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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.
If we start "mining" the moon, we will never figure out how all this energy got there in the frist place. The moon belongs in a museum!
To transport the helium, just put it all in a balloon and drop it toward earth...
Wait a second...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Even if the collection of H3 and it's conversion to useable energy was cheap... the transport costs alone would have to be killer.
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
That all of that cheese up there would be the fuel that saved the Earth!
BTW, I thought cheese generally produced methane when broken down?
...can be found in the Methane from Uranus. Talk about renewable. In spades.
So we're going to fly to the moon, pick up some feul, and hopfully fly back without any problems. Can the ship carry more helium 3 than the feul it needs to get there and back? Otherwise it seems like a compleate waste.
Let's replace a problematic energy source with another problematic energy source.
1) Who owns the moon? Does the American flag mean we own it?
2) It's non-renewable. It'll run out.
3) It's the MOON!
In my defense... It's been a long time since I gave any thought to chemical symbols.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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 problem with all these plans to "solve the energy problem" is that they ignore the fact that human energy demand is constantly growing, and growing exponentially. It's the same problem that we have with hard drives; in 1990, my 40MB hard drive was barely enough space. In 2004, my 320GB RAID array is barely enough space. Unless we control the demand for energy, all the new energy sources in the solar system won't solve the problem.
At least, as far as non-renewable resources go. Solar energy, coupled with a focus on efficiency and maybe some population control, would do far more to solve our energy problems than mining space for Helium-3. It would be safer and easier as well. Why go to the moon for energy when the sun delivers it for free?
... is that the energy in question comes from thermonuclear fusion, and fusion can be done with terrestrial elements. We don't _need_ he3 to build fusion power plants; we can build them with deuterium/tritium fuel, or even just deuterium alone. Moreover, D/T fusion only requires plasma temperatures about a tenth those of D/He3 fusion. IIRC D/D fusion is also somewhat more attainable than D/He3 (and uses an incredibly abundant fuel available on Earth - deuterium is a stable hydrogen isotope available in quantity from seawater).
The only disadvantage of hydrogen isotope fusion is radioactivity. D/T spits out fast neutrons, while D/D can produce radio-isotopes (I think - someone correct me if I've remembered wrong). Neither technology produces hazardous nuclear waste however, and the radioactivity in question would be very short lived, cooling in decades to centuries, rather than millennia. Moreover, in D/T reactor designs, the only radiation is in the core itself, and said neutron radiation can be used to "breed" tritium fuel. Disposing of fusion waste long term, either by sealing the decommissioned cores, or storing the D/D reaction products, is easier than importing he3 fuel from the moon.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I see a lot of posts complaining of the cost of flying to the moon to pick this stuff up. I think everyone needs the think about how cheap it would be to just drop this stuff on earth in a nice metal container. In this case gravity works in out favor. All the stuff has to do is escape the moons relatively light gravitational pull.
It's another matter entirely decided how to safely drop this stuff, and the politics behind this.
Keep in mind this is not a solve-our-wimpy-economy-slipping-a-little thing. It's a when-we-run-out-of-really-old-dead-things-to-burn kind of solution.
Help I'm a rock.
now the Chinese will be racing to establish a permanent presence on the moon just so they can claim it for themselves.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Problems:
- The concentration of He3 in the lunar surface may be very low. It could require processing many 100's of tonnes to get a gram/ounce/drop-in-the-ocean of He3. Of course, you could build an automated solar powered mining facility on the lunar surface to do it. You'd need serious $$$ though.
- Getting it back to Earth might be a pain. You could probably wrap it up in some aluminium projectile also mined on the moon, and fire it at Earth with a linear induction track or somthing. The projectile could have an ablative heat shield to protect the tiny precious cargo. More $$$ though.
- You need an efficient fusion power plant to 'burn' the stuff in and convert the heat to electrical energy.
Rather than using it on earth to generate electricity, it might be better used as a propellant for interplanetary spacecraft. The British Interplanetary Society once had plans for something called Daedalus which I think was designed to use He3 mined from the atmosphere of Jupiter. Is that even crazier?This is not a sig
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?"
Wouldn't something like this work nicely?
This is not the greatest
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!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
No, that would assume he's actually interested in alternative energy sources.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Very well, imagine the unregulated tides of cult based behavior magnitudes more powerful than that currently occurring in the USA, that is China without its proper and just government of the people's dictatorship. The poor and uneducated die, yes, but those past that point live on subject to nearly evolutionary stakes of success and life or failure and death. That is the nature of humanity, that is being humane in the most objective sense of the word. Tibet, a haven for religious extremists but as the totalitarian monks were not covered in the "West", the "West" does not know. Tibet had to be taken down without reservations. On your second point, national sovereignty is more important than even 400 million lives if it preserves the life of 600+ million. The actions taken were harsh, but necessary and just.
Yes, I'm feeding the troll.
Most of us know and are sympathetic to the Tibet situation. Now will you quit hijacking other people's topics and trolling with it?
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Mankind will think their way out of the energy crisis
Certainly, but that doesn't mean you're going to like the answer.
KFG
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.
We do not live back then. We live in November 27, 2004.
We live in 4641, you insensitive clod!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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"
m
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.
I think it's about time we bring our democracy values and love of freedom to the moon.
First off, what happens if we strip mine that sucker and change its mass significantly? What are the chances of it being pulled in by the Earths gravity?
Consider how large the moon is.... Now consider the odds that we could change that in any remotely significant way by mining H3. Get back to me.
Oh, and while you're at it, go read up on orbital physics. changing the moon's mass would not in any way affect its distance from earth. What might affect it (again, in a very, very slight way) would be the rockets firing off from it to return the stuff to earth. Even if that does become a problem (which would likely push the moon away from us, rather than towards), just start launching from the other side and coming around.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
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.
For today's more retarded moderators who are inclined to mod the parent as Troll, I give you the Wikipedia entry for the Chinese calendar system
Note that the years relative to the Christian calendar that it has mainly considered to have started on: 2637 B.C. According to Wikipedia, that puts us at year 4641.
I hope you feel more educated about this. See you in metamoderation.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
In general, standard of living is directly proportional to energy consumption. This may not hold completely true, and conservation may help. However, conservation tends to be on the order of saving 5% here, 10% there. Increases in energy usage, on the other hand, are often orders of magnitude. I want my standard of living to keep going up. The only way to stop demand from growing is to freeze everything the way it is today, and I don't like that idea at all.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"Is Helium-3 that much easier to fuse and create energy?"
No. It's harder. It requires higher temperatures, and better containment. The only advantage when used for terrestrial uses would be the lower neutron production as compared to reactions like Deuterium-Tritium (D+He3 still produces neutrons from unwanted D+D reactions).
Deuterium-Tritium produces neutrons, but the only radioactive stuff left behind is the reactor itself, and the isotopes in question have shortish half lives (tens of years for the most part). D+T is the only way to go for the forseeable future:
-First, we know we can build a D+T reactor. We know this because we already have. It doesn't produce useful electricity, and requires more work to be economical, but it's the only reaction to acheive breakeven.
-Second, Deuterium is easy to get.
-Third, Tritium is a little annoying to get, but heavy water moderated fission reactors produce the stuff as a waste product, and those aren't going away anytime soon even if we get fusion working. Also, a D+T reactor will be able to breed its own Tritium from waste neutrons and Lithium once it's running. Lithium is easy to get.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Wouldn't need tons of material at those velocities. Inertial weapons have been theorized for quite some time: Pournelle and Niven's novel Footfall quite graphically portrayed the power of such weapons. In that novel, the hostile elephantine aliens simply orbited chunks of rock around our planet, each with a one-shot engine that could halt it's orbital progress upon command and allow it to fall to earth. A guidance system was attached that would allow the falling object to hit designated targets. A fifty pound rock falling from twenty-odd thousand miles can do a lot of damage and needs no explosives.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, apart from being simplistic, jingoistic and offensive, it's wrong
Art. 11 Sec. 2. The moon is not subject to national appropriation by any claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
But what is the SIGnificance?
Indeed. The total stored energy of TNT is about 4 MJ (megajoules) per kilogram.
The kinetic energy of an object dropped from the Earth-Moon L1 point is about 50 MJ per kilogram. Adding explosives to any such device would be entirely a waste of time.
~Idarubicin
The only problem: the reactor technology for converting helium 3 to energy is still in its infancy.
Oh, yeah, and it's also on the moon.
Did you miss the part about there being an estimaged 1,100,000 metric tons of the stuff on the moon?
:)
;)
If *only* the USA was using this source of fuel to power the nation there would be enough to last 44,000 YEARS.
By the time this becomes viable we could in all probability power the entire planet for a few thousand years...
If the technology behind He3 recactors works as theorised we will have viable and clean nuclear power.
Also, since our moon has tons of He3 lying around, imagine how much more is out there on the other moons of our solar system.
Also, how far do you think 25 tones of crude oil goes?
The article stated that 200 million metric tons of lunar soil would have to be mined to extract 1 metric ton of Helium-3. It also stated that there is an estimated 1 million tons of Helium-3 on the Moon. Do the math:or 200 trillion tons (billion if you're British
The Moon masses approximately 7.4 x 10**22 kg. So we're talking about extracting 200 x 10**15 kg (1 metric ton = 1000 kg) from 7.4 x 10**22 kg, or about 2.7 millionths of the Moon's mass.
And that's if we take it all . And that's assuming that we don't develop a more efficient means of extracting the Helium-3 over the next few thousand years.
I really wish people would use their brains more than they do...
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Go ahead and mark me flamebait, but remember this: President Bush won! Four more years of excellent, competent leadership. Your loser candidates lost, and President Bush will pack the Supreme Court and rollback the creeping totalitarianism of the past seventy years in this country. He will finish the job that President Reagan gloriously started in 1981.
You lefties are finished. You may as well follow-through on your threats and leave the country because you are no longer welcome here.
The moon isn't exactly a small place. What's to stop some other country from setting up a He3 mining base on some remote part of the moon?
I should have gone into more detail. I'm not suggesting soldiers in space suits marching along, lunar rovers with rail guns strapped to the top or whatever. In any case, it's too expensive to ship the marines into orbit - it's costing a fortune just to supply them in Iraq.
What I'm talking about is control of the supply route to and from the moon / elsewhere. You can mine all the Helium-3 you want but if someone has a missile system that can blow the crap out of the shuttle that brings it back then they have control. The issue is that in Space, there is no terrain to hide behind which for all its size, makes it no different to guarding a narrow pass if you have weapons with the range to cover it - which they could. Sun Tzu say: "When one tiger guard the ford, 10,000 deer cannot pass."
Sure, if someone gets complete control of the world's main energy source, this'll almost certainly be illegal (along with competing energy technologies, such as fission and dirty (H2-H3) fusion), but it's questionable whether terrestrial laws have any force outside the atmosphere.
As we've seen with Iraq, neither the US nor the UK have much compunction about violating international law in their efforts to control the World's energy sources, despite the UK's role in establishing such international law in the first place. There is a treaty preventing the militarization of Space. The US is currently ignoring it and researching ways to keep absolute control of Earth orbit.
Ultimately they'll fail and find it's a long way back down.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Yes. But short of maintaining a military presence in any country you don't like, you can't stop them getting any energy. And look how difficult that is. The USA has by far the most heavily funded military in the world and it's really struggling to hold on to ONE country - Iraq - and the cost is staggering.
If all the world's energy is coming through one "pipeline" however - orbital Heilum-3 supplies - then control can be exerted through controling this one route. Much easier, less dangerous and with a greater area of influence (the World).
If you still see warfare as being about blowing each other up then you have a lot to learn. War is waged for profit or defence. If the US were the agressor then profit could be the only motive. Control of the energy supply is compatible with this purpose. Blowing up bits of other countries with ICBMs is not.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Helium-3 may be the power source of the future, but we should probably figure out how to use it for that purpose first. All it's good for now is making people sound like chipmunks.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.