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."

Comments

Re:In other news

[wass]

meanwhile cryogenics folks will rejoice because currently He3 is very expensive. And He3 cryostats are the basic workhorse for getting below temperatures of 1K.

Evaporative pumping of He3 can get you to about 250 mK, and using a He3/He4 dilution refrigerator can get one to about 10 mK.

A cheaper source of He3 would be good news, currently it's several hundred bucks for (I think) a liter of He3 gas at STP.

Re:On a more serious note

[jafiwam]

Not that I am an oceanographer or anything... But tides from the moon do cause currents; however the big "belt" currents of cold water circling the globe (or winding around rather) are caused by cooling of water at the poles (which then sinks) and to a certain extent the fresh water taken out by freezing.

Likewise, there is no country on Earth that has the budget to move enough mass either way to affect the Moon/Earth system. Simply ain't gonna happen.

(Earth loses atmosphere all the time, and takes on tons and tons of stardust from outerspace too... nobody worries about that changing orbits or tides.)

So mod parent down for "technically correct" but way overblowing the wrong thing.

Yes.

[Svartalf]

Chernobyl.

(Yes, I know that others have said the same thing- but allow me to expand on this...)

When Chernobyl reactor #4 exploded, it sprayed a radioactive cloud that would have killed everyone for many hundreds of miles around the damn thing if it weren't for the prevailing wind conditions and the local fauna dissipating goodly portions of the radioactive cloud. (To put what we are talking about here in perspective, the soldiers collecting bits and pieces of the moderator debris flung from the reactor recieved their lifetime safe dosage of radiation in the 90 or so seconds they were out picking this stuff up. They all died, by the way, over the following several years with various unusual conditions- as if they were irradiated with a very high radiation dose over several months' time.)

We were lucky with the Three Mile Island incident- had it gone just a little differently, we'd have experienced our OWN Chernobyl.

While I'm all for improving Fission reactors, the risks are still WAAAAY high for when something screws up (and invariably it does...) and the ash from the current fission designs is too damn dangerous to keep about and we've got no good way of disposing of it in a safe manner.

Why Work In A Gravity Well?

[DynaSoar]

Mining the moon would require placing the equivalent of heavy "earth" moving equipment on the surface. Doing that is expensive. So is getting the results back off the surface. He3 is only in the first few feet of moon surface because it comes from the sun. Go to the source.

A better design would be a sol-centric orbital platform, say in Mercury's L-5 point, collecting solar wind via magnetic trap (the "ram-scoop" idea) and using an on board mass spectrometer to separate the components, which are then bottled for use, storage or shipping. In that orbit, there'd be sufficient solar power to run all that.

Set up a veritable merry-go-round of solar sail craft to go pick up and return the He3, and whatever else you want, and pay nothing in fuel costs. So what if they're slow. They're cheap. Build lots. Build *them* on the moon, or better, out of asteroids. You don't want these things slamming into Earth? Don't nuke 'em, smelt 'em.

Gerard O'Neill gave us lots of good ideas. We'd do well to remember that he didn't get them from professional scientists and engineers with reputations to make and maintain. He got them from undergraduates, whose class project it was to think these things up. Having a reputation to lose to your less foresightful colleagues sure puts a damper on innovation.