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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.
Sounds like a lunatic's solution
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Well, golly, as long as we can discount the decades of research, engineering, and implementation that would be required to (a) establish a huge industrial presence on the Moon, (b) extract helium-3 in bulk from the lunar crust, (c) transport that He3 in bulk to Earth's surface, and (d) successfully fuse that He3 on an industrial scale to produce power, why don't we hedge our bets with giant space-constructed solar shades and thorough terraforming of Mars?
It is the topic of the movie Moon, which I strongly recommend to all hard SF fans.
Build more nuclear plants
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
harvest antimatter from the van allen belts? I mean if your going to go down the h3 route, just jump the gun and go straight to antimatter.
Fuck it, we're going to h5.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
1) the vast majority of earth helium is He4, which has some undesirable properties for fusion
2) even if it was all He3, there's not a lot of helium. He is light enough that it simply floats away from the earth
-Bucky
There isn't much Helium-3 on Earth. Most of it is Helium-4, produced through radioactive decay. Helium-3 is easy to fuse whereas Helium-4 is quite difficult.
The moon has far more, collected from the solar wind over long periods of time. Still, not exactly tons, but enough that it might be worth going there to get it.
Gag me, thats so 19990's.
How about something we can use now, and is much more abundant?
I am of course talking about Thorium.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I used He3 in my lab (He4 also (refrigerators)). It cost a couple hundred $/liter.
Are the Ray Kurzweil and singularity fanbois / public masturbators off their meds again?
Fusion: D-T fuel is the best fuel for any prospective fusion power plant on the horizon. Heating and confinement are solved problems. Materials that can withstand the massive heat/radiation loads of working reactors are the biggest problems right now. These machines weigh hundreds of thousands of tons. You're NOT going to ship a fusion reactor into space any time soon.
Space: it costs tens of thousands of dollars a kilogram to ship stuff into LEO. And these stupid basement-dwellers are seriously talking about bootstrapping an ENTIRE industrial infrastructure in space to mine a resource which is actually an inferior fuel, for fusion plants that don't exist yet.
It should be a criminal offense (or at least happy-slappable offence) to air such inanity and stupidity in public.
http://www.npr.org/templates/search/index.php?searchinput=climate&dateId=0&programId=0
NPR has had some decent coverage.
Is Matt Ridley an expert?
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
The "one true energy" bullshit is the stuff of people who benefit from that form of energy production or cargo cult fanboys that know next to nothing about that form of energy production. Nothing covers every niche without having vulnerable points of failure. A few dry years and even hydro has trouble.
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.
There are 10 energetically positive fusion reactions, and He-4 is the product of most of them. He-3 reacts with itself to form He-4 and two protons, and most importantly, no neutrons, and it has a high energy yield and relatively low Lawson Criterion so the ignition temperature is near current excitation methods. Deuterium-tritium reactions have a lower Lawson criterion and higher energy yield, but it generates most of it's energy as neutrons which leaves the magnetic confinement field and destroys the reactor materials.
As others have noted, very little He-3 is on the Earth's surface, the nearest source is the dark side of the moon (as the article notes).
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
OMG, not the stupid lunar He-3 myth again. - http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2834/1
There are currently NO better-than-break-even fusion reactors.
There are no He-3 fusion reactors.
Any currently purposed theories/technologies which could (theoretically) use the difficult and rare He-3 + H-2 could instead use the far more common B-11 + H-1.
Saying that there's a lot of He-3 on the moon is like saying there's a lot of gold in the ocean.
Technically true, but practically useless.
From the Summary: "get out of the solar and wind box." Solar and wind is scaling-up very nicely. It is becoming more and more cost effective and is already cheaper than many incumbent solutions. Storage is coming on line with both substation batteries and large scale solutions like pumped hydro. Pumped hydro in the US already has 25 GW built or in development. It is a very interesting way to store energy closer to where you need it such as SoCal storing Pacific Northwest hydro and wind energy that can be transported down at lower current rates off peak for later peak use. Peak power plants can be very expensive as they sit idle, not generating profit, most of the day just waiting for everyone to get home from work and turn on their AC for a few hours.
So, solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources are just pie-in-the-sky hippie fantasies because technological advances are just too far off, but energy from Moon helium is a solid, practical solution?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Perhaps not, but he's been debunked repeatedly. I find it amusing that slashdot would label a politician with no background in science as an "expert" on climate change and the best guys like you can come up to defend this guy are lame dismissals.
Mod parent up.
As for slashdot labeling a politician with no background in science as an "expert" on climate change -- that's just part of the new SlashDice business model:
(1) Post a provocative headline or summary.
(2) Generate traffic to the site.
(3) Collect ad-clicks.
(4) Profit!
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The only thing I'd call Matt Ridley and expert in is climate science denial. But he has motivation because his family owns coal mines.
You can make helium-3 by bombarding lithium-6 with neutrons. As a bonus, you also get plenty of tritium.
You know, it's the climate science deniers that pay more attention to Al Gore than the rest of us.
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!
"Solar is the energy of the future, and always will be." And that was true in a very sad way for the last 30 years. But NOW solar and wind are actually happening. They are already more economical than the market replacement costs of coal and oil, and that's without including the externalized environmental costs of fossil fuels.
So just at the moment when the joke is on fossil fuels for the first time ever, this joker suggest what? That we dump renewables for an unreachable and unproven fantasy? Yeah, that's funny.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
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 only thing I'd call Matt Ridley and expert in is climate science denial. But he has motivation because his family owns coal mines.
He has also invested heavily in fracking, and is opposed to regulating same.
Oh, and he is extremely hostile to wind and solar power.
He must really be panicking about solar and wind since the deployment costs have plummeted, and expansion rates have been averaging 25% annually, year after year. Currently wind and solar 11% of the entire annual electricity production in the EU, yet Ridley keeps asserting that it is impossible for these to make any significant contribution.
Anything to promote burning fossil fuels, which puts dollars directly into his pocket.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Gee, why not look at using unicorn vomit as a fuel. It is more easily obtained and utilized than using He3 from the moon as a fusion fuel.
Look at the website of any major media outside the US. Lots of coverage. BBC, CTV, CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Guardian ... or download their apps.
Also, the first sentence of the summary, "With the Paris Climate Conference apparently ending in failure" is total BS. The summit is only 1/3 through, has 8 days left to go, and is making progress. But of course anyone listening to US media wouldn't know that. Same as the rest of the world knew Saddam wasn't making centrifuges when Colin Powell was lying in the UN.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
[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
There is only ONE reason why Helium-3 fusion could be good... it doesn't produce neutrons, which means all byproducts can be captured by magnetic fields and we don't produce radioactive waste...
BUT (as quite a few people here said)
a) we don't have a working fusion reactor (no matter what reaction)
b) He3 fusion is a lot harder to do than D-T fusion
c) He3 on Earth is practically non-existent. He3 exists in low concentrations in the Lunar Dust...
so lets first get the current energy problems resolved with existing tech (solar, wind, water, ...), then lets get D-T fusion running, then lets colonize the Moon (and maybe a couple of other planets)... and when we arrive at Jupiter and Saturn, we can think about He3 fusion again. ;)
That 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.
Well said. Though you'll find yourself arguing with people who thought you said it's a dumb idea. It's a great idea --- good enough for practical old NASA to drop it into their distant-futurist visions of lunar colonies --- but a dumb solution for Earth right now, even directed research. There's an energy crisis happening down here.
Lunar H3 mining along with the idea of solar energy collected in orbit are 'fails' in my book because both would place Earth society in the grip of the consortium that manages the infrastructure, and that infrastructure (though awesome) would become an absurdly simple single point of failure. These ideas lead directly to One World Government and it's probably not the one you want. Even if it works out it's lights out for mankind when the first Bad Thing, Who'da Thunk It happens.
In order to ensure that nations can maintain their sovereignty, even to ensure there are nations at all, the fossil free energy solution we pursue should comprise power generated directly from elements that can be mined locally with a reasonable footprint, technology that can be manufactured and maintained locally. Mining is a 'given'. If you think wind and PV solar are mining-free solutions, you haven't looked into the process or run the numbers necessary to scale them. Wind and solar and the chemistry necessary for grid storage are environmental disasters waiting to happen.
Grid electricity should become the universal medium of exchange and should be used for almost all ground transportation, and must be available in such abundance that we can use it to manufacture synthetic fuels for air and sea travel. Continental grids should consist of power plants pushing HVDC into regional 'loops' from which tuned HVAC is extracted from several points to power the legacy grids, which can then be separated into smaller islands than are currently used. Efficiently doing DC/AC conversion and the means to better switch and properly utilize HVDC should be a top research priority --- what ever the energy source.
We are also approaching a time when the purification of ocean/waste water and its transport will become a top priority on a scale that exceeds any present oil and gas pipelines. Within fifty to a hundred years' time, additional terawatts of energy will be needed to bring fresh water into regions that are presently depleting water tables faster than they replenish. I'm not just talking tap water. Our food supply relies on massive irrigation. If you think wind and solar could purify and move this much water, let alone power an industrial society, please think again.
It's time to finish taming fire. Nuclear fission and specifically the two fluid molten salt reactor with active processing with it's "safe in 300 years" waste decay profile is the single best and most practical solution yet devised to produce energy on the scale necessary to survive and prosper.
I'm not fond of these so-called "small scale micro-fission reactors" either, where conventional nuclear power manufacturers re trying to trump the safety issue (while aggravating the waste generation problem) by proposing a great many smaller light and heavy water reactors. Yes of course they want to sell one to every town, including yours. It's an absurd notion borne out of the an
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>