The Quest To Find Nuclear Fuel On the Moon (businessweekme.com)

Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East reports: India's space program wants to go where no nation has gone before -- to the south side of the moon. And once it gets there, it will study the potential for mining a source of waste-free nuclear energy that could be worth trillions of dollars. The nation's equivalent of NASA will launch a rover in October to explore virgin territory on the lunar surface and analyze crust samples for signs of water and helium-3. That isotope is limited on Earth yet so abundant on the moon that it theoretically could meet global energy demands for 250 years if harnessed....

[A]ccomplishing feats on the cheap has been a hallmark of the agency since the 1960s. The upcoming mission will cost about $125 million -- or less than a quarter of Snap Inc. co-founder Evan Spiegel's compensation last year, the highest for an executive of a publicly traded company, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index... The upcoming launch of Chandrayaan-2 includes an orbiter, lander and a rectangular rover. The six-wheeled vehicle, powered by solar energy, will collect information for at least 14 days and cover an area with a 400-meter radius. The rover will send images to the lander, and the lander will transmit those back to ISRO for analysis. A primary objective, though, is to search for deposits of helium-3. Solar winds have bombarded the moon with immense quantities of helium-3 because it's not protected by a magnetic field like Earth is.
The European Space Agency points out that helium-3 isotope isn't radioactive and "would not produce dangerous waste products." And one former member of the NASA Advisory Council estimates that the moon-derived fuel could generate enough power to meet the world's energy demands for between two at least two centuries.

Comments

Re:Yeah sure

[dryeo]

It's a lot harder to fuse 3He then 2H, which would be the first step that we haven't taken.

The Hype Is Fearsome

[careysub]

Mapping the helium-3 distribution on the Moon is a worthy scientific endeavor - it will tell us much about how the solar wind interacts with the lunar surface.

But promoting the project for its "nuclear fuel" potential is so out of line with reality that it is deception, pure and simple.

First there is no prospect of building a helium-3 reactor. We currently cannot build a power-producing fusion reactor using the easiest fuel, deuterium-tritium, even though is reaction rate is ten thousand times faster than He-3/D at plausible temperatures.

Second we already can accurately forecast that when we can build a fusion reactor that uses that easiest to burn D-T fuel it will not be able to compete with any commercial source of electricity. The capital and operating costs of such a plant place the electricity cost at about ten times what wholesale electricity has been selling at for decades (an inflation adjusted current $30/MWh). This recent paper (accessible through Sci-hub) places the economics of a D-T plant in the best possible light and comes up with electricity costs due to the high capital cost of $175-$312 MWh*. Remember that He-3 fusion is ten thousand times harder, and we now have to mine the fuel on the Moon.

The only theoretical advantage of He-3 fusion is the lack of neutron emission from the main reaction (side reactions would still produce some). This would greatly reduce the neutron damage that requires periodic replacement of parts in D/T (or D/D) reactor, and greatly reduce the radioactive waste produced from neutron activated components. These are not major contributors to the projected cost of fusion power (the paper above assigns $14/MWh for these combined, 5-8% of the projected costs), so greatly reducing them does little to improve it.

And long before we can build a working He-3/D reactor, we will be able to build a D/D reactor using cheap, plentiful deuterium, available for a few thousand dollars a kilogram on Earth in effectively unlimited supply. The D/D reaction is "only" a few hundred times harder than D/T.

*The paper ultimately claims that it would be competitive, when externalities are costed, mostly by assigning very high externality costs to every other form of power, and assumes that all of that will be some day captured in electricity pricing. Its treatment of on-shore wind, and solar PV is especially suspect since it assigns levelized costs per MWh, 40 years in the future, that are several times higher than current, demonstrated costs now. This is a lot of special pleading.