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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...
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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.
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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.
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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
1.) probably some international treaty says no-one owns it; however, as the saying goes, possession is 9/10th's... 2.) actually, it is renewable. The He3 actually comes from the sun... The moon surface just happens to be efficient at capturing it; and, is conveniently close. 3.) So? It's just 270M miles over that way.
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.
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1) There are _maybe_ 5 entities in existance today (US, China, EU, Russia, India; and the last two are iffy) with the technology to actually even try to mine the moon. So three nations able to send perhaps two dozen men each to a planet, I doubt territorial disputes will be an issue.
2) Yes, it'll run out. In 10,000 years (RTFA), that's about the scope of human history thus far.
3) Yes, it's the moon. It's a big, cold, dead rock. We can mine to our heart's content and not destroy an ecosystem or create a health hazard for a small mining town. If we have to exploit something, I'd prefer it be the moon to the earth any day.
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.
Ok, good. Because seeing how much some people hate H2, it'd be pretty hard to convince them to allow scientists to perfect H3.
(Sorry)
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
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.
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As a vegan wiccan spirtual guide, with a deep knowledge of naturopathic wisdom, a solid foundation in crystal theory and application, and strong belief that humans not part of the natural world (and should therefor leave it alone) - I implore you to leave the moon in peace. She is a sweet silver virgin - it would be the height of hubris to allow her rape by man. We should all return to nature, live in the forest, and let mother earth and her moon sister guide our life choices.
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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.
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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.
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.
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