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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.
[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.
I think they forgot about a thing or two. For one, after like 50 years, commercial fusion power is still 50 years off. For two, returning mass to the earth going to be cheap. For three, building a mining infrastructure on the moon will be exorbitantly expensive. There are already simpler, cheaper options here on earth.
Quite frankly, the rest of the world would take India and its government a bit more seriously if, instead of making big announcements to the effect that they can pee farther than anybody, they announced the investment in the implementation of a policy to supply with running water, electricity and sanitation to the more than 600 million Indian citizens who lack such basic services.
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It's a lot harder to fuse 3He then 2H, which would be the first step that we haven't taken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Nobody's bothered developing a reactor that uses 3He because there isn't much of it here on Earth.
There's the little issue that He3 reactions are orders of magnitude harder to create and contain than the D-T reactions that we still haven't figured out how to harness.
Not to mention that if you did manage to create super high-tech reactors, then you might as well use boron. It has even less neutron-producing side reactions, and it's plentiful here on earth.
Nobody's bothered developing a power reactor that uses 3He because we haven't even gotten the much easier D-T reactions usable for such things yet.
Nobody *will* bother developing a power reactor that uses 3He because p-11B fusion is just as good (better actually, the more feasible 3He reactions involve side reactions that produce neutrons) and doesn't require processing 2 billion+ tons of lunar regolith every year.
You can make 3He here on Earth, though. That's probably more practical than setting up a remote mining operation on the moon (where the 3He isn't exactly plentiful either)
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
He3 makes things better, but I don't see how it helps enough.
Really it makes things far worse.
The only area where it helps is reducing the neutron damage and activation of the inner reactor parts, which are estimated to run only 5-8% of the capital contribution to the cost of electricity. But the reaction itself is ten thousand times harder to do (D/D fusion is only a few hundred times harder). We have good ideas for doing D/T fusion, that should work (at unaffordable cost) in several decades. We have none for He-3/D fusion, at this point it while the reaction is real, the technology is wishing for pink unicorns.
And then there is the fuel cost. One kilogram of D can be bought today for $3000. To get the equivalent amount of He-3 from the Moon you have to process ~300,000 tons of regolith on the Moon, and ship it back to Earth. Show me any sort of conceptual process that can do this for a penny a ton. Here on Earth currently total ore extraction and processing costs are in the range of $2 to $200 per ton, it is not going to be 100 to 10,000 times cheaper on the Moon, rather we can expect the reverse to be true.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
And when reactors get to the point where they can make use of aneutronic reactions, there are aneutronic reactions that don't require helium-3. Which do you pick, the most abundant isotope of boron, or the least abundant isotope of helium? Oh, and the easily achievable reactions involving the latter aren't actually fully aneutronic.
Even if you ignore that and press ahead with helium-3...by the time we get there, we'll have been operating D-T reactors for some time, and keeping stockpiles of tritium, which produces a constant stream of helium-3 as it decays.