of 2450 Mhz was it?

Then erect some microwave antennae , large ones, on this planet , to collect the miicrowaves, and turn the result into DC power. Then distribute it and use as reqd.

As someone else has already said, this has crazy dangers of trying to keep the whole thing in line and in focus without shrivelling up man, animals and plants.

The whole thing was planned out to a tremendous amount of detail way back - 1970 -1980? Eficencies were calculate but the kill ration was rarely mentioned......

If someone has the original paper around - it should be published to warn others!!

Not my favourite concept!!

Sleepy

The concept is technically sound but it'll never happen. There is no way to ensure that only paying customers get to use the power.