The Outfall of a Helium-3 Crisis

astroengine writes "The United States is currently recovering from a helium isotope crisis that last year sent low-temperature physicists scrambling, sky-rocketed the cost of hospital MRI's, and threw national security staff out on a search mission for alternate ways to detect dirty bombs. Now the panic is subsiding, what is being done to conserve, or replace, helium-3?"

Comments

Temporary problem.

[Mt._Honkey]

There are large amounts of He3 being made in heavy water reactors that is not being collected. Until now there has been little motivation to go through the trouble and expense of modifying these reactors to extract it, but it's not THAT hard. At some point it will just be done and then we'll be fine. This is only a short-term problem. DNRTFA, of course.

Re:an outlaw of balloons

[Anonymous Coward]

If the government is so stupid then how did it make all of that Helium-3 to begin with? That stuff didn't come from your beloved "free market," quit making a fool of yourself.

Re:This is easy

[dryeo]

Spread very thin though. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Extraterrestrial_supplies

The Moon's surface contains helium-3 at concentrations on the order of 0.01 ppm in sunlit areas,[40][41] and concentrations as much as five times higher in permanently shadowed regions.[2] A number of people, starting with Gerald Kulcinski in 1986,[42] have proposed to explore the moon, mine lunar regolith and use the helium-3 for fusion. Because of the low concentrations of helium-3, any mining equipment would need to process extremely large amounts of regolith (over 100 million tons of regolith to obtain one ton of helium 3),[43] and some proposals have suggested that helium-3 extraction be piggybacked onto a larger mining and development operation.[citation needed]