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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."
Balloon sellers go out of business as prices of helium plummet
18 year old choirboys whose voices broke 4 years ago rejoyce
Put out more energy than it takes in? Once again, never trust the AP for science.
If inhaling Helium-1 makes my voice high, Helium-2 makes it higher, how high will Helium-3 make it?
great now whats going to keep it floating up there??? :)
I mean come on. We can't even get one watt of positive energy flow out of Fusion and they already want to mine the moon for it. Let's spend our time developing better fission reactors, including ones for space engines. Then we can use them to get our scientists to the moon so they can play with Helium-3 and Fusion all they want.
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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...
...just like it was 50 years ago.
Is there REALLY anything wrong with Fission power?
Yes. It's politically and socially unacceptable.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
That is all well and good that it produces a substantial, if not infinite, amount of energy more than coal does, but realize that the energy needed to get it back to earth lessens its appeal and ultimately, its usefulness. Unless it is specifically directed towards interplanetary spaceflight to planets beyond our own, I say leave it be until then.
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 love it. We don't even have economic fusion yet, and these guys are talking about mining the fuel from the moon.
It would seem that with standard deuterium and tritium fusion, involving only plentiful isotopes of hydrogen found on Earth, there's utterly no need to get helium from the moon.
The main problem is the mastering the fusion process itself, not where we're gonna get the fuel from!
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Any other cynics out there thinking some Haliburton exec read some popular science mag and talk Cheney/Bush to annex the Moon for them quick?
Noam?? Is that you??
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
No wonder Bush wants to build a moon base!
Seriously, say what you will about him, the President is a man who understands the approaching energy crisis. If it's true that the fossil-based economy will expire by 2040 (the number quoted by my college professor), then we're looking at a very violent game of hot potato over the remaining fuel. Controlling the next generation energy supply could be important if fossil fuels remain the most efficient way to get to space.
Of course, I'd much rather see renewable Earth sources of fuel (like solar, geothermal, corn oil, etc)...but then, nobody CONTROLS the sun. So there's no economic or political incentive like there is with an exclusive source like oil or nuclear.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
- Homer J. Simpson
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
"helium-3... would yield about 1000 times more energy per pound than coal. And cost about 10,000 times more per pound to mine... doesn't sound like a big economic win to me.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
They don't even have a reactor yet that produces net power, and they are estimating that the moon has enough helium to supply the earth with energy for a thousand years? What could they possibly be basing this estimate on.
"Gee Bob, some journalist wants to know how much energy is on the moon. Should I assume that the reactor we may or may not be able to come up with will be 99% efficient or 5% efficient?"
"I'd go with 99%. We're running low on grant money."
I'm not sure why this warrants an article now, seeing that no real developments on the topic have happened in a long time...
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.
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.
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>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"
This guy is a dipshit. I've written to him and got back a pretty weak argument in return. He said he's a physics major but he didn't catch a huge error in something that I wrote and caught later. Here's our corespondence.
Blaze a trail to the New World
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.
Apparently no one knows how to build a nuke reactor safely enough for the insurance companies.
Considering that there have been zero civilian deaths from nuclear power use in the US, and that thousands die every years from diseases brought about by coal-burning, I have to wonder what type of design they want. Perhaps a nuclear power plant that produces power but doesn't actually have a reactor?
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Furthermore, I'm quite conviced that mining any substance on earth will harm more lifeforms than mining helium from the moon would.
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...
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11. That would bankrupt an insurance company instantly. It's not that the insurance companies are saying fission reactors are unsafe, just that if something went catastrophically wrong, they would be doomed. I don't think any company out there could survive a hit of $25 billion to their bottom line, which is probably a conservative figure for a large-scale (say, Chernobyl or worse) nuclear disaster.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Slap a solar panel on top of everyone's house in America, and with proper energy-saving, energy-sharing, and energy-storing techniques we'd never need a conventional power plant again. It would be a sizable initial investment (mostly infrastructure), but the payoffs are invaluable. We'd annihilate much of the need for foreign oil, power bills would plummet, pollution would decrease, and Chicago wouldn't be a smog-riddled wasteland ;).
Heck. Combine just a little solar power with this H3 stuff (assuming they CAN do this) and the "energy crisis" is basically solved. Until the Moon runs out.
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I spoke in person with engineers and nuclear physists who worked with Academic Alexandroff, who was a project leader to design Leningrad reactor which design has been used later in Chernobyl. Those guys know how it works. Moreover, Soviet nuclear phisists, who designed first Soviet nuclear bomb (Kurchatov and others) new exactly how nuclear physics works.
It was US engineers who learned from German physists. Saying that Soviet Nuclear engineers do not understand how the reactor works is the sign that you watch way too much TV and read way to many tabloids. Your brains are washed by US propaganda.
Coming back to Chernobyl, the Leningrad reactor was innovative in many ideas to reduce the cost of protection. That created an illusion that it's absolutely safe. It is safe, but not absolutely, just more safe than other reactors of that time. When its design has been re-applied in Chernobyl, they made more shortcuts on safity, thinking that it's safe anyway. Not only design shortcuts, but also in the technological process of the construction as well as n in organization of its support (like shift and like that). We all know the result.
Less is more !
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.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.
researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in
So let's see, the only thing in the way of their plans is this silly little law of physics that says energy in must equal energy out. period. you can't create energy, you can't destroy it.
On the same line, getting to the galaxy next door is right around the corner, we just need to figure out how to go 10,000x the speed of light.
Oh, and immortality is close too, we just need to get around that "death" thing.
Gimme a break.
no comment
The people you kill aren't the ones suing you. The people who sue you are the ones who's children have birth defects. The people who sue you are the ones that own radioactive land.
Chernobyl was extremely expensive. Pointing out that it was only 44 people is kindof silly. So what.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
okay so it's "over a million tons for every man, woman, and child on Earth!" But what's that in terms we can all understand?
How many VW's is that, or library on Congresses?
In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.
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 =
According to that `report', perhaps the few dozen people in my family who have Thyroid cancer are just imagining it.
Nope. According to that paper, Thyroid cancer was the biggest problem. Thankfully, only 14 people have died of it so far. You and your family were actually treatable.
I really don't want to downplay the fact that Chernobyl was a huge tragedy. You and your family have probably suffered quite a bit and I am not immune to that. My only point is that Chernobyl was not much worse than other industrial accidents. For example, a coal burning plant in London managed to kill 3500 people in one week back in 1952. Areas of the United States have seen their property values go to zero as chemical spills made the areas uninhabitable. There are much worse things that can go wrong than a nuclear melt-down.
There is no such thing as 100% "safe" industry and nuclear power is far from the worst. That is my point. Nothing more, nothing less.
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In the past I believed that public resistance to power reactors was founded in ignorance, and therefore without merit. It is, but some knee-jerk reactions are healthy.
Last Friday the Tennessee reactor called WATTS BAR was SCRAM-ed. A SCRAM is an emergency procedure where the core's control rods are rapidly inserted to halt the reaction. SCRAMs are routine. Reactors SCRAM themselves and are manually SCRAM-ed under a large number of conditions.
Here is a quote from the WATTS BAR report to the NRC on this "event"; "The licensee also reported that all control rods inserted on the reactor trip, no primary or secondary system relief valves operated, and that reactor temperature is being maintained using steam dump to the condenser. Steam generator water levels are being maintained using auxiliary feedwater. The station electrical system is available and in a normal configuration. All ECCS equipment is available. The reactor is currently stable at 2230 psig, 559 degrees Fahrenheit."
Something about having to report the condition of control rods and water levels directly to the Federal Government makes me doubt exactly how safe this stuff actually is. That paragraph follows a template that varies based primarily on which parts of the back-up systems fail post SCRAM, and this is an unusual report in that none did.
Machine's break, people mess up, things get neglected, overlooked and forgotten. The consequences at a coal or gas power generating facility are localized deaths and equipment damage. The consequences at a fission reactor range from trivial to catastrophic, in a biblical sense. We have never suffered the worst case. Chernobyl did not even begin to approach it.
Also, last Friday, the DAVIS BESSE facility in Ohio reported that, according to their simulations, a steam line break could potentially compromise all low-voltage systems and battery backups available at the reactor by overpressuring some doors. That's a useful discovery. Too bad it took 27 years to notice. It probably isn't coincidental that this particlar facility is being scrutinized with a microscope and thus rendering interesting new discoveries like this. Two years ago refueling workers discovered that boric acid had eaten through the steam generator casing down to the stainless steel inner lining. 8" of low alloy steel gone and all of the pressure generated by the nuclear reaction retained by a 3/8" layer of stainless steel.
I have no animus towards the power companies. I am not an activist exaggerating to support an agenda. Paranoia about nuclear waste is nothing more than trumped up NIMBY. "Deregulation" isn't causing a degradation of safety. It's just the nature of any large industrial system; everything breaks eventually. Hell, everything is already broken and we have simply failed to notice, yet.
I now believe that fission reactors are inherently dangerous, including recent improved designs. It is the nature of a fission reactor to melt down unless prevented from doing so. We are very good at preventing this. We are not, however, perfect. We are people operating machines.
In contrast, fusion appears much safer. The challenge of fusion is getting more power out of the reaction than you put in. By definition the reaction will stop if the input fails. It is the nature of a fusion reactor to stop unless prevented from doing so. Unless some foul-up closes the loop it can't spiral out-of-control.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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:
0 06 30.html
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.