(And yes, the relevant Niven essay did come up in comments.)
Two comments I have:
Mind you (James Nicoll will hate me) it might make Lunar He3 a viable energy source, if we can actually get to a working second-generation fusion cycle reactor.
This doesn't seem to help much with Lunar 3He because the big energy cost there is sifting the stuff out of regolith. What it could do is make Uranian 3He accessible. Also doesn't do anything to prevent 2nd generation reactors from using the cleaner Boron 11 reaction.
And I'm going to disallow the movement of radioisotopes through the gates by declaring that it just Doesn't Work™.
Anyone know what happens to cell chemistry if all the radioactive materials are suddenly stripped out? It's not a huge fraction of the total (0.0118 % for K40, iirc, and C14 is measured, again iirc, in parts per trillion) but I wonder if (to be alarmist) having one in ten thousand cells die at the same time might not be noticeable. It seems to me if the no-nuke effect is a sieve and not a barrier [1], then a number of activities become very different because it becomes trivial to remove radioactive materials from the body. That wouldn't fix the damage already done but it would prevent more damage from being done.
One consequence I didn't see mentioned: while this facilitates space exploitation, the fact that rtgs and such cannot be sent in this manner to the other system is going to have an effect.
1: Thus, as someone pointed out, requiring bananas to be sent by ship. Smoke detectors too or at least the Americium in them.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are
2012-04-21 07:05 pm (UTC)
Although, really, teleportation of big things is way less interesting than a molecular-scale version. With that, presuming it's small enough, you can start to externalize people's metabolism. Maybe just in a hospital bed, maybe in a context where eating and excretion are (to those plugged into the, ahem, Food Network) totally optional.