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Mine The Moon For Helium-3
Rob Kennedy writes "A story at The Daily Cardinal is reporting that UW-Madison researchers are looking to mine the moon for helium-3 as an energy source, which supposedly would yield about 1000 times more energy per pound than coal. Although there are several hurdles that would need to be cleared, The Associated Press mentions one catch in particular: 'The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in.' Indeed. SciScoop has a more in-depth discussion of the prospect."
Wow. Here's a space.com article from three and a half years ago on the same subject.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Well, we're still working on getting a net-gain fusion reaction going with deuterium and tritium, which is a considerably easier fusion reaction to start than deuterium and Helium-3. The advantage with the D-He3 reaction is that it is theoretically aneutronic, but in any D-He3 fusion-capable environment you're going to have enough D-D fusion to have to worry about neutrons anyway...
Relevant quote for the lazy:
In fairness to the president, I did a little research and found the microscopic grain of truth in what he was saying. It turns out that there is, indeed, an abundant quantity of something called helium-3 just under the surface of the moon. Forget for a second that we still lack the technology to use helium-3 for anything except making your voice sound really high and squeaky. Thanks to nuclear fusion, helium-3 will someday be that long-envisioned clean-burning, limitless energy supply.
Problem is, the Earth is actually running out of helium. I could tell you why we're running out of helium, but you probably already believe that it's all Bill Clinton's fault, so I won't bother changing your mind. The fact is, we're running out of helium...fast. How fast? Let's put it this way, by the year 2104, the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade is going to suck.
But the moon has so much helium-3 that it practically floats. Scientists estimate that the million tons of helium-3 on the moon could provide enough energy to power the Earth for thousands of years (or 28 Hummer-driving soccer moms for three weeks). Of course, these estimates depend on which scientists are making the estimates--the ones who predicted we'd all be living in a utopia of perfectly fitting unitards or the ones who've crashed two space shuttles in 17 years.
Please help metamoderate.
Ordinary Helium is Helium-4 (two neutrons, two protons), Helium-3 is a lighter isotope with one less neutron. So no Helium-1 or Helium-2 :-)
If just the US can run on "one space shuttle load" per year of this astrofuel, then what about more densely populated countries, like China or Japan?
What will the petroleum lobby think about this?What political repercussions would result if a US president pulled crap like OPEC does (threatening embargoes, being real bastards with prices, etc;) today if the US were to follow through with a plan like this?
What will mining the moon do to things like tides here on Earth? (shifting mass like that on the surface/possibly expelling it into space -which I hope won't be the case, that would be really bad-)
Do you honestly think this will remove our dependence on fossil fuel completely? Look at your computer. It's prolly got a lot of plastic in, on, and around it. Same with probably the rest of your room. Multiply that by a couple/few billion and you get the idea. Also, with the demand for plastic products growing ever more insistent, by the time (if) we get to enact a feasible plan for mining the moon, how much oil will be required to make non-energy products?
How greatly do you think this will change civilization as we know it? We'll still have electricity, the only difference would prolly be that we're mining it from the moon, from a consumer standpoint, that is. What humanitarian /technology/quality-of-life improvements do you think we, as people in a social/civilization context will see as a direct result of mining energy from the moon?
Call me a pessimist bastard who says the glass is half empty. I don't necessarily see THIS glass as half empty, but I don't see it as half full either. I'd say I see it as just another damn glass with some damn water in it. If we get our energy from the moon, whoopty-friggin'-do, we'll be getting it from the moon, we'll still pay for it. We'll still have electricity. Just be sure to inform me when they find a way to make something like plastic out of something other than oil (for instance polymerizing something more readily available, say, water. ) THEN will I be more enthusiastic.
Now watch this drive.
This has been discussed for years and how close are we to a working, ie more energy out than we put in, prototype are we??
Once we have a proper working efficient reactor then moon ahoy.
Build the reactors on the moon as well and use microwve transmitters to beam the power to earth via reciever satellites.
Gotta be safer and cheaper than multi-tonne rocks of froxen HE3 (the only mass sensible way of moving it) being fired at us by linear accelerator.
Worst
No, Helium-2 could possible exist, it would just have two protons and zero neutrons.
Helium-1 makes no sense, but if you drop down to only one proton, its not Helium, its Hydrogen. Calling Hydrogen Helium-1 makes little sense though.
Maybe if you had 2 protons and -1 neutrons, you could call that Helium-1. But how exactly do you get an anti-neutron?
Morphing Software
I'm not sure why this warrants an article now, seeing that no real developments on the topic have happened in a long time...
Ah, that's right. That's why insurance companies won't insure new nuclear reactors. That's because it's politically and socially unacceptable.
The "political" reason that they aren't getting built is because the government won't indemnify or guarantee the insurance companies that insure nuclear reactors.
And why should they, really? Apparently no one knows how to build a nuke reactor safely enough for the insurance companies. That's a fiscal decision, not a political or a social one.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Chernobyl
I hate to break it to you, but an industrial accident is an industrial accident whether we're talking chemical spills, molten steel, coal burning, nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion. They all can potentially result in a lot of deaths. Yet we deal with these risks every day and trust that companies will do their best to be safe about handling dangerous materials.
In the case of Chernobyl, the Russian government stole a US design, built a reactor, and assigned engineers who didn't understand how it worked. As a result, they did quite a few things that no sane plant manager would have allowed (such as removing control rods and cutting wires). The end result was a boiler explosion that killed about 30 people on site, and about 14 from chemical contamination of radioactive iodine. (I just recently came across these figures from an official report. Here's a link if you wish to verify.) Modern reactor designs make Chernobyl type situations impossible because a melt down situation will boil away the water that is used to keep the reaction going. In older designs, the water was under pressure and would super-heat instead of boiling.
Perhaps the most telling point is that the Chernobyl design had actually been decommissioned here in the US as being unsafe. Yet the communist government was so intent on getting an atomic bomb that they used the stolen specs just to show that they as well could use nuclear power for "peaceful" uses.
In any case, the other 3 Chernobyl reactors continued running for many years despite the safety problems, so it's not like the entire area was leveled or anything. It takes a very specific shaping of the fissible material to produce a nuclear explosion. That shaping doesn't happen inside a reactor.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
>Is there REALLY anything wrong with Fission power?
Well, some people are waging wars to avoid that they come into wrong hands.
Next, they are highly profiliated targets for terroristic attacks, and are in need of strong protection.
Finally maybe, because the backend costs of nuclear reactors make nuclear power (after over 45 years of commercial use) more expensive as conventional power-plants.
Which is all inherent to the fact that they use and need very refined and radioactive fuel and produce waste with similar attributes.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Oh, duh - I went back and reexamined the article again. I get it - it's not the *generation* of He^3 that's the problem, it's the processing when they get it to Earth.
Yeah - color me stupid. Sorry.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
There isn't much helium-3 involved -- no more than a few thousand tons. People move that much mass around every day, and you don't see catastrophic tides occurring every time a freighter goes by, do you?
People generally don't have a good idea of just how damn heavy planets are. To make a measurable difference in the Moon's behavior, it would be necessary to move over 1,000,000,000,000,000 tons of material -- over a million tons for every man, woman, and child on Earth!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The proton count determines the kind of element (so you couldn't call something with one proton Helium-1) and the chemical properties (period and group in the periodic table). The neutron count only affects mass and stability of the nucleus...
of course energy is conserved, but this doesn't mean you can't get more energy out than you put in. exothermic reactions produce more heat than is required to make them go, the extra heat coming from chemical potential energy. in nuclear plants energy is released when nuclei rearrange themselves. in these cases the energy released was already there but was inaccessible before the reaction.
another example is solar power - in this case electricity is produced but no energy is put in, in the sense that the energy comes from the Sun so there's no cost associated with it. other renewable energy sources work on the same principle.
Check out the indian mission to moon called Chandrayan.
;-)
The primary goal for this mission is the same thing. extracting helium 3 and mapping moon surface for finding proper spot to do that.
I would like to see some comments here about poverty in India though
Nuclear power is about releasing nuclear energy already stored in the atom. If the process of releasing that energy consumes less energy than is released, you have a viable nuclear reactor and the laws of thernodynamics are not broken. The AP wording, therefore, is correct.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I believe the theory is that the ones they've built have just been too small.
Anyways is there not a plan to build a full scale one in France or Japan. Except that not surprisingly the 6 parties involved (E.U., U.S., Japan, Russia, ?, ?) are split down the middle.
Ah sure, they should just build two of them. Two for the price of one it sure would not be of course! But the E.U. and U.S. won't be good at sharing one. It's like kids - the only way to keep them happy is make sure they all get the same.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
The moon is bigger than you may have figured. Its well larger than previous generations though, but they only believed it was about the size of a bigga pizza pie.
Removing 1e-10 percent of the moons mass would not change its gravitational force significantly.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I replied to your original post, but I should have said this to begin with. The mass of He3 was deposited by the solar wind anyway, so the lunar mass is increasing anyway. Add to that effects of meteorites from comets and other space dust, and you've got an ever-insteasing lunar mass.
so planetary masses vary anyways. The question is how significant would the harvesting of helium be.
make world, not war
For every man, woman and child currently alive in the world (and even that number is too big to comprehend, for me anyway), mass of moonrock equivalent to the weight of 365 Empire State Buildings would have to be removed from the moon. All that just to change its mass by 1%.
Even if that mass were coal, not H3 which stores many many times more energy, it would last us for millions of years. By which time we will have something else for an energy source.
In conclusion, unless a deliberate effort was made, there is absolutely no way we could affect the mass of the moon enough to cause a noticeable difference in tides or anything else.
P.S. Even if the mass were to change, the Moon would simply shift into a different orbit. It would not "spiral away from the Earth" or crash into us. Orbits, though complicated, are not delicate things. Yes they are in balance, but changing a factor won't just make the object fall out of the sky.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
Perhaps you didn't read the report. 44 people died. Period. End of story. Ukraine is perfectly inhabitable (As my Russian wife can attest to. I'm sure there's a few annoying ones she'd like to see irradiated tho.)
Besides that, the population in the region has been affected: cancer and birth deformity rates have gone up significantly since the accident.
DID YOU READ THE FSCKING REPORT? IT IS THE OFFICIAL INTERNATIONAL REPORT ON THE SITUATION.
Most cancer situations were in newborns in the area of Chernobyl at the time of the accident. These babies consumed radioactive iodine and developed Thyroid cancer. Most were treated, but a few (14, as I said) did die. Whoever told you otherwise was lying.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
From the article (you DID read it right): they are estimating there is a total of about 1,100,000 metric tons of He3 on the moon.
Now, the moon weighs 7.4e22 kilograms. Even if we remove all 1.1e6 metric tons of He3, the mass of the moon will only change by 1 part in 67 trillion.
And that's assuming we were somehow capable of mining every last gram of He3 -- A complete impossibility.
For some reason He3 has gotten quite a bit cheaper in the last decade or so. That is strange given that it comes from nucear reactors that are used to breed Plutonium for fission bombs.
Anyway, He3 costs about $100/standard gaseous liter these days. Still pretty expensive, when you consider that translates to about $700/liter in the liquid state!
It was stated in the article that there was about 1.1 million tons of He3 on the moon, to a depth of several meters, half of it in about 20 percent of the moon's surface. Now lets get out our calculators kiddies:
.002 * 2.8 million = 5,600 cubic miles of moondust, to recover about 500,000 tons of He3. This much liquified He3 could be contained in only a few supertankers, but the amout of material to be moved would be enormous, and would fill a quarry the size of Connecticut nearly a mile deep. I worked out a similar problem trying to estimate the cost of building A Bridge to Hawaii. Assuming a specific gravity of about 3, this would require processing a staggering 84 Trillion Tons of material. Of course, 1/6 of the gravity would make it easier to lift, but the costs of getting the heavy equipment to move all of this moondust would be truly enormous.
Surface Area of Moon = 4*pi*r**2 where r is about equal to 1,100 miles is about 14,000,000 square miles, give or take.
Mineable surface of moon = 20 percent of 14,000,000 square miles, or about 2.8 million square miles. This is only slightly less than the area of the Continental United States.
Mine Depth: for sake of arguement, lets just say 10 feet, or about 1/500 of a mile, which is slightly more than 3 meters.
Total volume of moon to be mined =
My original point is this: Hydrogen is not a clean fuel. Yes, at the location of combustion you generate only H2O (theoretically) and get energy out. However, there is no "free" way to generate H2.
The reason fossil fuels are used as a source of energy is that they are "free". Free as in you go dig a hole in the ground and get a very energy-rich fuel. The energy to create the fossil fuels was harnessed from the sun millions of years ago. You can't dig an H2 well. There just aren't pockets of H2 lying under the surface of the earth.
To create H2, you need a "free" source of energy (i.e. fossil fuels in the form of CH4) or you need a lot of energy to crack H2O. You need to put in as much energy into the creation of the H2 as you will later get out. That's so important, I'm going to say it again:
Right now, that basically means electricity from fossil fuel plants, or in a few locations in the US, hydroelectric, nuclear, and possibly a tiny bit of solar. So all a hydrogen car will do will move the source of pollution from the car to the power plant.I don't know enough about submarines to know where they get their power from (giant batteries? nuclear plants?), but they don't crack H2O for free.
Umm, Christopher Pike is an analyst. He has no position within government. Anything he says can be completely bull crap, for all we really know. It's certainly not an official government position. Even Rumsfeld wouldn't say something like that.
Solar involves nasty heavy metal by products to create the cells. As for the moon running out, Bah. It is bathed in it by the sun. Though most of it drifts of in the solar wind, there are some supplies, mostly trapped in rock bubbles. We can't have much due to our magnetosphere repelling it.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
We don't need lunar mining to do this. Helium 3 has been made in kilogram quantities over the years. Tritium decays into helium-3 with a half life of 12 years, and fifty years of tritium production for H-bombs has resulted in a stockpile of helium-3. It's a weird fuel cycle. Tritium is created by transmutation in nuclear reactors, loaded into H-bombs, allowed to decay, and replaced with fresh tritium after a few years. Helium-3 is then separated out from the decayed tritium.
The US's tritium production facility (Savannah River, K-reactor) has been shut down since 1993. A replacement facility is being built to do transmutation the hard way - with a big linear accelerator. This is hopeless as a power source, of course. But it might be acceptable as a way to make fuel for fusion rockets. Tritium is also being produced in some of Canada's heavy-water reactors, and one of the TVA's reactors is being modified to produce tritium. But right now, the supply is a bit tight. Not too tight, though; you can buy tritium-illuminated exit signs and watches.
The US tritium and helium-3 stockpile sizes are classified, because they give a hint as to how many US nuclear weapons are still functional. The Accelerator Production of Tritium facility is supposed to make about 3Kg of tritium per year, which provides a sense of what can be produced.
This isn't cheap, but it doesn't require a giant lunar mining infrastructure. If He-He fusion can be made to work, it's the cleanest and safest way to go.
Coal is Less than a 1$ a Pound... So they would need to figure out how to transport it back for Alot less than 1$ per pound. I don't think the economics to do it are here yet... I think It will be pretty far off in the future.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Very informative comment off of SciScoop by RickyJames
Kulcinski and FTI have presented a graduate course entitled "Resources From Space" in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001, taught by a variety of instructors including Harrison Schmitt. Each of these have extensive notes and pdf files online, and probably are the best sources for data on the Internet on the topic of using lunar resources for energy. These two guys are the leading proponents of helium-3 use; if anybody is going to make a good case for this, it's them.
The key factor is the dilute nature of the helium-3 in the lunar regolith, and all the other stuff that's mixed in there with it. Schmitt estimates on page 19 of lecture 10 in the 2001 course that the He3 abundance is "up to 30 ppb" or 30 parts-per-Billion-with-a-B in the top 10 feet of lunar soil. Also embedded in the lunar soil is 30-180 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of hydrogen and 30 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of normal helium or He2.
So, say you want a ton of helium-3 from the Moon. You've only got to do two things.
Step one, heat up 1,000,000,000 / 30 = 33,333,333 tons of lunar soil. That's a lot of dirt and a lot of heat. All of the hydrogen and helium gas in the soil is baked off and captured. You get 2001 tons of hydrogen and helium - 1000 tons of hydrogen gas, 1000 tons of helium gas, and one ton of helium-3 gas.
Step two, you've got to separate the ton of helium-3 you want to ship back to Earth from the 2000 tons of normal helium and hydrogen you don't. Getting the hydrogen out is relatively easy; just combine it with lunar oxygen to make water. Try to avoid a titanic explosion in the process. Separating that one-in-a-thousand helium atom you want from the helium that's left, though, is hard. It's the same problem faced with the Manhattan Project people trying to separate the U-235 uranium atoms that could make a bomb from the U-238 uranium atoms that couldn't. You'd have to recreate wartime Oak Ridge isotope separation plants on the moon - and those aren't going to be built from lunar material, I assure you.
As a point of interest, coal strip mines in the West get out 25 tons of coal for ever manhour of labor used. By this criteria digging up 33 million tons of moondirt per year would take 1.32 million manhours of labor. At 2000 manhours per year, that's a required crew of 660 miners for one ton of He3 per year.
You say we need 30 tons of He3 per year - that's the equivalent of 20,000 miners moving as much moondust around as the entire U.S. coal mining industry mines in coal in a year. I know, I know - the situation isn't comparable, NASA would create a super-automated unmanned bulldozer fleet, etc. etc. Running on what? Costing what? Getting to the moon how? None of these are impossible factors, only impractical ones.
Then, there's the question if a fusion reactor could ever be built that would use helium-3. Sure, it sounds good. But we haven't even built a deuterium fusion reactor yet, and the physics of that is a LOT easier than getting a helium-3 reactor to work. In the 1950s fission reactors were going to be cheap and simple, too. Remember "electricity too cheap to meter"?
I dunno, Sylvia. It sure sounds good to say, here comes this shuttle with a one ton can of helium-3 on board back from space that's landing on the runway to solve all of our problems (for two weeks - you need 30 tons per year, remember?), wave the flag and strike up the band. But when you look at what it takes in infrastructure to get that helium in the can on the moon, and what kind of infrastructure you're going to pour it into once the can is offloaded and the band's gone home, well, it's just not quite so attractive to investors. Especially as long as they kn
I repeat:
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I did a back of the napkin based upon the He3 info posted on space.com.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0
They said there is about 70 tons He3 per million tons of regolith.
That comes in at concentrations that would be a nice gold or platinum deposit on earth (about 1.75 oz/ton He3), but is a very low concentration for anything other than a precious metal. The extraction temp quoted in the article is 800C (1470F) and would require a lot of energy. This would require very large solar panels and MANY trips to get them up there.
No, you are not going to fabricate solar panels on the moon. The moon's regolith is composed of refractory minerals like anorthite that (while benched in a NASA lab yield silica) are not feasible as silica sources because of the high energy requirements and expensive crucibles needed.
Then there is the distribution of He3 in regolith. If it only occurs in the top few inches of regolith, you need the kind of equipment that can mine only that portion. Otherwise you dilute the ore feed and end up treating material devoid of the resource at great cost.
Then you have to deal with removing the gasses that come off in addition to H3. Water and O2 woudl be useful, but F, Cl and the other volatiles typically found in rocks and regolith would be a problem.
Assuming we come up with a feasible fusion reactor, it looks like it will be cheaper to deal with neutrons than import a clean fuel from the moon.
Ignorance may be a bliss, but it can be unhealthy as well.
Check out two international studies. Unscear report and UN report. UN also has pretty clueful page on chernobyl in general. We're talking about moderate increase in occurrence of cancer with some 10000-20000 cases attributed to the accident. Fatality is pretty low, thought, so casualties are some 100s.