DeepSeaBase

Bioreactor tubes are stackable because biomass production doesn't fall-off as fast as solar productivity does in less light. The fresnel lens just enhances the irradiance for the entire stack of tubes or wherever its target happens to be. Your question gives me an idea though. The Bioreactor module, if was taller, could have walls that fold down when landed that contain mirrors, and the mirrors can shine up to the bottom of a higher stack. In this way the higher stack is illumined from below which if you think of those solar concentrators on the roof, that below target can be hit and funnel light (by mirror probably) into a lower stack. Depends on if it's worth it to stack the modules. For your statement though it was in reference to the amount of tubes that can be packed into a space. You can stack more and have effectively up to 2 or 3x the tubes on a square meter footprint and still not lose too much. The entire 'window' of the module would be the lens.

So my post that is researched and has sources and logical arguments gets downvoted? What's up with that?

TL:DR Your mind will be blown. Bioreactor/diesel blows Solar out of the water. Bioreactor is approximately 5x more efficient than Solar Panels optimized for Mars. WITHOUT additional efficiency modifiers that can be applied to Bioreactors. Same area of flat bioreactor as Solar Farm (50km^2) = power for 277 astronauts. Bioreactor makes rocket fuel (solar panels do not). Bioreactor is modular and can be built on Earth and shipped to Mars. Bioreactor uses in-situ materials, solar panels cannot. Bioreactor recycles all its nutrients/materials. Bioreactor provides numerous other benefits to Astronauts. So my first thread raised a lot of good questions, I want to attempt to answer them properly. The main questions are: How can this be more efficient than solar? How can it be provided for? Nutrients, offworld elements, etc? How can it operate? Basically it comes down to this: is a bioreactor more efficient and practical than a solar farm or some radiogenic method, etc? I say yes for the following reasons. First, why did I retitle this from "biodiesel"? Because I'm not sold on the closed-cycle diesel generator. There is an even better ethanol fuel cell that is a potential power source that uses elements easily extracted from Martian Regolith to act as the catalyst. So first: technologies used. Photobioreactor - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318031436_Photobioreactors_for_the_production_of_microalgae Direct Ethanol Fuel Cell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-ethanol_fuel_cell Or a Closed Cycle Diesel Generator - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-independent_propulsion#Closed-cycle_diesel_engines Measurement of success? Generate power on a better scale than solar at less weight-cost than uranium using in situ materials if possible. K, let's get started. So the photobioreactor comes in many forms but its efficiency comes in its space savings and modular design. The module can be pre-built on Earth and shipped to Mars, an advantage to any set-up requiring more labor-intensive construction. Tubular Serpentine Photobioreactors with linear-fresnel lens solar concentrators will be the probable type of photobioreactor used to accomplish biomass production. Why? Because the linear-fresnel lenses will greatly improve efficiency. Such devices theoretically could be used to enhance solar panels, but the weight of a panel is higher than an empty tube and again, not modular or compact and can't be stacked (unlike bioreactors which can stack). The important part of this is dry mass - an acre of open ponds of algae produces at most about 10 grams of algae per day per m^2 footprint. Comparatively - the photobioreactors without additional equipment (such as the fresnel lens) produce 22 grams per liter per day. Key Facts 20 m^2 = 1 gallon of fuel per day. Fuel can be biodiesel (a methyl ester) or ethanol. fresnel lens increases solar irradiance by 3.5x more than enough to make up for Mars's lower insolation. For simplicity I'll keep to 1 gallon a day of either fuel type per 20 m^2. Therefore the module would be roughly a 5m x 5m module and can be constructed on Earth and shipped ready to operate on Mars. How much energy does 1 gallon produce? Roughly speaking you can get 10 kwh's per gallon of diesel. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Diesel_generator Key Facts Diesel engine produces approximately 10kwh's per gallon of diesel. 2.4 Gallons of fuel per Martian Day per 1kwh stead load. 2.4 Modules or round up to 3 modules fueling a diesel engine. How does this stack-up with the Martian energy requirements? Not sure...so I'll use this as a source: https://planete-mars.com/a-mars-colony-a-tentative-technical-analysis/8/ 90KW per person or 3.75kwh per person. We can get 1 kwh from 2.4 modules so this conveniently works out to 9 modules. Situation so far I did not stack the modules, so we are going with a short footprint of flat modules, with 20m^2 footprints. If the modules are built upward you can greatly reduce this footprint further. Rough calculation are 180 m^2 per astronaut on Mars. Based on others' statements I've seen 50,000m^2 for solar panels quoted for a base of unknown number of astronauts. But... bioreactor modules using closed cycle diesel can provide for 277 astronauts with the equivalent footprint. What about ethanol fuel cells? There are strains of algae that excrete ethanol and other chemical processes can extract ethanol. So how much energy is produced by an ethanol fuel cell? Source: https://energiforskmedia.blob.core.windows.net/media/18529/direct-ethanol-fuel-cells-ethanol-for-our-future-fuel-cells-energiforskrapport-2015-137.pdf Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells produce 6.4 kwh of electricity per liter. Again a gallon is approximately 4 liters, so 1 gallon per day = approximately 1kwh of electricity. The advantage with direct ethanol fuel cells comes from the materials and the lack of complicated oxidizers for closed cycle diesel engines. These Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells use Iron, Nickel and Cobalt for their catalyst and those can be pulled from the Martian Regolith in sufficient quantity if needed to be replaced or repaired. Key Facts: Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells are not much more efficient than the Diesel Generator. In-situ materials. I'd say the ethanol fuel cell therefore could be more advantageous, but its power consideration comes from how much ethanol versus diesel per biomass can be generated. CONCLUSION My conclusion so far is that basically the bioreactor can provide for 277 Astronauts if it were the size of the solar farm. I don't even want to bother explaining all the other benefits of having a bioreactor, and it's a given that all the materials for the bioreactor are recyclable while the bioreactor converts CO2 into O2 which gives you HALF of your return home fuel requirements. Furthermore - the bioreactor can in fact make METHANE. Dare I say...BOOM *mic drop* NOTES: I didn't give the exact figures for Solar panel efficiency, instead I compared solar panel performance on earth to the bioreactor performance on earth and considered it good enough. Since basically the two suffer the same inefficiency problems and wavelength optimizations are possible for both if you consider strains of algae versus materials of solar panels. Source: https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/how-much-electricity

I don't disagree with what you said except for one point. The US is investing a lot less money into space exploration than China is, and China has advantages afforded its government organized space agency where as you noted the US is devolving its space industry. As such, in the Angry Astronaut video, he points out how little Congress financed the Axios Space Station request that NASA did give. So NASA awarded them an amount and Congress said no. China is full steam ahead. So maybe I should ask a question. Must US government invest more?

China is going to beat the pants off private industry and militarize space. They also have orbited a space plane. So they are now on par with US but way beyond SpaceX or Axios or ULA. Found a very interesting video on Chinese capabilities and where they are headed. Am I mistaken? I thought the whole reason US is giving money to private billionaires is because they will provide a better service than NASA did at securing space. But now you're telling me it doesn't matter they are failing? Why are we paying them then? So billionaires can vacation in space?

I think this "Angry Astronaut" guy makes a great point. Can private industry compete against China? China has basically hit the tarmac with full afterburners and they already have achieved more than SpaceX or Axios combined. US private companies like SpaceX have had some significant accomplishments such as their finally successful re-landing of Starship, but I think time has ran out. China already has equal lift capacity to SpaceX and ULA and Arianne, and they are going bigger. And they are going for a unilateral space station approach which has some very interesting speculative militarization aspects.

I agree, sometimes it's hard for enthusiasts or even industry-professionals to separate the complexities of adding "safety" and "assurance" and stagnation. So often times we get pushed onto timeframes that are unrealistic, or expectations that compromise safety and think of that as progress but really we could have done it better had we remained focused. That's an oversimplification. Just before JFK said that h spent 5 minutes detailing the national security risks of allowing Russia to advance rocket technology while the US remains behind, and made the other point that Russia was poised to militarize space unopposed and the US better seize the opportunity of space exploration before that happens. I see an opposite trend. Test flights have increasing frequencies of failures which is a strong indicator of the manufacturing methods employed. What's happening is the mainstreaming of space. The question is can we tolerate the current hazard levels it is at?

I'm pretty sure that since people can now build computers in minecraft, that can run sizeable programs even, that running these programs in the game still constitutes running a program on the hardware running the game. Therefore that host running the game can be hacked in similar principles to how a host can be used to hack the virtual machines it hosts and vice versa. From me, this is a prediction, not an estimation of how it will be pulled off.

At this point I'm just concerned about the immediate claims. They seem a bit far fetched. I suppose that's OK as long as some progress is made but not at the integrity of the mission. If people get jaded because of tall tales that never turn into anything, then eventually it erodes public support.

We're not having this discussion until you admit that you can't have a $23Billion industry ($23Billion as in profit) unless you earn $5million profit from each seat you sell which works out to 4,600 tourists a year. An absurd number to claim possible in next 10 years, and at current accident rates would kill 460 passengers a year. (I detail this in a thread more appropriate for this whole side of the discussion)

An interesting point developed in another thread but because it's not directly related to that thread I'll just ask the question here and see what discussion forms of it. It fascinates me that NASA actually has asked this question in response to the loss of the Columbia. Brief background, Columbia is just one of many missions that had foam insulation come off the tank and break off tiles. Before whoever throws NASA under the bus, they actually ran through a lot of scenarios to evaluate the tiles and see if the Atlantis should be sent or a jury-rigged repair be made. They determined an unplanned spacewalk is a far higher risk than what had been happening. In hindsight this is now called "normalization and deviance". We normalize recurring mistakes that did not reveal themselves to be mistakes because of no consequence until we deviate so far from a standard that a consequence is probable or certain. K -------------------- having set that aside we can get on with the question of space travel. Is it right to think that risk acceptance is built into space travel? Another way of asking: is it reasonable to think we can accept higher amounts of risk to make it more affordable? I think a lot of us who would love to go into space, I'm certainly one of them, say we would accept a higher tolerance of risk, but when that risk rises above a certain threshold would we really? https://www.intechopen.com/books/into-space-a-journey-of-how-humans-adapt-and-live-in-microgravity/the-mortality-of-space-explorers Let me really start to blow your mind. Astronaut deaths are actually quite high. Job related fatalities are in the 10% range. 1 out of 10 Astronauts are killed by being Astronauts, whether that's training accidents or dying in actual spacecraft related incidents. So where does all this stand? My opinion is that space travel is so infrequent that we as people have no clue how dangerous it really is. Airplane crashes: Chance of death 1 in 5,882,352 https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2020/04/07/the-chance-of-dying-in-a-plane-crash-more-than-halved-last-year-according-to-new-research/#:~:text=IATA concluded that the chance,accident with just one fatality. Car crashes: Chance of death 1 in 103 https://valientemott.com/blog/chances-of-dying-in-a-car-crash/#:~:text=According to the National Safety,crash is 1 in 103. Ok, so let's put that into perspective. If we were sending 4,600 tourists into space at current statistics, 460 of them would die in fatal accidents. These statistics are muted by the fact that Apollo 13 did not end in disaster (took a huge amount of effort to pull that off) and Mir didn't kill everyone on board in a docking accident (3 Astronauts), so we are missing 6 probable deaths from the statistics. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm not saying we should halt space travel. I'm saying that there's so little of it that we haven't had exposure to how dangerous it really is. As such, people are grossly underestimating that danger. If car crashes were as fatal as space travel then: 365,690 Americans would die each year from driving their car, or almost as many Americans as died in all of WW2. That put into perspective: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can we afford even higher risk to cheapen space flight further for tourism? Can we afford to be complacent? Can we afford to normalize and deviate from already standard practices when the cost is this high already?

How about you address the fact that to achieve $23Billion in revenue at $5million per seat you need to fly 4,600 seats per year. How about you just focus on that absurd prediction and stop hiding behind some non-technical, non-peer reviewed, opinion paper from a bank? That's all I really want you to acknowledge is how do you think space tourism will achieve that kind of lift capacity?

I agree with Tom Booth. It's fine to present observation, in order to understand what went wrong versus our understanding of 2nd law of Thermodynamics, the problem isn't Tom Booth's observation being "speculation" the problem is the thread failed to achieve discovery of the parameters of the experiment. For instance, I'm not sure what the parameters were. So if the thread were to remain open I'd suggest Tom Booth start from the beginning an enumerate the parameters better so we can all review it in a more meaningful way and get to the bottom of it? It's a curiosity and the question can be better asked: "why is Tom Booth's observation wrong?" We know it has to be because none of us are going to stumble on a jackpot world changing discovery in our garage these days. Too many corporate science/engineer stooges already would have found it on their payrolls.

I did some simple math on their own numbers provided. How much networth does someone need to have enough control over their own finances in order to justify a $5million expense? Most wealthy people have powers of attorney in case of accidents who most likely will declare them insane if they want to spend a sizeable chunk of family or estate wealth on a risky venture. If a family has $25million dollars then dad decides to spend $5million, chances are his heirs have enough money to stop him and declare him mentally incapable. You think 3 children want to split $25million or split $20million? So at what point do rich children not have influence over their family's finances. Most families at that level of wealth put their wealth into corporate entities so those entities are even more subject to stakeholders than someone with just $25million in the bank. So I think anyone can identify a number of roadblocks to people throwing $5million at a tourist venture. So even at $5million a seat you have to be very wealthy to do it. And that means 4,600 seats per year. At 10 passengers, that's almost 2 flights a day. What is the turn around of these rockets? Does it take a month? So you need a rolling stock of 60 reentry vehicles and the staff to do 2 per day? I mean come on man, you give me a source, I have the ability to critique the source. The source seems to have ignored everything that actually exists in favor of some fantasy of "well it could happen." I'm going to stand by the idea that no space company currently has the launch ability to send 4,600 seats into space and even then the price of $5million is so high they probably couldn't find enough people to pay that per year. I think suborbital curier makes the most sense for added revenue stream. Vaccines for instance, medical devices, medical materials. Very high value short lived cargo...

Don't be facetious. $23Billion / $50 million = 460 tourists per year. If you lower the cost from $50 million to $5 million then you get 4,600 tourists per year. These numbers are absurd assumptions. Starship, Blue Origins, etc, none of them propose anything that can conduct 460 seats per year let alone 4,600 seats. This is one of those moments where commonsense says whoever the "reputable source is" got paid by the industry to fluff the numbers because no one is going to check them or hold them accountable.

Challenge economic forecasters with commonsense. I suppose though if you redefine space tourism to "suborbital transport" then you can justify the industry. There's actually a revenue stream unthought of by the reputable source. Organ transport. Highly time sensitive cold-chain dependent medical couriers will favor near-direct suborbital flights for 30minute transit times across the globe rather than long and complicated flight-patterns to get these precious medical materials from source to consumer.

Awesome, I actually did not know this but now I do! Makes me wonder why we didn't just pay ULA to do it any differently? I mean decades ago...now that boat has kind of sailed. If SpaceX can bring the cost down to like ... $40,000 per seat for a meaningful visit (few days, a week?) I'd probably be more supportive of the tourism program myself. Currently I'm probably just miffed that I'm getting older, a lot older, and all the cool stuff to do is being done by rich people who never worked a day in their life. Even the engineers building SpaceX rockets aren't the ones getting space-rides. And they are the reason that space-rides will even exist. Get my drift? I'm very bitter at the idea of corporate effort // private gain. If it takes 400,000 people to send one person into space, then the one person going into space better be the best person, not the richest person.

Almost no death on Everest is investigated. Any death in space will be investigated and by the NTSB in the US if any US citizens are on board, etc? Regardless, that will be very public. And since it'll be the first, and great effort goes into no accidents, it'll also be highly scrutinized. Also, as you mentioned earlier, it is easier to go into space. This is a false perception. It is harder than going to Everest, but Everest gives you a more immediate feedback that tells you that you're in danger. Shortness of breath, hard beating heart, burning legs, all these say "do not continue, turn back." Unfortunately in a rocket system you go from "comfy chair" to "something's wrong, figure it out in 5 seconds and apply the correct procedural fix" within a blink of an eye. So either you compromise the survivability of the mission with "passengers", or you require passengers to know the systems and how to work them...neither choice are good for the tourism industry. Well, we already have, but they are seen as highly competent risk takers who are doing everything they can to achieve the mission. I'm now thanks to this thread fascinated by the idea of how people's perceptions change when someone is just a tourist.

---------------------------------------------------------- That raises a consideration I would have. As a tourist, and as a pilot, I wouldn't want the person next to me to be deadweight. When Challenger exploded, the crew cabin survived At first the g-forces were so strong that they passed out. But, about 200,000 feet above the surface of the ocean, the crew woke-up and the recovery efforts have proven (though the exact details are classified) that the pilots "flew that crew cabin all the way until they hit that ocean." Basically the tried to use what attitude control they did have to try and build enough drag that they could survive impact. They didn't. Not just sad, but terrifying really. I worked a plane crash recovery before, not pretty. Best description is it was like they (the victims) slipped out of their pajamas. When flying, pilots often put vicks vapor rub or similar product in the nose of their air masks because the are taught that as you catch fire the vicks will prevent it from distracting you so you can focus and try to self-rescue. I'm definitely not trying to say we should not explore space, or even encourage tourism. But I am saying that the realities are way different than what some eccentric billionaire blathers about on "Ted Talks". In fact, a good point of risk is that Musk himself is not on any of his flights, even his first tourism flight. The guy, you might say, "know better." So in summary, I think space tourism will fizzle out and is exposed to a dramatic end with an actual accident which then has to become subject to review. And unfortunately, because it isn't government, the review won't be classifiable and the horrifying realities of a crash and especially a rocket accident will be made very vivid. Plane crashes aren't so vivid, and I think an space tourism will try to hide it all the same, but it will enter the public imagination and become pretty restrictive at that point. Not a lot of people want to sign up for a 200,000 foot free fall in a partly flyable crew cabin trying to save their lives. And Astronauts won't want dead weight along for the ride when someone in that seat might be the one to wake up from a G-force induced knock out and be able to bring the craft back under control. I don't want a billionaire flying to space with me because he's rich. I want this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0nbRYIBVDQ None of them would go if they actually had to do the work it takes to get there, is kinda my point.

Maybe: as I struggle to find justifications for my deep sea station proposal I'm getting pretty intimate with what early space explorers must have felt finding reasons to be in space. They found a reason in biotechnology research in microgravity. "Space tourism" sounds cool and I would love to participate, but every space mission has had a very well designed purpose and most of them have centered around biotech. If other extreme-tourism industries are any indicator, space will likely be no different and fall flat in terms of revenue. So my contribution here is that, yes, space exploration will expand at some pace. But I think the direction it is going now will fizzle out, it will continue to be a microgravity environment that expands space exploration. There are plenty of enthusiasts, but how many of them push the furthest limits? Climb the highest mountains? Dive the deepest pressures on mixed gas? Etc. In terms of the last example, 250,000 UK divers by certification, less than 1,000 technical divers (dives on mixed gas) and half of those are for professional reasons i.e. they have a reason to be down there. So, if diving is analogous to space in terms of effort...if not more effort...that should give you some example of the difference between the enthusiast (249,000+ divers) and the really interested (<1,000 divers). I think that's an important distinction because if we are really trying to quantify an industry, that's the reality. Right now the "space tourism" industry is making money off people donating their enthusiasm. If you told a person they had to quit their job, train one and a half years, be able to do 100 pull ups, be able to tolerate 9Gs and stay awake AND perform life saving maneuvers and procedures, and remember them all....most people will just as soon stay home and keep their money. For that reason I think space tourism is a scam and am kind of disappointed governments are encouraging it.

Wow, didn't expect this when I landed on this thread. Too long, didn't read. Read this though, have a question: I don't think we have a russian made rocket supply chain? None of that makes sense. ULA and a few others are American based. Why does the USAF need to give money to someone else to do what ULA is already doing? I side with Ken Fabian who is quoted as saying SpaceX is unrealistic hype. But so is Axios and a few others as evidenced from this quote: Prometheus questions Ken's logic but I rebuttal with: these people are quite ambitious with their hype aren't they? It is more difficult to get to space, and more expensive, than Mount Everest ($45,000) or Challenger Deep ($750,000). Why would space tourism be $23 Billion per year 9 years from now when Mount Everest Tourism isn't even $300 million a year? https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/too-many-tourists/ My napkin math also says that at $50million per seat (that's what I saw for that Ohio billionaire going to ISS in 9months) to reach 23 billion per year means 460 seats per year. There's 52 weeks in a year. We'd have to maintain a population on the ISS of +8 per week being cycled through like a cruise ship just to meet those quotas at current prices. And if you lower the price you'll need even more people. And frankly you're one accident away from killing 10+ scientists/mission specialists and 10+ tourists. 20 people blowing-up in space doesn't sound like good publicity. If you think that's far-fetched: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-06-26-1997177014-story.html#:~:text=The bus-sized craft missed,itself%2C damaging an external radiator. We almost blew-up the Mir with a docking accident. Although one might argue it was intentional to get rid of the American module Spektr lol - I love conspiracy theories. Death in space tourism is inevitable and I don't think anyone has figured out how to handle the PR of that inevitability. Since pretty much only billionaires can go into space, it is inevitable that billionaires will die there in an accident. And that will be a lot of powerful estate money to sue the hell out of you. I'm all for figuring out solutions to problems, but we have to actually recognize the challenges that exist. I feel the space industry no longer recognizes realistic challenges. Ken has done a good job about pointing that out. A last note, internal documents now show that very accurate data warned NASA leadership that the O-rings on Space Shuttle Challenger might rupture and the launch should be delayed. They were administratively overridden for time constraints. So what's the odds that someday SpaceX or Axios or whoever will blow-up the wrong billionaire and that billionaire's survivors will sue the hell out of them for suppressing valid data to avoid a fatal launch accident. At least NASA was untouchable. "For they do not purpose their deaths when they purpose their services." - Shakespeare.

Taking a breather from my thought-experimenting with deep sea stuff. A little background - in Apollo the inertial guidance system was instrumented through what's called the Flight Director Attitude Indicator (FDAI) or 8ball. The FDAI shows your pitch, yaw and with a ring around it, your roll. But you can think of the roll as the axis on which the pitch and yaw translate. Over time the inertial guidance system would deviate and need to be corrected using the optics. Now it is possible to find the deviation over time by simply observing the new roll axis of the FDAI as it shifts off the poles that were at 90 deg yaw. But I haven't been able to confirm that you can find the pitch. The reasons this is important is because a lot of burns need to be retrograde or posigrade (prograde) and to do that you need to know you're actually in those positions. With the FDAI, I know you can find yaw 0 easy enough. Find the axis of rotation and then yaw 90deg off that and you will be at yaw 0. But I'm not sure how to find pitch 0, although intuitively it seems whatever the roll-axis pitch value is is the new 0. So you should in theory be able to correct your FDAI without ever having to use the Guidance Computer and the optics. Useful if your Guidance Computer goes to crap AND you can't radio Huston for telemetry (which is what Apollo 13 did, basically relied on Houston for everything). So now that I'm thinking about again after a long pause, I'm almost certain you can correct for pitch, yaw and roll based entirely from the FDAI, that's super useful and I'll need to test it in simulators. Anyway, being able to do that gets you MOST of the way there. I'm still not sure how to find retrograde or posigrade anywhere in an elliptical transfer orbit. But I think I over-thought the problem. The inertial guidance system should be able to tell you this if I understand its functionality correctly, because 0,0 yaw,pitch should put you at posigrade and 0,180 should put you at retrograde, anywhere in the progression of the orbit, yes? The progression being defined as 0deg - 360deg progress through your orbit. So what I'm asking at this part of the thread is, is that how a functioning guidance system should work? Should your 0,0 always be posigrade no matter the progress in the orbit. If yes, then determining your attitude without a guidance computer is much easier than I originally thought - provided you still have a working inertial guidance system. But if no, then determining your pitch to posigrade/retrograde in your progression of the orbit must be known. I'm not sure yet how to determine what the pitch should be if it isn't supposed to be 0 or 180. -------------------------------------------------------------- To be certain, I'm pretty sure if your roll axis was at 0 pitch and 90 yaw, and your deviated roll axis is now at 30 pitch and 70 yaw, then your corrected prograde would be 30 pitch and 340 yaw. It really should be that simple *IF* the prograde in progression of orbit is ALWAYS 0,0 without deviational error.

If that were the case then the question must be, how much power is in the system to put a load on? The heat sink being the load, to me, just sounds like a roundabout way of converting heat to energy, transmitting that energy somewhere. Thermodynamically that energy must be lost from the system eventually because no system is a perfectly closed system to our universe. This leads me to think that a superconducting heat sink is what we would think of as a "battery." The superconductor is the "load" or between a load and a power source, and is able to hold onto that potential at lengths of time that to us would seem like a battery. Really all it is is that energy waiting for a load to exhaust it into the universe through something like mechanical force and some frictional heat.

The heatsink is the load, I'd imagine. Otherwise it just never hit a threshold where it burned up.

I don't think you can make a bomb out of the device because there is very little energy contained in the system. A bomb has to have more energy contained in the system than the container holds. A bomb often doesn't have a container at all. Dynamite is basically all bomb, the container is just some wrapper to hold the bomb together. When ice expands it will exert some force on the container, the energy in the system is the force required to break the container. As soon as the ice breaks the container the system loses all energy. It doesn't release that energy anywhere, it has no energy. While I am fascinated by these myself, their performance is grossly over-exaggerated. The ice factories in Persia were not actually creating conditions for ice, but rather were exploiting conditions for ice that already existed. They were basically ice caves with some human infrastructure to give them a nudge. There's more energy in a refrigerator today than what Persia was nudging with huge architectural feats to help nature create ice for them.