Former Senator Wants to Mine The Moon

MarkWhittington writes "Harrison Schmitt, Apollo Moonwalker, geologist, and former United States Senator, recently presented a plan to solve the world's long term energy problems by developing fusion power fueled with helium-3 mined from the Moon. He presented this plan in a speech at Williston Basin Petroleum Conference."

Comments

Why is this notable?

[artor3]

We've known for ages that helium-3 is a good potential fusion fuel, and that mining the moon could be a good source of it. But we don't have fusion power plants yet, nor are we particularly close to getting them. So why talking about mining fuel that we're at least twenty years away from being able to use?

Re:Why is this notable?

[SharpFang]

...because it's at least 20 years until the mining operation will be possible to start.

Also, think of all the nice things we got as a total by-product of the space race. Helium-3 is the tip of an iceberg. Permanent moon base, self-sustainable spacecraft to travel earth-moon on routine route, possibly fusion spacecraft propulsion, humans not only getting to the moon but going there routinely, experience in space mining in general (asteroid belt anyone?) and generally a significant leap towards making space travel easy and common.

It doesn't even have to be really profitable. It would be nice if the helium-3 deposits paid for the investment, but it's all the tech developed to get this to work, where all the REAL profit would happen.

Re:Why is this notable?

[X0563511]

Well, don't forget that the world is running out of helium as it is. Even if fusion fizzles, having a source of the stuff in hand is better than not.

Do you realize how many hi-tech things need helium at some point in their creation or use?

You do like being able to get an MRI, for example?

Re:Why is this notable?

[RsG]

...because it's at least 20 years until the mining operation will be possible to start.

Actually, that's pretty pessimistic.

The last time we went to the moon, it took around twelve years of R&D, using tech that's positively antiquated by modern standards, and with no precedent whatsoever to show that it was even possible to send a person to the moon and bring them back alive.

If we were to repeat that process now, we'd have the advantage of automation, precedent and over half a century of R&D to start with. And since we're talking about a mining operation, we could remove the human factor altogether, and rely on teleoperated machines (granted there's that three second delay to contend with, but there are workarounds). The total amount of He-3 fuel needed to make the trip worthwhile is small, and an unmanned return vehicle could use methods not suitable to human spaceflight.

Not that I wouldn't like to see more work on manned spaceflight mind you, but I think you're overestimating the amount of infrastructure needed for this kind of work.

Re:Why is this notable?

[The Wooden Badger]

The Chinese could do it in 10? I hope that doesn't turn out like their high speed trains.

Re:Why is this notable?

[RsG]

Not really applicable to the discussion, unfortunately.

The amount of He-3 needed to fuel a hypothetical fusion power plant is small. Like "a handheld tank per year" small - that's the kind of energy density we're talking about here.

A lunar mining operation to get the fuel and bring it back to earth would cost a fortune in terms of dollars to grams. Uncut cocaine would be cheaper. The only reason mining the moon for He-3 makes sense is because the quantities needed are small enough that the fuel cost in dollars per watt is pretty reasonable. But you would not be using lunar helium as a cryogenic liquid or lifting gas, period.

Re:Why is this notable?

[khallow]

And since we're talking about a mining operation, we could remove the human factor altogether, and rely on teleoperated machines (granted there's that three second delay to contend with, but there are workarounds).

Or just suck it up. There's equipment on Earth (for example, large aircraft) that have significant lag in their control mechanisms. A few second delay is a lot, if you're juggling balls. It's nothing, if you're driving heavy mining equipment.

As another example, I saw MMO players who have had lag on the order of tens of seconds to minutes. If you're doing mostly automated stuff (such as beating on a mob or driving a partly self-piloting rover on Mars), then you can still do it even with long delays.

Re:Why is this notable?

[dadioflex]

There's a company called Nautilus Minerals that's developing technology to mine copper sulphide deposits 1600m under the sea and 30km off-shore. They're probably a good 2-3 years away from pulling that off commercially. I suspect that a lot of the remote controlled, hostile environment mobile drilling platform technologies they're working on would be compatible with exactly the sort of moon operation you envisage. If you check out their website, there are some cool underwater shots under the mediakit tab.

Re:Why is this notable?

[rainmouse]

World is only running out of helium (one of the most common elements in the universe) because the USA holds half of all the reserves and is selling it off at an artificially low price. It may run out in 30 years time because this useful element primarily wasted in pointless things like balloons at carnivals.

Re:Why is this notable?

[AchilleTalon]

If something like digging moon's ground for He-3 is to happen, it shouldn't be done sending humans and establishing an inhabited permanent moon base, it should be done sending robots there. It is a complete waste of resources to send humans there. Robots and automated systems and semi-automated systems can do it efficiently if it worth to do it. Humans are inefficients, costly and vulnerables at this job.

The whole humans on the moon and humans travelling the solar system, space mining or whatever else you call that thing is just a wet dream to flatter the national identity, it has nothing to do with doing actual work.Robots, probes, semi-automated systems is the way to go.

Re:Why is this notable?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Lets run some numbers.

He3+He3 gives 12.9MeV of energy per reaction. Thus 1 mol gives 619GJ, or 206 GJ per gram. Assume 1.5 GW power station would produce an average of 1GW all year. That is 31.5e15 J for the year. Assume a 50% efficiency and we need 306 kg of He3 per year. At STP that is about 2000 cubic meters of He3. Now in the Luna surface He3 is only at .01ppm. So at 100% mining efficiency we need to process 30 million tons of rock. In reality you would be very lucky to get 50% efficiency and you still need to consider how much of that He3 you need to burn to run the mining operation. So it is probably closer to 60-100million tons of Luna rock per year.

And thats for just one power station.

Now lets consider the fact that D+T fusion is not here yet and that He3 fusion is more than a 1000 times harder to do. In fact if you can run a He3 fusion plant you can run a DD fusion plant for a fraction of the cost since it is more that 10 times easier to do. Also the ash from DD is He3! It would be cheaper to have DD fusion He3 breeder reactors, than to mine the moon.

He3 is something moon fans bring up since they can't think of any other reason to go there.

Re:Why is this notable?

[Custard Horse]

It that argument a little sensationalist? How much of the world's helium is squandred on pointless activities such as the aforementioned balloons?

Is this the same argument as motor vehicles causing pollution whereas motor vehicles account for only a small fraction of that pollution?

Re:Why is this notable?

[Arlet]

It's much easier to just not care about long term survivability.

Re:Why is this notable?

[RsG]

I'm not going to ask how you knew that. I for one did not, but assumed it was much more expensive, at least for the end user (obviously cheaper further up the supply chain).

Next time I'll use weapons grade plutonium or HP inkjet cartridges as my point of comparison. :-)

Re:Why is this notable?

[Arlet]

The point of progress is that you get to reap the benefits yourself. Setting up a moon base, so that people 10 million years from now have a place to go to when a big asteroid hits has no benefits to yourself, your children, grand children, or anybody you know.

Re:Why is this notable?

[RsG]

A fusion reactor is not hypothetical.

A "fusion power plant" is.

Please note the distinction. A reactor is not a power plant. A power plant generates power, by any number of means for any number of purposes. A reactor causes a controlled reaction to happen. Research reactors, chemical reactors, bioreactors and breeder reactors are not (necessarily) power plants, though hybrid breeder/power reactors are fairly straightforward.

A power plant based around a reactor (i.e. modern fission plants and hypothetical fusion plants) belongs to both categories.

ITER, JET et al are experimental reactor designs; they are the basis for as-yet-unbuilt future reactor designs intended for use in power plants. They do not generate power themselves. For now, fusion power plants remain hypothetical.

(And yes, this is incredibly pedantic/semantic nitpicking on my part, but you did incorrectly correct me on a semantic issue.)

Re:Why is this notable?

[BeShaMo]

But what about my genes? Won't anybody think of the GENES?!?!

Re:Why is this notable?

[jecblackpepper]

And indeed may harm you, your children and grand children by diverting resources that could have been used to improve the human condition on Earth. How many hospitals, wells, schools etc could be built and maintained for the cost of building and operating a moon base.

Re:Why is this notable?

[estestvoispytatel]

He3 production is not about mines, but rather a kind of harvester moving with the constant speed and heating top 15 to 60 cm of Lunar soil up to 600 degrees Celsius.

Re:Why is this notable?

[countertrolling]

An orbital loop between earth and moon would require no propulsion at all once established except for course corrections. It's a 'free ride'

Re:Why is this notable?

[Talderas]

They can do it in 10, but only if they get their entire population to sign a no-suicide pact.

Re:Why is this notable?

[rgbatduke]

This is a slight exaggeration and subject to unrealistic assumptions. Read (for example) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions -- at reasonable efficiencies, it would require close to 80 kg of fuel to run a 1/2 GW power plant, "hand held" only if you are a pretty strong person. To provide all the electricity required to fuel all the homes in the US it would require roughly 20 tons of He3 a year. To replace ALL energy sources used by the US would require roughly 25 times that, some 500 tons a year. If we pretend they are metric tons to make the arithmetic easy, that's 5x10^5 kg, where the bare "cost" of getting off the moon is roughly 3 x 10^6 J/kg, the actual cost again many times that. And these numbers all assume that we have significantly passed break even in the fusion reaction itself, something that we currently haven't done -- if the best we can do in fusion efficiency is 10%, multiply all of these numbers by 10 (for example). Suddenly our 1 GW power plant requires 1600 kg of fuel and no, you can't carry it around.

Abundant energy on the moon is no problem -- both solar and hypothetical He3 burning give you ELECTRICITY, but electricity is nearly useless for lifting spacecraft in all models except Heinlein's imaginary mass drivers. So we either have to lift real chemical fuels from the Earth to the moon to be able to ship the stuff back or tackle an enormous engineering task on the moon -- no simple "drop a bunch of He3 scavenging robots" but building a mass driving linear accelerator long enough to accelerate payloads to 2.38 km/sec (2.8x10^ Joules/kg). Suddenly we're spending a small fortune on energy to lift the fuel back to earth. Paradoxically, if we burn hydrogen and oxygen as reaction/rocket fuel to lift it back, we will be wasting more fusion energy in the rocket fuel required to lift it back than we are gaining by lifting it.

What was that? Wasting more fusion energy than we gain? The problem is this: If we can burn He3, we can damn well burn D-D and D-T. One hydrogen atom in 6400 is Deuterium right here on Earth. One ninth of the mass of the oceans is hydrogen. Concentrating Deuterium in water (making "heavy water") is straightforward, 70 year old technology and is still done for certain nuclear power plants because it makes a better moderator than ordinary water -- it is economic to do, in other words, in spite of the fact that it isn't even a fuel (there is more energy available by perhaps and order of magnitude in the moderator than in the fission fuel load of a plant that does this, if D-D fusion were efficient at all). The ocean has a mass of 1.4x10^21 kg, or 2.4x10^16 kg of Deuterium. Allowing for higher efficiencies (it requires a higher temperature and pressure to burn He3 because of its greater charge, so it is basically certain that D-D fusion will always be more efficient than He3-anything) but lower yield per reaction as a wash, we might burn as much as 2500 metric tons worldwide per year, but let's be lavish and assume 10,000 (or 10^7 kg). That means there is enough Deuterium in the oceans to fuel world civilization at a significantly higher per capita energy consumption than we now have for a few billion years -- at least a billion before the concentration of D in the ocean is even close to being halved.

So actually, lunar mining of He3 isn't just stupid, it is insanely, massively, stupendously stupid. It is a thinly veiled attempt by a former astronaut to try to keep the enormously expensive space program funded by inventing the most vaporous of vaporware -- the illusion of cheap energy from the moon!

Of course, anyone who has actually read Heinlein knows that the same mass drivers that deliver our fuel in metric ton payloads could deliver e.g. 1 metric ton rocks instead. 1 metric ton of rock hitting the Earth at escape speed is 6x10^10 Joules of heat all released in a second at a single point of impac

Re:Why is this notable?

[Waffle Iron]

Actually, per unit of energy produced, fusion generates far more neutrons than fission, and they're generally at higher energies. (Think about how many more atoms there are to react in one gram of hydrogen vs. one gram of uranium.) Finding materials that can handle this higher neutron flux is one of the biggest unsolved problems in fusion research.

For D-T fusion, they do need as many of those neutrons as possible to try to breed enough tritium from a lithium blanket to fuel the reactor. It's not clear that the breeding will be efficient enough to generate the required amount of tritium.

Re:Why is this notable?

[rgbatduke]

No, silly beanie! I'm happy to support NASA and going to the moon to gain knowledge. Going to the moon to mine He3 would never, ever, ever be as efficient in the knowledge gaining arena as going to the moon to gain knowledge, though. That's like saying that if I go into my backyard and dig in the dirt looking for fishing worms I'll learn as much as I would going into my back yard armed with a microscope and systematic plan of study (and carefully directed investment for future study). Simply not so.

Mining the moon is a complete boondoggle, you've hit the nail square on the head. Make the case for NASA and moon settlements straight up, without the boondoggles.

As for the charged particle extraction of energy and so on -- please. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Dilithium crystals might allow us to extract stray antimatter from universe-prime (the antimatter one that is separated from our real one by a thin symmetry barrier) so we could turn garbage into energy (my name isn't Doc Brown for nothing:-) once we learn how all of this works. Right now (and I reiterate) we cannot even reach break even for D-D or D-T fusion! I repeat, we cannot reach break even.

It requires significantly more energy and significantly higher pressures and temperatures to burn Helium than Hydrogen. We can't even manage sufficient confinement pressures/temperatures to fused Hydrogen, and here you are planning to mine the moon for He3? Deuterium, as I've pointed out, is so plentiful that we will exhaust the Earth's supply not long before the Sun itself has changed state to the point where the Earth isn't habitable anyway (if not long after that -- the Sun is still a pretty big question mark). Who could possibly care how much it costs to build a power plant that burns inexhaustible, dirt cheap fuel? Especially when you add to the cost of the alternative fuel going to the moon to find it and ship it home?

So how about we agree to:

* First, build a D-T reactor that actually makes more energy than it consumes.
* Second, build a D-T reactor that actually makes a lot more energy than it consumes, and get D-D and so on to work in it as well at a high fusion yield per joule of energy spent obtaining it.
* Third, build a D-D/D-T power infrastructure that burns all of the nice, cheap, abundant fuel this represents, while continuing to work on He3-He3 and other considerably more difficult fusion reactions.
* Fourth, if and when we achieve break even and then well beyond break even for He3-He3, we can look at the economics of mining He3 vs the well-established D-D/D-T technology, given the technological landscape for space travel at that time. If it makes sense, everybody will do it, because marginal profit is marginal profit. If it doesn't make sense, well, we'll just keep on burning that nasty old Deuterium for the next billion years or so, won't we?

In the meantime, I'm all for continuing the support of NASA and moon trips and Mars trips and Jupiter trips, building space stations and putting up enormous space telescopes, bringing back moon rocks and visiting Titan to look for life, and above all setting up a high post and technology base for intervening early (far away) in the event an asteroid/comet should appear coming in out of the Oort cloud on a collision course with Earth. Heck, I'm all for developing a nuclear-bomb driven mass driver specifically for this purpose! But let's not lie and try to get people to go to the moon to mine He3 that we might be able to use -- or might not be able to use -- one day, just because we want to trick them into funding all of this.

OK?

rgb

Re:Why is this notable?

[DCFusor]

Kudos to the parents here for mostly getting it right. Fusion is what I work on every day myself. I particularly appreciate the running of the numbers above -- that's something I have to do all the time to get the starry-eyed a little perspective on things.

DD fusion splits between two main reaction pathways that give He3 for one and tritium for the other, about half and half when the fusion is done thermally (without polarizing the input nuclei). DT fusion makes much more energetic neutrons (very roughly 13 MeV vs about 2.5 MeV) that do more materials damage than straight DD does, but is being considered as it's got about 100 times the reaction cross section -- easier to do -- except for that little materials problem. Any (hydrogen isotope based) fusion reactor is thus to some extent already a breeder from the DD reactions in it.

It's not so much that you make the materials radioactive in a reactor as it is hydrogen embrittlement from all those neutrons (the ones not captured in a nucleus decay into hydrogen) -- things get too weak as a result.

We have high hopes of course, but the two fusion reactors we've built here on an "amateur" basis are mainly good for a loud neutron source that can be turned on and off with a switch. Much smaller than a fission reactor for making isotopes of things. And safer.

Much of the energy in fission comes from later decay of the fission products in the form of beta, alpha, gamma radiation, and slashdot readers who followed the cooling issues at Fukishima should know that - a big problem with fission is that you can turn the fission off easily, but not this secondary decay and heat, you just have to wait -- and cool while waiting. Fusion reactors aren't a problem in that regard, and some types can even be fast-pulsed to get short bursts of neutrons used in time of flight experiments.

Heck, I think we should be going to the moon at any rate myself -- this may not be the best reason, but whatever gets us there to a real presence off earth suits me fine. I'd be quite surprised if we didn't find a way to make it worth the effort, He3 or not.

BTW, there is a worldwide shortage of He3 used for neutron detectors and some cryogenic dilution refrigerators, largely due to an excessive demand by DHS to make detectors for everywhere they can think of. It's got real scientists in somewhat of a tizzy as good sensitive neutron detectors are priced out of sight and backordered at that. There is also somewhat of a tritium shortage, with the reduction of its production for nukes (a good thing I suppose).

Didn't read TFA yet...

[myoparo]

but what's with the title of this story?

"Former Senator Wants to Mine the Moon"

Wouldn't it be more informative and important to mention, in the title, that he is one of the few people to actually walk on the moon?

Something like:

"Apollo Moonwalker Believes We Should Mine Moon"

Or, if you really want that Senator in there...

"Former Senator, having walked on the moon, now wants to mine it"

Re:Didn't read TFA yet...

[QuantumG]

Neither actually make the idea any less retarded.

But apparently if you were one of the spam-in-a-can heroes of the 60s space program we're required to accept everything you say as gospel until you die.

Which won't be long now.. http://www.xkcd.com/893/

Briilliant

[frovingslosh]

If we only had helium 3 we could easily have fusion and a limitless source of energy. Good thing that there are no other technical issues to resolve. So clearly we should take mining equipment to the moon, mine the helium 3 that might be there and then send it back to earth in huge rocket ships, no matter how much energy all of that expends. This message was brought to you by a former U.S. Senator, so you know there is no need to question the logic behind it.

Helium Shortage

[Mantrid42]

This proposal might seem outlandish, but a global helium shortage is a very real problem that we're going to have to deal with soon. Many, many industries rely on helium, and the price is artificially low since the government is trying to sell off its reserves by 2015. Aside from fusion (or somehow mining the sun), there's really no way to get new helium (it's a noble gas, there are no naturally occurring helium compounds).

Re:Helium Shortage

[Arlet]

This plan won't help. There is no significant amount of regular helium on the moon. This is about the rare helium-3 isotope, of which is there is only 1 ppm on the moon, and even less on earth.

Re:Nice idea but a few missing steps

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 3: cloning astronauts

Step 4: suspended animation

Cart Before The Horse

[sudonim2]

First you have to be able to generate more power with fusion than is consumed generating it. We haven't done that yet. Also, all current fusion generator designs generate low-level radioactive contamination. So fusion will have the same long-term radioactive waste disposal problems as fission power currently does. If you're going to mine the moon, mine the aluminum and magnesium and make orbital mirrors for an orbiting solar-thermal plant.

A little premature.

[Sitnalta]

Shouldn't we... I dunno... invent sustainable fusion first? It's kinda like buying the cart before the horse. If the cart was three hundred thousand kilometers in space.

How about using the *existing* fusion reactor?

[iksbob]

You know... The huge one with the gravity well that holds the solar system together? What do they call that thing again? Oh yeah... Sol.

Seriously though, photovoltaics have hit and are now past grid parity. First Solar is already in the process of constructing a 2,000 megawatt solar farm in China, which is expected to produce power CHEAPER THAN COAL. This is without subsidies, tax credits or other financial BS. Another 1,700 megawatts of contracted capacity is scattered around the US, to be online by 2017.

I don't see how ferrying fusion fuel back from the moon could be cost effective compared to solar, even if it's done by automated harvesters.

What, USA copies China?

[davevr]

The stated mission of the Chinese Space Program is to mine helium 3 from the moon. I believe their target timeframe is by 2050. At the rate we are going, they will probably still beat us. Wasn't there a story once about a turtle racing a rabbit?

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2006-07/26/content_649325.htm

I'm sorry, that will not be possible

[scsirob]

He can't do that. I own the moon, according to this certificate I bought years ago.
Please have him call me to negotiate a deal first.

Re:its impossible

[khallow]

its impossible just like mars.

Last I checked, the Moon and Mars both existed and were viewable with the naked eye. That makes them something other than impossible.

mining the moon is easy

[simoncpu was here]

Just point your portal gun at the moon.

Stupid "Helium-3" idea.

[Animats]

First, after more than half a century of work, we don't have a controlled fusion technology that generates more power than goes in. Not even close.

Second, if we did, it would probably be a deuterium-tritium reaction, which can be started at much lower energy levels. That's a good way to generate energy if it can be done. It does generate neutrons, though, which means that the containment tends to become radioactive over time. This probably means having some mildly radioactive metal to deal with. That's not a big problem.

D-T fusion also produces tritium, which is valuable,and in 12 years or so decays into ... helium-3.

So if we ever get fusion going, we'll probably have excess helium-3. Helium-3 fusion is cleaner, in that the outputs are helium and protons - no annoying neutrons. If we ever get fusion working, we'll probably see D-T fusion for fixed plants, and He3 fusion for spacecraft, with the He3 coming from the D-T plants.

Re:Stupid "Helium-3" idea.

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>D-T fusion also produces tritium

Before anyone jumps on Animats, this must be a reference to the idea of putting a lithium blanket around the fusion reactor to catch neutrons. The neutrons' reaction with the lithium produces helium and tritium.

Re:*Does math on max number of years*

[khallow]

The helium 3 is concentrated in the regolith, the surface cruft that comes from continual meteorite bombardment. That's because the original source of helium 3 is from the Solar Wind. So if you're drilling holes 1,200 km deep, you're going to miss that.

Wouldn't it be nice...

[Ardeaem]

...if there were already some kind of giant fusion reactor near us in space? And what if that giant fusion reactor were constantly beaming some of its energy at us? That would be AWESOME.

Hot-fusion is always going to fail

[nido]

The real interesting work is being done by the "low energy nuclear reaction" researchers.

Did you hear about the Italian, Rossi? He's fusing a nano-nickel powder and hydrogen to create copper. Newest Cold Fusion Machine Does the Impossible ... Or Does it?:

"Basically, there's a new physical effect that I think was found in the lab more than 20 years ago by Fleischmann and Pons [University of Utah electrochemists who were later derided for their work on cold fusion]," said Peter Hagelstein, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and one of the most mainstream proponents of cold fusion research. "It was not accepted by the scientific community. It's been laughed at and criticized. However, over the years the effect has continued to be seen."

As Max Planck said, "science advances on funeral at a time." Wall Street and the ghost of JP Morgan (Tesla-suppressor #1) are not going to be happy once these things hit mass production...

Re:Our inherited legacy

[jcr]

Not to mention, there's no trees to hug up there.

-jcr

He's past it

[benjfowler]

I'm reminded of the sad stories about the father of the thermonuclear bomb, Edward Teller, as an old man, shuffling about the place with hand-built models, trying to sell the idea of building ever-bigger fusion weapons, oblivious to the fact that he was just being humored and smiled at, by the youngsters who by then, had realised that one would bring to bear far more destructive power with 10x1MT weapons, than with a single 10MT weapon.

It's true: everyone has a use-by date, the point where we outlive our usefulness to the world and just get in the way. That's what retirement is for. There are a myriad of reasons why strip-mining the Moon for He-3 is a dumb idea; the old man's lost his marbles and needs to quit.

A nice bit of political grand-standing

[golodh]

Not to sound like a sourpuss, but this is nothing but grandstanding. Political grand-standing at that, and with clear ulterior motives.

Now how to I phrase that in a way which is close to your heart? Yes. Consider the funding. Why aren't there any private investors lining up to finance this scheme, eh? He pitched this idea at a petroleum conference, so plenty of parties with deep pockets. None stepped up so far.

So, the good (former) senator tacitly implied *public* funding for his scheme that private investors won't touch. What part of that do you like, as a tax payer?. I personally consider this an attempt to further a hobbyist agenda to revive moon travel, at the public expense, after it was canned. So count me out. There are better ways to spend public money (the best being not to spend it at all).

Secondly: why would we *need* such a boondoggle? We haven't even *got* nuclear fusion operational, despite about half a century of work. Interestingly, the first step in his grand plan is to build a $5 billion demonstration fusion reactor. Nice going! Amidst huge on-going research programmes and demonstration reactors being built (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER for magnetic confinement and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#Inertial_confinement_fusion_as_an_energy_source for inertial confinement) our dear former senator proposes we go it alone and simply build a demo. How cute!

Personally I'm optimistic about nuclear fusion, but it's not going to help us meet our energy needs in the near or medium future. If we're getting away from fossil fuels, then how about first exhausting nuclear fission (yes, despite the Fukushima disaster) geothermal (think the magma reservoir under Yellowstone park; see http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110119-yellowstone-park-supervolcano-eruption-magma-science/ ), and "alternative" energy sources like wind, tidal, and solar?

And lets not forget about energy efficiency, shall we? Energy you don't waste is energy you don't have to generate in the first place. Even now US energy efficiency in all walks of life is about one half to one third of what;s usual in e.g. Western Europe (which has a comparable standard of living). Think home insulation and building for energy efficiency. The usual homes and offices are basically sheds with an airco and a heater installed. Easy, simple, and very wasteful.

Design them with a view to energy efficiency and you can make do with about 20% of the energy consumption of "dumb" buildings. Think efficient cars (this is already happening, albeit not through any foresight: the high price of gasoline is making fuel-efficient cars attractive). All of that is something we can do right now, it's proven technology, and it's cost-effective (at current oil prices).

In third place, just suppose we had nuclear fusion. Why-ever would we *need* Lunar hydrogen? The oceans are chock-full of hydrogen, and a lot of that is deuterium, which ''burns" just fine in nuclear fusion (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion ). So why go all the way to the moon to get Helium-3 eh? Just to rekindle some moon-projects? Not with my money!

And don't forget the issue of ownership rights to the moon. If the US were to take its traditional point of view (being: "finders keepers", or "you get what you can grab"), it will now face *serious* competition from e.g. China. And what about the other BRIC (Brasil, Russia, India) countries? They're going to agree with the US and China ripping up the moon and unilaterally laying claim to all its minerals, are they?

So ... perhaps it's time to re-discover how much we favour the "co

Re:Who owns the moon?

[somersault]

Whoever mines the fuel should own it, assuming that nobody really owns land on the moon yet. The US probably have some claim to their landing zone, but it's a bit tenuous considering they haven't been back for 40 years. I think whoever actually colonises it should stake their claim at the time (it's not like they'll be able to claim the whole Moon at first, they won't have enough people and resources), and until then it's a free for all.

This is what we do

[chocapix]

There's no need for a reason besides the cool factor.

We, as a species, do useless stuff like that all the time: art, science, exploration. This is what makes us different from the rest of the scum that crawls the earth.

Think Big

[YetAnotherBob]

Forget Helium 3. If you can build a mining operation on the Moon, you can ship anything back to Earth for little cost.

Build oxygen/aluminum-carbon rockets. Use them to launch payloads on an earth intercept orbit.

Build basic aeroshells with heat shields. Load anything you like into them. Have them land anywhere on Earth. Pick any lake, if they float, then no landing gear is needed. Tow the thing to a dock, and cut it up. Recycle the entire mass. Iron, aluminum, copper, silica, glass, rare earth elements, it's all gravy. If the asteroids are factored in, then you could ship oil back too. some asteroids are up to 40% oil. How many cubic kilometers do you want?

A couple of hundred people living in Space/on the Moon could pay for the entire space program. Using linear induction motors, you could launch from the Moon without even using rockets.

Remember, the astronomical cost of space is almost all used in getting there. The return trip is as easy as dropping a rock off a cliff. Once it's set up, the rest is easy. Setting it up is very hard (read astronomically expensive), the fist time. But only the first time.