Politics of a Lunar Colony: How to wean Earth from Oil to Helium-3

AP and also Special to SPACE.com | varried | Julie Wakefield, MARCIA DUNN

[rface]

We've all heard, discussed or read the stories about how Bush is going to propose a new mission for NASA and the establishment of a colony on the Moon and then on to Mars - but I searched through the various posting of this story and saw nothing (very little) mentioned of the promise that HELIUM-3 holds as an energy source.

I wonder why Bush hasn't held out the potential of HELIUM-3. The screaming about how oil based energy has harmed Earth is a talking point that Bush should use. "A big reason we are going to the Moon is to develope an energy source that is safe and plentiful and this great supply of energy covers the Moon."

.

from the Moon/Mars article by AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - President Bush is planning a permanent science base for astronauts on the moon that could serve as a steppingstone for sending humans ultimately on to Mars, according to senior administration officials.

< snip >

Visionaries say observatories could be built on the moon and mining camps could gather helium-3 for conversion into fuel for use back on Earth.

.

Moon's Helium-3 Could Power Earth
By Julie Wakefield
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 05:30 pm ET
30 June 2000

Researchers and space enthusiasts see helium 3 as the perfect fuel source: extremely potent, nonpolluting, with virtually no radioactive by-product. Proponents claim it’s the fuel of the 21st century. The trouble is, hardly any of it is found on Earth. But there is plenty of it on the moon.

Society is straining to keep pace with energy demands, expected to increase eightfold by 2050 as the world population swells toward 12 billion. The moon just may be the answer.

"Helium 3 fusion energy may be the key to future space exploration and settlement," said Gerald Kulcinski, Director of the Fusion Technology Institute (FTI) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Scientists estimate there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year, according to Apollo17 astronaut and FTI researcher Harrison Schmitt.

Cash crop of the moon

When the solar wind, the rapid stream of charged particles emitted by the sun, strikes the moon, helium 3 is deposited in the powdery soil. Over billions of years that adds up. Meteorite bombardment disperses the particles throughout the top several meters of the lunar surface.

"Helium 3 could be the cash crop for the moon," said Kulcinski, a longtime advocate and leading pioneer in the field, who envisions the moon becoming "the Hudson Bay Store of Earth." Today helium 3 would have a cash value of $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil, he estimates. "When the moon becomes an independent country, it will have something to trade."

~

Fusion research began in 1951 in the United States under military auspices. After its declassification in 1957 scientists began looking for a candidate fuel source that wouldn't produce neutrons. Although Louie Alvarez and Robert Cornog discovered helium 3 in 1939, only a few hundred pounds (kilograms) were known to exist on Earth, most the by-product of nuclear-weapon production.

Apollo astronauts found helium 3 on the moon in 1969, but the link between the isotope and lunar resources was not made until 1986. "It took 15 years for us [lunar geologists and fusion pioneers] to stumble across each other," said Schmitt, the last astronaut to leave footprints on the moon.

For solving long-term energy needs, proponents contend helium 3 is a better choice than first generation nuclear fuels like deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen), which are now being tested on a large scale worldwide in tokamak thermonuclear reactors. Such approaches, which generally use strong magnetic fields to contain the tremendously hot, electrically charged gas or plasma in which fusion occurs, have cost billions and yielded little. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER tokamak, for example, won't produce a single watt of electricity for several years yet.

Increases production and safety costs

"I don't doubt it will eventually work," Kulcinski said. "But I have serious doubts it will ever provide an economic power source on Earth or in space." That's because reactors that exploit the fusion of deuterium and tritium release 80 percent of their energy in the form of radioactive neutrons, which exponentially increase production and safety costs.

In contrast, helium 3 fusion would produce little residual radioactivity. Helium 3, an isotope of the familiar helium used to inflate balloons and blimps, has a nucleus with two protons and one neutron. A nuclear reactor based on the fusion of helium 3 and deuterium, which has a single nuclear proton and neutron, would produce very few neutrons -- about 1 percent of the number generated by the deuterium-tritium reaction. "You could safely build a helium 3 plant in the middle of a big city," Kulcinski said.

Helium 3 fusion is also ideal for powering spacecraft and interstellar travel. While offering the high performance power of fusion -- "a classic Buck Rogers propulsion system" -- helium 3 rockets would require less radioactive shielding, lightening the load, said Robert Frisbee, an advanced propulsion engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California.

Recently Kulcinski's team reports progress toward making helium 3 fusion possible. Inside a lab chamber, the Wisconsin researchers have produced protons from a steady-state deuterium-helium 3 plasma at a rate of 2.6 million reactions per second. That's fast enough to produce fusion power but not churn out electricity. "It's proof of principle, but a long way from producing electricity or making a power source out of it," Kulcinski said. He will present the results in Amsterdam in mid July at the Fourth International Conference on Exploration and Utilization of the Moon.

Size of a basketball

The chamber, which is roughly the size of a basketball, relies on the electrostatic focusing of ions into a dense core by using a spherical grid, explained Wisconsin colleague John Santarius, a study co-author. With some refinement, such Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion systems could produce high-energy neutrons and protons useful in industry and medicine. For example, the technology could generate short-lived PET (positron emission tomography) isotopes on site at hospitals, enabling safe brain scans of young children and even pregnant women. Portable IEC devices could bridge the gap between today's science-based research and the ultimate goal of generating electricity, Santarius said.

~

This fall, the University of Wisconsin team hopes to demonstrate a third-generation fusion reaction between helium 3 and helium 3 particles in the lab. The reaction would be completely void of radiation.

"Although helium 3 would be very exciting," says Bryan Palaszewski, leader of advanced fuels at NASA Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, "first we have to go back to the moon and be capable of doing significant operations there."

Economically unfeasible

Indeed for now, the economics of extracting and transporting helium 3 from the moon are also problematic. Even if scientists solved the physics of helium 3 fusion, "it would be economically unfeasible," asserted Jim Benson, chairman of SpaceDev in Poway, California, which strives to be one of the first commercial space-exploration companies. "Unless I'm mistaken, you'd have to strip-mine large surfaces of the moon."

While it's true that to produce roughly 70 tons of helium 3, for example, a million tons of lunar soil would need to be heated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius) to liberate the gas, proponents say lunar strip mining is not the goal. "There's enough in the Mare Tranquillitatis alone to last for several hundred years," Schmitt said. The moon would be a stepping stone to other helium 3-rich sources, such as the atmospheres of Saturn and Uranus.

Benson agreed that finding fuel sources in space is the way to go. But for him, H2O and not helium 3 is the ideal fuel source. His personal goal is to create gas stations in space by mining asteroids for water. The water can be electrolyzed into hydrogen or oxygen fuel or used straight as a propellant by superheating with solar arrays. "Water is more practical and believable in the short run," he said.

But proponents believe only helium 3 can pay its own way.

"Water just isn't that valuable," Schmitt said. Besides the helium, a mining process would produce water and oxygen as by-products, he says.

[rface]

I support a renewed space program - because I can see the potential payoff

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[rface]

for your concideration

[Lokibob]

EARTH FIRST--- We can strip mine the other planets later.

[Brett66]

He3 lunar sources won't be that useful until we have a thriving fusion energy industry. There are plenty of useful things to do on the moon though. One potential industry could be the large scale production a pure glass. Producing glass on the surface of the moon can eliminate impurities that get into it during production on Earth. Lunar glass would have as much strength as titanium.

Also there's no reason why a space on a lunar base couldn't be reserved for tourists,just like the ISS. This could junpstart a lunar tourism industry that could be profitable and sustainable. This would lead to a self-sustaining colony. I think private enterprise can play a much larger round this time.

[rface]

He3 lunar sources won't be that useful until we have a thriving fusion energy industry.

I have a laymans knowledge of the subject, but I thought the He3 is better fusion source than anything else we have available to us ?

[Lokibob]

The President has/will proposed return to the moon early in the next decade. That gives us at least 6 years. More than likely a lot more time to develop a viable h3 industry. Especially if the emphasis is placed on it.

[Viking2002]

I'm with you, brother. I think that NASA has veered off into a rut in the last 20 years. We've accomplised things on Earth in the last few decades that were unthinkable - or envisioned centuries into the future - when Kennedy made the initial push for the moon. Manned spaceflight, on the other hand, has become a political whipping boy and fiscal football, left in the hands of complacent bureaucrats with no sense of bravado or pioneer spirit. They're too worried about their pensions to want to take risks. I firmly believe that there's a million and one adventures and discoveries just waiting for us in our own solar system alone. As long as it's left to the behemoth, do-nothing-know-nothing bureaucracy, and the average citizenry sits around fat, happy, and complacent with their cable TV, microwave dinners, cell phones, and broadband internet connections, we'll just squander new opportunities for discovery and enlightenment. Not to mention wasting our God-given potential (and I do believe that the Almighty wants us out there, learning and growing as a species - it's incumbent upon us to experience the wonders of what He created. He didn't make the cosmos just to amuse himself on the seventh day). I think that the discovery, mining, and use of Helium-3, as good as it may be, doesn't even begin to uncover the potential benefits for mankind, once we finally arise to the challenge before us.

[boris]

Ten thousand dollars per pound of payload, FOB LEO.

End of story.

If God were emplace the infrastructure on the Moon for us, it might break even.

--Boris

[newguy357]

I wonder why Bush hasn't held out the potential of HELIUM-3.

Maybe because he hasn't even made his announcement yet.

[newguy357]

I have a laymans knowledge of the subject, but I thought the He3 is better fusion source than anything else we have available to us ?

And what fusion power plants do we have to use it? Fusion power on a large, useful scale is decades way.

[rface]

Maybe because he hasn't even made his announcement yet.

Yea yea I know, but this whole announcement was fed to the press to get every Tom, Dick and Harry talking about it. You would have thought that these article would have touched on the He3 thingy a little more than they did.

We'll see.

[rface]

I don't think we have ANY fusion plants - but we do have research fusion reactors (I think)

[no-s]

Ten thousand dollars per pound of payload, FOB LEO

Which is $20,000,000 a ton. Using the LEO <==> halfway to anywhere as trivial support, the $4,000,000,000 a ton for HE-3 implies a 20,000% rate of return, FOB LEO.

That would make it worthwhile even if you use stacks of dollar bills for rocket fuel (with lox, isp close to 190, I hear...).

(chortle)

[Brett66]

The ITER project will lead eventually to a prototype commercial fusion reactor. Estimated dates for the completion of research using the ITER have been 2034.

US to Join Negotiations on Major International Fusion Project

[Mike-o-Matic]

   said Robert Frisbee, an advanced propulsion engineer

You just can't make this stuff up.

[Paul C. Jesup]

Did you take into account of current ramjet technology that is ten times for fuel efficent than old rockets, but that NASA has choosen not to use?

[Johnny_Cipher]

That would make it worthwhile even if you use stacks of dollar bills for rocket fuel

And who says you have to send the stuff first-class from the Moon to the Earth? Build a mass driver on the Moon, load it with a few tons of ore, sling it back to Earth orbit, slap a heat shield and a thruster pack on the lump, then deorbit the whole thing straight into the nearest convenient abandoned gravel pit for processing. Voila!

[rface]

that's a good idea

[Johnny_Cipher]

You can mail the royalty checks to:

Johnny_Cipher
PayPal Account 9999
c/o FreeRepublic

I'll even kick in half at the next Freepathon!

:)