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Lunar Helium 3 Could Meet Earth's Energy Demands
starannihilator writes "Helium 3, rare on the earth but abundant on the moon, may prove to be a feasible energy source with NASA's Moon-Mars initiative. Despite the American Physical Society's Report that the initiative harms science, the moon may actually benefit humans because it contains 10 times more energy than all the fossil fuels on earth. Long hailed as a potential source of energy, and outlined in detail by the Artemis Project, helium 3 may solve earth's energy crisis without any radioactive byproducts. The only problem: the reactor technology for converting helium 3 to energy is still in its infancy. Read more about the Artemis Project's information about fusion power from the moon here." Reader muditgarg points out that India has just hosted a global conference on Moon exploration and utilization, and adds a link to this related story on KeralaNext.
I remind the readers that the Chinese space program is located entirely within the Chinese Department of War. The space program is designed to further the Chinese military machine.
By contrast, NASA is an entirely civilian effort.
Here are my couple of thoughts on the subject. First, it seems like obtaining the Helium-3 would be prohibitively expensive. We would need something like a space elevator first before we could really start shuttling this stuff back to earth. I guess the other option is to build a reactor on the moon and beam the energy back to earth (but we all know how dangerous that is based on SimCity, right?).
One thing that doesn't sit easy with me wrt this is that even though there is 10x more energy in Helium-3 on the moon compared to 'fossil' fuels here on earth, I have a feeling that we would still deplete it relatively quickly (with exponential population growth and all).
I think that ultimately the answer is going to have to be with solar energy, since that is an incredible source of energy for a long time. But, whether it's looking for efficient means of converting solar energy to something usable, or transporting the Helium-3 from the moon, it's going to take the price of gas skyrocketing before people cry for a change. I just hope that by that point it's not too late.
On the gripping hand, I do have a friend whose PhD thesis was the chemistry of moon rocks - and her opinion was that mining He3 would be impractical.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The counterargument to the APS's "report" shouldn't be "but we could solve the energy crisis," it should be "you're a bunch of self-serving, near-sighted idiots who seem to think that scientific funding *has to be* a zero-sum game. Do you realize that in the minds of many people, the bucks for probes is in part justfied by the Buck Rogers of manned space flight? Do you understand how much more fruitful it would be for planetologists to actually get to study the moon, Mars, etc. *in situ*? Do you realize that expanding the world economy into the solar system could have countless beneficial effects on all the sciences, on our standards of living, on our philosophical view of the universe? Or is protecting your research grant that much more important to you than the universe itself?"
I have a couple of thoughts on the subject.
1.) Where exactly in the moon is the Helium-3 located? I read the article but did not see mention of exactly where the stuff is. Is it in moon rock? Does the moon have an ultra thin atmosphere of this stuff?
2.) Putting a metric buttload of really good Helium in a ship and blasting it towards Earth where it will reenter the atmosphere at very high temperatures doesn't seem like a good idea. If anything happens, say a leak of the helium that caused an explosion, how powerful would the explosion be? Would it be high enough in the atmosphere to not worry about? Would it wipe out a state or three?
3.) Would it be possible to use the helium-3 gathered from the moon to power the ship back to Earth? Could the helium-3 be used to power small reactors on the moon to enable a robotic or human colony to thrive?
4.) What would happen to the moon if it were mined? How stable is the moon, and if we start taking stuff off of the moon and putting it on Earth, what happens to the moon's orbit? the Earth's orbit?
It seems interesting, but I don't know how well mining the moon sits with me. Didn't anyone see that episode of Sliders where the moon was mined so much it broke up and headed towards Earth in continent sized chunks!?
The article there appears to be a stub, so here's hoping that those slashdotters that know a little more on the subject can contribute.
Help the wiki!
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WTF? You are basing those figures off 1970 spacecraft that were designed primarily to carry people and not cargo that doesn't need a constant temperature (well, not as much as humans), humidity or oxygen.
I'm sure we could do it for less than $10billion nowadays - automated space craft flies off, collects the Helium, and flies it back - one way. The space craft does not need to be very heavy, because all it is is effectively a huge cargo container.
You are also forgetting that we could place the energy generation on the moon itself instead of on the earth and simply beam the power back...
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What I keep wondering is why hasn't anyone looked at HEAT. If we could harness direct heat to energy conversion via quantum conversion then we could simply drill into the GROUND drop pure diamond collectors (made via CVD for solid state energy conversion) and connected via nanotubing and have an abundent source of energy for at least a few millions years...
c ro1-JHT02.pdf
Think about it. It's clean. It's efficient. And it can be found in every country of the world!
Here's a link: http://quantum.soe.ucsc.edu/publications/01_02/Mi
What do YOU think? Is it a viable solution?
Cheers!
Smile.
Well, for one, hybrid cars use technology designed for efficient transportation. They don't produce energy, they merely make more efficient use of existing fossil fuel energy.
For another, the technology in question is fusion power, which is desirable as a replacement for existing nuclear or fossil fuel power as a means of generating electricity. We could build fusion power plants with terrestrial fuels (see my other post) but people are advocating He3/D fusion because it produces no dangerous radioactivity.
I'm pro green technology, so I understand your point, but there are various energy needs to be met, and hybrids (and biodiesel, and passive power generation) only solve part of the problem. We could have extensive distributed solar power, efficient cars and appliances, renewable chemical fuels with zero net carbon emmissions, hydro/geothermal/wind power where applicable, and no fossil fuels at all, and we would still need some means of active power generation. And, as I said in my other post, we actually don't need to go offworld to get fusion fuel (although lunar He3 is renewable, and safer than terrestrial fusion fuel; it's just harder to get and harder to fuse).
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
A solar powered mass driver could move the H3 into Earth orbit quite easily. These are the top three URL's from my google for "mass drivers"
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http://www.permanent.com/t-massdr.htm
http://www.permanent.com/t-massdr.htm
http://www.spacecolonization.com/massdrivers.ht
Besides a scientific station, this would be another reason for a permanent colony on the moon.
The moon is basically vacuum. That means that it is far easier to control temperatures. You can cool super conducting magnets VERY easily... and high temperatures don't "leak" as badly to the surrounding area. I bet it would be easier to build a fusion reactor with the vacuum aspect "free"
Those first two look surprisingly similar... Is this some kind of new information stealthing technology?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Good point.
However, that would leave you with the problem of getting the power back to earth. The article is talking about build reactors groundside, and transporting the fuel back, not building them on the moon and beaming back tht power. If we could beam the power back, why not build solar stations in orbit (a la SimCity) and save ourselves some effort? Granted, they'd be less powerful, but also a hell of a lot cheaper, and since real estate in space is not an issue, we could build as many as we liked. And we would probably need to man reactor stations with people or robots, whereas we could leave the satellites unmanned except for repairs and maintainence.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
maybe to bueracratic institutions like NASA and the US government, who spend money just trying to figure out how to spend money. give that 10B to the guys who did SpaceShipOne and you'll have an entire colony on Pluto within a decade.
Except that Apollo returned three astronauts, 110 Kg. of moonrocks, assorted equipment, AND the capsule that was technically the command module, AND the service modules themselves could have been included in the return weight if we weren't just letting them burn up (They certainly made it back to Earth's vicinity, if not technically Earth itself). At the very least, all those parts of the CM and SM that were just needed to keep astronauts alive and functioning can be included in weight available for cargo in an alternate design. This includes breathing mixture (and scrubbers, fans to keep air circulating, and associated wiring and controls), food and water, (and refrigeration and other associated mass), fuel for the onboard heaters (and the heaters themselves, shell insulation, etc.), plus things that aren't absolutely essential for life itself but are for the mission, i.e. onboard communications and computing gear, etc.
Mass of the combined CSM for actual lunar landing missions was 30,329 Kg. (Encyclopedia Aeronautica).
How much of that would be actual He3 in a cargo design is a different question. So is how fast a load of He3 has to return to Earth - Apollo was designed for short travel times, largely because of consumables limits. A tank of He3 doesn't need to worry if it takes months to get across the system.
Realistically, our costs would be those to put a crew on the Moon, sustain them for the time needed to 'mine' He3, and bring them home, plus the costs to put a delivery system for the He3 into place, whether it's one big capsule with all elements including its fuel shipped up from Earth, or a bunch of 10 gallon barrels with cheap transponders, spray on ablative shields and a local He3 powered mass driver throwing them at the Pacific recovery zone.
At pragmatically foreseeable levels of technology, we have to ship some people there and back at least once to get our 25 tons, but we don't necessarily have to ship people back and forth every time we move some He3. If they can process a 20 year supply in a few weeks on the Moon we could be talking about sending up and recovering one living crew, once, for the total life of the program.
Costs might vary widely depending on what percentage of pods you can recover with a given design - maybe cheap ones that we lose 50% to reentry stresses would still actually work out cheaper overall. Can we make He3 tight barrels out of material already found on the Lunar surface? Haven't the foggiest - We don't even know how to get a sustained fusion reaction out of the stuff yet.
If you figure the personnel costs might be only a share of a larger project, to put people on the Moon for several reasons and not just this one, the project requires less to justify itself (but the overall committment required becomes bigger, naturally). Depending on just what methods are possible, transportation costs may be a deal killer, or quite workable.
Who is John Cabal?
Of course "catching" it without destroying the catching mitt demands some cleverness, but you have to be pretty clever to begin with to hit it at all.
I'm all for new sources of energy... but the transport issue would seem to be the first major hurdle, long before the needed reactor.
Well, if we've reached reactor feasibility, present transportation costs would be irrelevant. We'd have fusion powered rockets available to use for transport between Earth orbit and the Moon. The rockets would be able to be reusable, long-term cargo taxis, possibly drastically reducing cost. Fusion power would revolutionize everything, from the energy economy to space travel.
Derek
In Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, he postulates lunar catapults launching containers equipped with only maneuvering thrusters to deliver grain grown on the moon to earth orbit. Same principle could be applied here.
Of course, in the book, when the loonies get mad at earth (for depleting their natural resources), they load up the containers with rock and use them as kinetic weapons. If the payload is already an energy source, it'll be that much less work for them...