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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: US Intuitive Machines set for second moon landing in February
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2025 13:26:12 +1100
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On 12/01/2025 8:04 am, Jeff Layman wrote:
> On 11/01/2025 13:11, Bill Sloman wrote:
>> On 11/01/2025 7:29 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
>>> On 11/01/2025 04:17, Bill Sloman wrote:
> 
>>> Everything I've read about fusion power states that to start it an
>>> immense amount of power is required.
>>
>> Then you haven't read much. Cold fusion wouldn't take much power at all,
>> if it worked.
> 
> Is that the best you can do? You'll get a reputation for trolling, or 
> perhaps you've got a signed picture of Fleischmann and Pons on your wall.

When I was I was post-doc in the Southampton University Chemistry 
Department  from 1973 to 1975, Fleischmann was the professor of 
electrochemistry. I didn't have anything to do with him, but I knew some 
of his graduate students and post-docs, and Fleischmann clearly wasn't 
any kind of flake.

>>> How are you going to get that power
>>> source to the moon? And if you can do that, why not use that to provide
>>> lunar power needs? Or is it that you're going to do something like
>>> charge a large bank of capacitors from solar cells on the moon? How are
>>> you going to get those capacitors and solar cells to the moon? And so 
>>> on.
>>>
>>> By the way, whoever wrote that abstract didn't bother checking it: "...
>>> from 3He, fusion power can be provided to terrestrial electrical needs
>>> and to interplanetary travel." Did they /really/ mean "terrestrial"
>>> electrical needs? Or did they intend to say "lunar" electrical needs?
>>>
>>> You might also like to consider a couple of comments from
>>> <https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface>:
>>>
>>> "...Gerald Kulcinski at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is another
>>> leading proponent. He has created a small reactor at the Fusion
>>> Technology Institute, but so far it has not been possible to create the
>>> helium fusion reaction with a net power output."
>>>
>>> "Not everyone is in agreement that Helium 3 will produce a safe fusion
>>> solution.
>>
>> We do have an unlimited supply of people willing to express opinions
>> about stuff they known very little about. Some - like Cursitor Doom -
>> seem to search out the most fatuous misinformation they can find and
>> repost that.
>>
>>> In an article entitled "Fears over Factoids" in 2007, the
>>> theoretical physicist Frank Close famously described the concept as
>>> "moonshine"."
>>
>> https://hb11.energy/
>>
>> is perhaps also moonshine, but they do seem to be attracting investors.
>> Boron-hydrogen fusion does have the advantage of not generating
>> neutrons, so the hardware would last a lot longer if they ever got it to
>> work (and the prospects are rather better than they are for cold fusion).
> 
> Perhaps you'd like to predict when /you/ think that fusion energy will 
> become commercially available, and what form it will take. That should 
> be easy enough as you obviously know a lot about fusion energy.

I know quite enough to know that predicting when nuclear fusion will 
become a commercially viable energy source isn't something anybody could 
do at the moment. We do have this nuclear fusion reactor at the centre 
of the solar system, and it is providing all the energy we use, some of 
it captured by plants a few hundred million years ago.

It seems likely that we will eventually find a way of fusing light 
elements locally to serve as a controllable local energy source, and 
people are exploring a lot of possibilities, but predicting if any of 
the ones we are currently looking at will pan out is pure guesswork, and 
it's always possible that somebody will find a new approach which will 
wipe the floor with everybody else.

What is obvious is that it is a promising area in which to look.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney