During the Constellation years, Marshall worked with the Department of Energy on nuclear-power technology that might one day power a lunar outpost. While Los Alamos and other national labs handled the radioactive material, NASA experts here used heating elements to simulate nuclear fuel and concentrated on the power systems that would generate electricity on the Moon.

That work continues, but it has expanded to encompass another technology goal under the new Obama policy: advanced in-space propulsion. In a nondescript high-bay building, the power-plant team has installed a nuclear-thermal rocket environmental simulator, which flows gaseous hydrogen over heating elements that mimic different nuclear-fuel configurations. The idea is to test the way different materials react with the hydrogen at high temperature and pressure.

Unfortunately, given the mindless apocalyptic hysteria that greets any use of nuclear materials in space nowadays (such as fretting about the MSL rover being a potential “Fukushima in space”…no, really…someone actually wrote that…), it probably won’t be possible to build and use in-space nuclear propulsion until it can actually be done in-space.

I haven’t looked into the abundance of uranium on the moon, but I’m guessing that even if it were as abundant and accessable there as on Earth it would be a while before there is a suitable industrial base to support this use…

(Note that the accompanying photo is not of Marshall but of Michoud, which to my knowledge has no connection to nuclear propulsion programs.)

NOVEMBER 7, 2500:

Seasons formed the rhythm of his work.

The passing seasons themselves formed years, but years were less important in marking the progress he had made. Seasons mattered more to nature, his focus and his purpose, yet sometimes the years intruded into his thoughts. Today, the calendar at the edge of his conscious mind told him it was the five hundredth anniversary of the most significant date in his life. A date more important even than his Uploading, a date which – unappreciated at the time – would change the face of the world itself. The sense memory of a smile colored his electronic thoughts. The seasons can take care of themselves for a few minutes.

Deep under what had once been called Cheyenne Mountain, the disembodied consciousness of Al Gore extended its senses across the world, and saw that it was good.

He had been studying rainforest canopy health in the Amazon basin when the significance of the date penetrated his awareness. The broad-spectrum image from the observation satellite was informative in ways his previous form could never have processed let alone comprehended at a glance, but nostalgia for his flesh-and-blood days moved him to limit his sensors to the human-visible range.  A mottled sea of lush blue-green foliage filled his vision, and a swell of pride surged through his quantum synapses as ancient memories were awakened — had he still possessed lungs, the beauty would have taken his breath away.  Herculean efforts had gone into conserving what little had remained of these rainforests at the midpoint of the 21^st Century and protecting the rainforest’s endangered plants and animals from extinction. Genetic advances in mid-century had allowed the resurrection of many species which had in fact gone extinct in the face of human encroachment and exploitation. High in geosynchronous orbit, his remote eyes zoomed in to a break in the canopy where the Madeira river met the Amazon, and he was rewarded with the sight of Boto dolphins leaping playfully from the swift waters.

Success with the Amazon project had led to further recovery efforts. A polar-orbiting satellite constellation fed him real-time imagery of polar bears frolicking on arctic sea ice – ice which had all but disappeared by the time he was Uploaded to coordinate restoration efforts across the rest of the globe. This view was always his favorite, on those rare occasions when he could take time away from saving the world to actually admire it. Drastic reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide had been followed by a recovery of annual sea ice, and careful management of the new atmospheric composition kept the icepack within the targeted area and thickness limits.

He cycled his attention across his worldwide network of ground sensors and orbital observatories, taking stock of the fruits of his centuries-long labors. Bold light-blue swirls along the coast of Australia and throughout Micronesia attested to the renewed health of coral reefs, and by extension the oceans around them.  Throughout the western Pacific, the green caps and sandy outlines of low-lying islands poked up from the sapphire-blue sea, no longer threatened by sea-level rise. Looking down at Fiji, he felt a nostalgic longing – how nice it would feel to once again enjoy those broad, sandy beaches, to feel the wind in his hair and the sun on his face and the sand beneath his feet. That was no longer possible, hadn’t been for over four and a half centuries, and never would be again. But it was okay, he thought – some sacrifices had to be made to save the planet, and his physical body was the least of the sacrifices that had been required of him.

His work was by no means done, but he saw no harm in a moment’s pride in what he had so far accomplished. All of this, he mused, was based on the foundation of what had saved the polar bears: nearly 500 years of reductions and strict management of atmospheric CO2 levels. With the eradication of carbon-based industries and the changeover to wind and solar, it was possible to bring the Earth back into balance, and keep it within the limits established so long ago by climatologists’ reconstruction of what the environment was like before human industrialization. Those limits had been enshrined in UN conventions and served as the guideposts for his work to this day. Work which might never have come about but for circumstances which had seemed so unfair and unjust at the time. None of the progress he had made in healing the globe would have been accomplished, but for that strange twist of fate in 2000.

Had I won, he thought, the world would surely have lost.

An indicator interrupted his reverie. His power reserves were running low again, something he was prone to more often this time of year – solar generation was already down because of the shortening days, but it had been especially low for several days due to a cloud system parked stubbornly over the region. Once again, he wondered if it had been such a smart idea to dismantle the last of the wind turbines on the nearby plains, but he only had to remind himself of the millions of birds whose lives that action had spared over the past seven decades to confirm the greater wisdom of that decision. He sighed and prepared his systems to hibernate for the evening, so as to conserve what energy remained in his battery networks and flywheel clusters.

His higher cognitive functions began their scheduled shutdown, a strange simulation of drifting off to sleep. As he reflected a few more milliseconds on the triumphs of the past millennium, a profound loneliness crept into his fading awareness, one that always came at those moments when he wished he had someone with whom he could celebrate. He was always certain of the greater wisdom of this decision, too, but it was a loneliness he never anticipated when he concluded saving the world meant exterminating all of humanity.

You’d think that a civilization with the ability to cross interplanetary distances would, when encountering this set of circumstances (humans, on Earth, burning fossil fuels), simply mock us for using such inefficient and diffuse sources of energy, and provide us with matter-conversion cells or zero-point energy modules or something suitably science-fictiony, scoring a tidy profit on the trade.

(What…why would you assume the aliens wouldn’t be capitalists…?)

I’ve only had television service for about a year and a half of the past twelve years, and all three were SD models which could no longer receive broadcast signals, were the signals even capable of reaching my house. Good riddance – I now have a corner of my living room and a sizable chunk of closet space back.

So, I can say with all honesty that Earth Day isn’t a completely dumb idea. This year it actually accomplished something positive.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that these same people are big on “renewable resources”.

“It’s not like you’re gonna give up your whole paycheck, it’s just a few bucks a month [that you're gonna give up]“.

Dude…it’s not your money to take.

[hat tip: WhoSaidYouSaid]

According to Bruce Gagnon, NASA’s upcoming LCROSS “moon bombing” is a test of first-strike space weapons.

No…seriously…he actually believes this.

When the space craft arrives near the moon it will fire a missile, at twice the speed of a bullet, from the spacecraft into the moon’s surface. NASA maintains that the “test” will displace several miles of lunar material in order to find out if water is present on the moon’s surface.

NASA will then have the $511 million mission’s mother satellite circle the moon for at least a year creating a detailed map of the moon’s surface. NASA says the new maps will be crucial for identifying possible landing sites for astronauts in future years as permanent bases are built on the moon for the eventual mining of helium-3. Scientists have long suggested that helium-3 could be used for fusion power back here on Earth and would make the profits of the oil industries pale in comparison.  [emphasis added]

Words fail.

A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away;  but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands  had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town.  — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

With this description of the re-wilding of present day Detroit:

His little Cape Cod is an urban Appalachia of coon dogs and funny smells. The interior paint has the faded sepia tones of an old man’s teeth; the wallpaper is as flaky and dry as an old woman’s hand.

Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots…

“This city is going back to the wild,” he says. “That’s bad for people but that’s good for me. I can catch wild rabbit and pheasant and coon in my backyard.”

Detroit was once home to nearly 2 million people but has shrunk to a population of perhaps less than 900,000. It is estimated that a city the size of San Francisco could fit neatly within its empty lots. As nature abhors a vacuum, wildlife has moved in.

A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown.

And throw in these photoessays from the ruins of the city’s once-thriving downtown for illustration – lots more links at BoingBoing. I disagree emphatically with the BoingBoing commenter who claims that this is the result of ‘hypercapitalism having its vampiric way’ – it was capitalism which built all of these now-ruined buildings and the now-decaying wastelands of Detroit. The ruination came in degrees as Detroit’s industrial giants were increasingly hamstrung by unions and Detroit’s government increasingly fell victim to corruption and identity politics – if there were any vampires preying on “The Twentieth-Century Motor City”, they were from the union hall and the city hall.

As most of you know, just over two years ago, my organization, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, found that the knuckleheaded leader of the global warming alarmism movement, Al Gore, consumes 20 times more electricity in his home than the average American household.

Since Earth Hour was recognized today, Saturday, March 28 from 8:30-9:30pm, I thought I’d see how the hypocritical, fear-mongering former Veep was celebrating at his home.

I pulled up to Al’s house, located in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, at 8:48pm – right in the middle of Earth Hour. I found that the main spotlights that usually illuminate his 9,000 square foot mansion were dark, but several of the lights inside the house were on.

In fact, most of the windows were lit by the familiar blue-ish hue indicating that floor lamps and ceiling fixtures were off, but TV screens and computer monitors were hard at work. (In other words, his house looked the way most houses look about 1:45am when their inhabitants are distractedly watching “Cheaters” or “Chelsea Lately” reruns.)

The kicker, though, were the dozen or so floodlights grandly highlighting several trees and illuminating the driveway entrance of Gore’s mansion.

I shit you not, my friends, the savior of the environment couldn’t be bothered to turn off the gaudy lights that show off his goofy trees…

If you’re unfamiliar, Earth Hour is where socialists and patchouli-dabbing tree-hugging hippies unite to dismiss electricity, fossil fuels and the modern conveniences that allow for historically unrivaled prosperity, longevity, health and quality of life throughout the world.

I guess I’d almost maybe be sort of a little surprised by this, if Drew Johnson hadn’t already revealed how Gore’s mansion consumes twenty times as much energy as the average american home...and even more than that after renovations aimed at improving its energy efficiency paradoxically increased energy usage by more than 10%.

Personally, I think Al Gore is perfectly within his rights to use as much electricity as he likes, so long as he is paying the bills himself…even during “Earth Hour”.  I find this amusing because it illustrates the hypocrisy of the environmentalist elitists like St. Al. I do not know whether or not Gore was personally pushing “Earth Hour”, and it doesn’t really matter – Johnson merely used the occasion to check up on the latest electrical goings-on at the Gore mansion and discovered that, “Earth Hour” or no, Gore’s lights were on, but no one was home.

How long we will be able to freeze our rate depends upon federal and state energy policies.  Many in Congress see a CO2 cap and trade scheme or carbon tax as a lucrative source of potential government revenues, payable by electricity consumers.  Special interests at the state and federal level are pushing to require subsidization of uneconomical and inefficient power sources.

During the first quarter of 2008, we conducted a survey seeking our members’ views on subsidies proposed by lawmakers.  A carbon tax – which would increase energy costs across the board – was opposed by 84% of the questionnaire respondents.  77% opposed a tax to fund energy conservation, and 65% of our members opposed paying for solar subsidies.  They agreed with the Board of Directors that consumers benefitting from lower electric bills after installing a solar array should pay for the system themselves rather than requiring their neighbors – many of whom are already having difficulty paying their bills – to pay for it.

This year, new legislation is being proposed that would promote tiered rate structures.  Such rates would cause the per kWh cost to increase as you use more energy… The purpose of the tiered rates is to impose energy conservation.  However, the effect is to reduce the revenues needed to run the business [ie: the utility company] with the end result being rate increases for everyone.

Our members’ comments clearly indicate they can’t afford higher taxes and they want IREA to keep rates low; also that “rebates” (in fact, subsidies) disproportionally affect the poor and those on fixed incomes.  Since these new proposals – cap and trade, tiered rates, or a carbon tax – would result in trillions of dollars of additional power costs nationwide, devastating our economy and quality of life whil yielding little or no practical benefits, we plan to actively oppose such proposals.

The letter goes on to rally members to help the co-op fight such measures.

Nice to see a company whose business is targeted by environmentalist do-gooders actually fighting back against the directives and non-value-adding costs said do-gooders are trying to impose on them — and us.

I see nothing wrong with “alternative” energy, but I do think it’s wrong to mandate the adoption of alternative energy when the technology is not yet (and may never be) capable of competing with existing sources through equivalent or better reliability, availability, and affordability.  If subsidies are required to make such technology even remotely economical, and if significant, economy-wrecking penalties need to be applied to existing sources of energy to “incentivize” the switch to alternatives, the alternatives are clearly not ready for widespread adoption.

Environmentalists who are sincerely concerned with CO2 emissions and environmental damage from the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and who want to actually make headway against those things, would be taken much more seriously if they endorsed nuclear power – the real alternative energy.  It’s a pity that our local co-op is too small to build a nuclear reactor of its own.