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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
[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