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If Climate Change Is a Problem Then Lunar Helium-3 Fueled Fusion Is the Solution (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: With the Paris Climate Conference apparently ending in failure and experts such as Matt Ridley suggesting that, in any case, global warming is not a cause for immediate concern, the private sector is casting about to fund "green" energy solutions. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are starting a renewable energy research and development fund, for example. The Chicago Tribune pointed to a possible area of investment that Gates and Zuckerberg might look into if they would like to get out of the solar and wind box that many green energy enthusiasts find themselves in. The key to evolving from a fossil fuel energy economy, perhaps, is fusion energy powered by helium-3 from the moon.
3He is hard to find, but relatively easy to make. Pile up some tritium and wait. It decays to 3He with a half-life of 12.3 years.
If we ever get fusion power plants at all we'll start with D-T reactors, which means we'll have to have enough tritium breeding capacity to fuel our reactors, which means we'll have enough production capacity to fuel our 3He reactors with the decay products.
Cheaper than mining the Moon, I would guess.
One of the low points of the US nuclear industry was when they lobbied to get thorium research shut down during the Clinton administration. Nuclear fanboys should take note that the current players just want to collect the rent on 1970s technology and anything better than what they have endangers their cash flow - real progress is limited to military spinoffs. For anything better it's going to have to be government research opposing that lobby group or imported technology.
India has been doing things with thorium but the promising efforts (eg. the accelerated thorium reactor that can also get a lot more out of used uranium fuel rods from other reactor) have been slowed down a bit due to India being offered a lot of the 1970s uranium technology from those same culprits in the US nuclear industry.
I was paying ~$110/Liter STP in quantity a decade back; I got it from the Russkies. It's more expensive now, since they are running out of surplus Tritium.
The thing is, it is vastly cheaper, by orders of magnitude, to simply make 3He here on Earth.
First thing needed is an old Nuclear Reactor, and then a decent source of cheap Deuterium and 6Lithium. (~$18/gm for the Deuts from Chalk River, in the form of 2H2-18O. Pure 6Li is best, but Garden Variety will do- a few bucks a Kilogram.)
Mix together, and start drawing off the Tritium. Let that start to decay, and draw off the 3He. The extraction is the easiest part.
Half of the Tritium decays to 3He in toughly 12.3 years. Interesting things can be done with the accompanying Beta Decays in the meanwhile.
Mining the Moon for 3He is the domain of Bad Science Fiction, and "Engineers" with a BS in BS. 3He is just about the most volatile Element that we know of; it simply doesn't hang around. The SS Cylinders that the Russkies sold us screamed Mass 3 under vacuum on the Residual Gas Analyzers. Even Implanted, straight 3He on the Moon doesn't hang around very long.
We _know_ this. We did all sorts of Isotopic Analyses on returned Moon Rocks, including my favorite, a thin sintered disc probed for 136Xe.
There was more Xenon than 3He, in terms of Parts Per Quadrillion. (Xenon freezes out in the Colder Lunar regions and adsorbs; 3He doesn't freeze out anywhere.)
"In 1985, engineers from the University of Wisconsin discovered that lunar soil samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions contained unexpectedly high concentrations of it."
"Unexpectedly high" meant barely measurable. They weren't expecting to see any at all. Now there can be reasons for this, and it involves the Chemistry of Helium.
Normally, Helium has no Chemistry to speak of. A decade after the Wisconsin Experiments, it was discovered that Helium can form stable compounds in Ionic States. That is, Helium Hydride is ridiculously easy to manufacture as a +1 Ion in a thin Plasma, like those Plasmas found near the Sun. (I made some small contributions to this field.) If an Electron attaches, Helium Hydride dis-associates, but fairly slowly. In the conditions found in certain regions of the Moon, very slowly. It's all very Plasma Chemistry, and I wasn't involved in that aspect of it. I just found a way to make a lot, relatively, of the damn stuff, in what is known as an Electron Cyclotron Resonance Ion Source. (ECR-IS)
Note that in the Sources for this all-too-familiar Timothy Jerk-Off, there is no mention of Gates or Zuckerberg and of their Mining the Moon for 3He, which is still a damn stupid idea.
Timothy just felt that he had something Extra-Special to contribute yet again on a subject that he knows absolutely nothing about. Dammit Timmy!
In short, fission and fusion will both always cost significantly more than the alternatives, because alternatives require less capital and do direct conversion of energy to electricity.
Citations:
http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...
https://matter2energy.wordpres...
[the Onion is] where it belongs. Helium-3 is the dumbest, most impractical solution to our energy problems imaginable. Unicorn farts would be a more realistic power source. We don't actual have any helium-3, and even if we did, it is far harder to fuse, with far less energy out, than deuterium, and deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.
If you're going for a harder-than-deuterium/tritium reaction as your one great hope, Helium 3 is not it.
The logical candidate is p-B (Proton, i.e. light hydrogen, fusing with Boron 11). While it's even a bit harder to light than 2xHe3, and produces about 2/3 the power per reaction. But it's also aneutronic (i.e. 1% of the reactions produce a neutron - in this case about 0.2%). Nearly all of the fusion energy can be extracted as electricity - DC at several voltages in the vicinity of 2 kV - almost trivially, by decelerating and "catching" the reaction product alpha particles. The kicker, though, is that both H1 and B11 are common on Earth, so you don't have to import them from the moon.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way