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rfmcdonaldJean-Louis Santini's AFP article will make some people reading this post weep in frustration. That's right, the lunar Helium-3 meme is on the run again.
Helium-3, a light isotope of helium, is seen by proponents as an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, with collisions of helium-3 with the heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium to produce abundant, radioactive waste-free power. Russia and China have stated their intentions to start mining helium-3 by the middle of the 2010s.
Three problems with this meme come to mind.
The moon still has a great deal of scientific information left to be discovered that relates directly to... our understanding of the history of the Earth and early history of other planets," geologist Harrison Schmitt told AFP.
Schmitt landed on the moon in 1972 aboard the Apollo 17, the last manned mission to ever touch down on the lunar surface. He is among an elite group of 12 Americans who are the only people to have walked on the moon.
[. . .]
Schmitt, a former astronaut, noted that the moon's soil is rich in helium-3, which comes from the outer layer of the sun and is blown around the solar system by solar winds.
The element is rarely found on Earth, unlike on the moon, where it is heavily accumulated because it is pushed away by the Earth's magnetic poles.
Helium-3 is highly sought for nuclear fusion, and though the technology is still in its infancy, the element "will ultimately be quite valuable on Earth," Schmitt said.
"It's not the only solution to the accelerating demand for energy that we are going to see on Earth, but it's certainly one of the major potential solutions to that demand."
Reserves of helium-3 on the moon are in the order of a million tons, according to some estimates, and just 25 tons could serve to power the European Union and United States for a year.
Helium-3, a light isotope of helium, is seen by proponents as an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, with collisions of helium-3 with the heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium to produce abundant, radioactive waste-free power. Russia and China have stated their intentions to start mining helium-3 by the middle of the 2010s.
Three problems with this meme come to mind.
- We don't have fusion reactors: They've always been fifty years in the future. Collecting materials certain to be unusable for decades might not be economic.
- The MIT Technology Review makes the point that helium-3 fusion requires unrealistically extreme conditions in order to actually happen.
- Finally, as Depleted Cranium noted, besides the massive investments required for a lunar mining program and the pointlessness of collecting unusable fuel, there's already plenty of helium-3 on Earth, not least in the form of the decay of the unstable heavy hydrogen isotope tritium.
