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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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

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"

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:Nice idea but a few missing steps

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 3: cloning astronauts

Step 4: suspended animation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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