Mark Whittington discusses the prospects for energy production via He3 mining on the moon. He also discusses the reluctance of the administration to talk about it as a justification for the VSE. I find the latter understandable--I suspect that they fear ridicule if they do so.

And I have trouble buying this statement:

For every ton of Helium 3 extracted from lunar soil, researchers say, nine tons of oxygen, water and other life-sustaining substances, as well as six tons of hydrogen useful for powering fuel cells, would be yielded.

While He3 is much more abundant on the moon than on earth, I have a hard time believing that it's that abundant. There has to be much more than nine times it for those other substances. Oxygen alone is a major constituent of lunar regolith, whereas He3 is a trace element. I'd like to see the basis for those numbers.

Dennis Wingo makes a much better case for using the moon as a source for PGMs. He3 assumes advances in fusion that aren't currently in evidence while the use of cheaper PGMs for cheaper fuel cells is technology that's deployable now...

Yet still, it seems important to find some useful resource up there...

Rand - Here's the article the cites the figures for oxygen, et al extraction along with HE3:

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/GALLERY/pdf/on_wis0604.pdf

Mark, if that's your source, you didn't read it very carefully. It says that for every ton of He3 produced, the excavator produces nine thousand tons of other stuff. Which sounds much more reasonable to me.

Rand - Which is, of course, what I wrote:

"For every ton of Helium 3 extracted from lunar soil, researchers say, nine tons of oxygen, water and other life-sustaining substances, as well as six tons of hydrogen useful for powering fuel cells, would be yielded."

Apparently you didn't read what I wrote very carefully, either. I even bolded the missing word for you. It's "nine THOUSAND tons," not "nine tons."

OK, I just pinpointed the error. The article submitted did say nine thousand tons. Apparently some copyeditor took out the word "thousand." I'll publish the correct in my blog.

IMO good ole lunar silicon, aluminium and iron stand a much better chance of forming a basis for future energy source from moon.

OK, here's the official mea culpa I've posted everywhere, and have copied to the editors of USA Today:

"There's a reference to nine tons of oxygen, water, and so on and six tons of hydrogen for every ton of helium 3 that be be extracted from lunar soil. That should have been nine thousand tons and six thousand tons respectively. I regret the error."

No problem, Mark. Just remember, this is the Internet. We can fact check your ass.

But taking down Dan Rather was a lot more fun... ;-)

The UWisc studies of lunar 3He fusion economics (that were presented in course notes on their web sites, sorry, no URL at hand) found that 3He could be economical, but only if someone was also buying the hydrogen and other volatiles on the moon. By itself it was hard to make the case for mining 3He.

I suspect that the engineering problems of extracting the 3He -- present in very small amounts, even in beneficiated regolith -- will turn out to be harder than they appear on Powerpoint slides.

Maybe the best spinoff of the lunar base will be that it will cause an increase in the fusion budget. It'll be hard to justify those lunar 3He mines if there isn't also a strong concurrent effort to develop the reactors to use the stuff.

Rand - As mortifying as the error was, I do appreciate it. I'm told that the paper will run some kind of correction and I'll reference it as soon as it does.

That is by far the most optimistic estimate I have ever heard for successful He3 fusion. Not just breakeven, not just for D-T, but positive energy production for D-He3 in 10 years? I seriously doubt it, especially if this is supposed to be a practical reactor instead of a "Do it at all cost" project. For some time, my feeling has been that Lunar He3 mining was the worst type of argument for space development: A "Gee Whiz" Holy Grail energy solution that requires technology we don't have, and assumes we know more about the availability of the resource than we actually do. We have to promote things that we have reasonable certainty can be done, not things that may never be practical, especially when there are obvious alternatives.

I think you could make a case for doing some experiments to better establish the practicality of Lunar He3 production, and if it looks good, cautiously move further on this, but I wouldn't make any promises at this early stage.

Reality Check: Current plans for fusion call for a 35 year program leading to fusion power on the grid in 2038. That's D-T fusion, not advanced fuel cycles like D-He3 or He3-He3. I believe that with a focus on innovative approaches that could be cut to 20 years, but mine is a minority opinion within the fusion community, and that's still D-T, not anything involving He3.

Realistically He3 based fusion fuel cycles are at least 40 years out, and it may well turn out that p-B11 is a better choice for aneutronic fuel cycles. Certainly it's a hell of a lot cheaper than anything involving He3 (think about it: there's no market until the fuel cycle has been shown to work, and there's no way to show that it works without using pretty much the world's entire existing supply of He3 in the testing phase). Unless we are already extracting huge amounts of volatiles from the moon, with He3 as a byproduct, the chicken/egg problem will leave He3 in the dust relative to other fuel cycles.

Finally, there's the issue of why aneutronic fusion is so damned important anyway. With careful management neutrons need not be a major problem. A fusion power plant would produce several orders of magnitude less waste than a fission plant, even running on D-T. More problematic is the Tritium inventory, which if it leaks (and it will) will eventually make its way into the local water source, providing a major PR problem, if not a public health crisis. The solution to that is to use a D-D fuel cycle, with the reaction products kept in the power core for secondary burning (the D-D reaction produces Tritium and He3 in roughly equal proportions). This eliminates the need to breed Tritium in a lithium blanket, and produces only helium 4 as a reaction product. Reactor activation can be minimized by careful choice of materials.

Long story short, forget He3 as the killer app for lunar resource exploitation. Rocket fuel from volatiles, or PGMs from impact sites are much better bets. For the very short term, if you could bring back as little as a few liters of lunar water you could probably sell it as a novelty beverage for the insanely rich at prices on the order of $1000/ml. Just think about it - you make up some fancy shmancy beverage using the most expensive liquers, throw in some gold flake, package it in high end cut crystal with a lunar motif, add a ml of lunar water per flagon and flog a flagon for $10,000 a pop. Not enough to fund a full expedition, but perhaps enough to reduce the losses a tad.

Andrew, your comment was great, but it would have been better as a post. ;-)

Andrew,

When I was a young lad in the early 70's, the pop of the local mom n' pop store told me that the astronauts made 'Moon Pies' on the moon.

Perhaps I could set up a real moon pie factory!

Yes, thanks, Andrew. Nice to see you here. That would have made a great post. Since I'm not in the field, I didn't feel comfortable saying that Lawrence Taylor's time estimates were impossible, but they looked radically improbable based on everything I've ever seen before on the subject.

Fusion Power has proved to be little more than a money pit for the last 50 something years, with little to show up. So how will expensive unobtainium He-3 fusion maginally solve this?

Go Fission Power.

GodZirra: fusion has turned out to be harder than hypsters have said, but it's deeply ignorant to say there's been nothing to show for the last five decades of research. Plasma parameters and fusion energy production have increased by many orders of magnitude over that time. Plasma physics has advanced enormously. Many new and exciting engineering concepts have been (and continue to be) invented.

Andrew: may I assume you consider tritium storage to be an Achilles heel of so-called '3He-catalyzed DD fusion' (a scheme proposed for dipole reactors)? This scheme uses DD fusion, but quickly removes the tritium before it can fuse, instead allowing it to decay to 3He which is then burned. Needless to say, if that scheme were practical, it would be a serious blow to the idea of mining 3He in space.