This is why we need to live in Habitats

Greetings Mike,

Yes and no, you are very right but there is more to it. You need a big
mirror or lots of smaller ones, so in orbit a large single mirror is
easier but the big one is vacuum, you not only have to heat the stuff to
ionise it but it must be too hot to recombine into things you don't
want. Then to have them go into different places you have to have a
strong magnetic field do the separating for you. You send the atoms out
at speed and then the light atoms curve first and the heavy ones last,
so you use mass to put them into different buckets, so to speak. Of
course you don't want let your mass cool down, heating it each day is a
waste so having the sun go away would be very annoying, also having to
track it is a small bother, you don't want to move all your buckets but
if the sun moves fast you have to track your mirror. That said, the best
place for a solar furnace would be at the same place that SOHO occupies
now.

Darren Brown
Canberra Australia

From: Combs, Mike [mailto:mikecombs@...]
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 11:06 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [spacesettlers] Re: This is why we need to live in Habitats

From: victoriatangoman [mailto:tango_dancer@...]

> So, my WAG is that a solar furnace chamber to superheat waste into
> constituent parts will be a simpler technology than typical waste
> remediation processes.

And it could be that the only reason the process is not economically
competitive here on Earth is that here the sun has an annoying habit of
setting every night.

Regards,

Mike Combs

s/S=:HM/A!64330/rand=366431747>

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