Mercury rising

I was looking at a station radiating 13.1 MW. How would it get that energy, before all that?

Here at 1 AU, photovoltaic powercells are best below 20 kW - like on the ISS. These post-Einstein days we're asked to envision fission for large stations, over 100 kW. According to Lester Del Rey (not Smith pace, er, me): big tanks of mercury would get the job done in between (so the pre-1955-SF lack of photovoltaics isn't as "zeerust" as you'd think).

Recall that Smith's station was at the preceding Venus equilateral so Del Rey's quicksilver there could beat out nuclear up to 200 kW. Also if the station has no nuclear physicist on staff then they may have to default to the mercury plan. Or gallium, at a 1.911 flux.

Why starve a station of nukes? I wouldn't take a space nuclear war seriously. More worrisome to the space legal-department would be energy so cheap it fires unsolicited railguns, even an Orion pulse engine. Action... reaction. Say we leave aside DAY OF THE ROCK. A station with its orbit adjusted to intercept Atíra or to take some Laplacian is now king of that region, so henceforth must be bartered-with.

Now the station has to get the mercury. First up, this element is a pest metal in our post-Potosí age. A series of efficient Starship flights could get this into LEO and then out of here entirely. Of course we don't much want it in LEO either.

Failing that, I was struck by the lack of any Hg on H rocks over here. Proportions seem to vary. The Orgueil rock has the most spotted thus far, at 14 ppm. Orgueil is a carbonaceous chondrite, like Pallas and beyond. I expect that our Sun treats mercury as just another volatile, so S (and H) rocks lose it. Bennu might still have some, buried in there.