Mining He-3 from the Moon
From an email discussion list that I'm on:
"
I've heard a really interesting rumor....it goes like this: There's abundant H3 (Hydrogen3) on the moon. H3 is big-badda-BOOM in terms of kinetic energy, a small amount makes a large explosion. Big Oil misusing it's current position of power within the government to use NASA to explore the moon, certainly cheaper than creating a seperate infrastructure for space exploration. Thus the explanation of ending funding for the Hubble and transferring the funding to seemingly frivolous Lunar Exploration. There are plans to extract the H3 and find a safe way to ship it planetside, so after they've milked all the oil, they can create dependence on yet another difficult-to-extract resource, namely H3.
Mind you, I live surrounded by extremist hippies who have even less idea than I do how possible it is to produce H3 earthside. It seems difficult at best to ship containers of H3 through the atmosphere and land them safely,after all they are basically very large bombs (Hindenburg anyone? and thatwas simple hydrogen).
Still, it's amusing and making the rounds of theBirkenstock-clad drones. Debunk the myth for me!
"
Interesting...
Actually, I believe they mean "Helium 3" or He-3, not Hydrogen 3, see:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_000630.html
All this was discussed a while ago in Mining the Sky, a reasonably decent tract of space exploration evangelism.
I hope we do go to the moon and bring back loads of He-3 and use it to power fusion reactions... (but I hope even more that we can create Friendly AI's and let them transform the universe for the better within the next couple decades, so that the AI's can rapidly handle all the boring helium-digging for us!!)
-- Ben G
posted by Ben @ 2:55 PM
4 Comments:
No, Ben, I'm pretty sure they really mean hydrogen-3, or tritium:
http://toxics.usgs.gov/definitions/tritium.html
"Tritium is the common name for hydrogen-3 (3H), which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Like ordinary hydrogen (1H or hydrogen-1, called protium) and deuterium (2H or hydrogen-2), tritium has a single proton in its nucleus. Unlike ordinary hydrogen, deuterium and tritium have neutrons in their nucleus. Deuterium has one neutron in its nucleus and is stable, while tritium's nucleus contains two neutrons and is unstable." Tritium is why hydrogen bombs are so mean.
Ahem, I read *your* link, and it does say helium-3. (eats crow)
And of course helium does not burn (it is a noble gas, in fact), as the author of the original post was implying.
This idea that mining the Moon may be profitable due to the Helium-3 is an old one. The problem, of course, is that there is no fusion reactor able to use Helium-3 (or any other nuclear fuel) in a viable way. And perhaps there will not be any for a long time. I would indeed think that the first fusion reactors will be based on Deuterium and Tritium simply because a Helium-3 reactor poses a "chicken-and-egg" problem: you have first to have some Helium-3 for doing a lot of experimentation...
Also, it is interesting to stress that the so-called "energy problem" on Earth is largely a political artifact. We have Uranium and Thorium enough to power Earth for millenia even at a rate of energy consumption ten times higher than the current one. However, there is widespread anti-nuclear hysteria among the population and widespread nuclear proliferation paranoia among governments.
Currently, at the rate of which it is being used, there is a supply of uranium 235 to last us for 200 years at most. It is a finite supply.
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