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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...
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.
I'm not sure why this warrants an article now, seeing that no real developments on the topic have happened in a long time...
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"
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.
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...
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
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.
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 =
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.