Yeah thats why I suggested they hadn't even thought of sats and given that helium is now known to be a finite resource her on earth seems to me at least to be rather flippant use of this material.
Is helium a finite resource?
I just know someone will say the universe is full of the stuff but that isn't here at 'ground zero"
Yep it is off interest too that the thorium you mentioned is also a very good 'fuel"source for generating power and we sit on a pile of it here in Oz.
Thorium
Thorium fuel cycle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thorium Fuel for Nuclear Energy » American Scientist
I suppose it still has the usual downsides but IMHO a safer way to go. Having said that I have to assume that there is probably too much tied up in R&D of uranium for it to happen
Actually most Helium is distilled from natural gas. I guess it got trapped there the same way natural gas did.
What would give us a ton of helium would be "dirty" fusion technology, where you fuse deuterium and tritium you get from water and neutron bombardment of Lithium respectively (since that kind of fusion does produce a ton of neutrons you can do that in-house), not the one where you fuse He3 you get from space or it's a catch 22.
For something like that they can easily use hydrogen. When you go beyond 8 km of altitude (the baloons are at more than 10, they are technically in space) there is no more atmosphere to speak of, so it would be pretty inert. No Hindemburg all over again.
Although the stuff has the nasty tendency of escaping through the tiniest holes in the balloon and even through the solid walls of it due to its nature of lightest gas of the universe. So it risks to shorten the life of each balloon.
I have read of some pretty cool reactor designs with thorium, like LTFRs, molten-salt reactors that allow you to skip all the ridiculous things like pressure vessels strong enough to keep water liquid at 400 celsius, and allow to insert easy kill-switches that literally empty the reactor in a passive cooling pool (its core is already molten so...) in case of irrecoverable power failure. This to read more. They are a bit optimistic, but the prototype worked even back then, at the times when it was supposed to be the reactor of a nuclear-powered long-range bomber. Aah... those were good times.Yep it is off interest too that the thorium you mentioned is also a very good 'fuel"source for generating power and we sit on a pile of it here in Oz.
Sadly I think that anything with "nuclear" in the name is going to be too scary to get any acceptance after Fukushima. Besides, uranium had always ever been practical only if the government planned to stockpile nukes (all nuclear reactor "waste" contains a lot of Plutonium, which is pretty useful to make good nukes) and gave funds for this reason.
Now that none is eager to nuke each other over Capitalism Vs Communism there is no more incentive and uranium technology returns to lab-only breeder reactors.
This is VERY interesting. How do they plan on keeping track of the balloons, they move around, so aiming a connection at them may be interrupted by Wind Drift.
Sounds very cool! But not sure how their going to manage all those balloons...
The idea is to have a more or less constant concentration of those balloons, so that when one goes out of range, another is in range and takes over the previous one's job seamlessly. Did you watch the video?
It is mildly inconvenient to pull off at the first time and will likely help the understanding of jet streams, but should work fine after some more tests to get the hang of it.
Quote
