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If you postulate a still non-existent fusion reactor, and then postulate an enormous industrial lunar mining program- 150 tons of lunar regolith gets you 1 gram
by mandevil 6y ago
If you postulate a still non-existent fusion reactor, and then postulate an enormous industrial lunar mining program- 150 tons of lunar regolith gets you 1 gram of He3- this might, might, might work out. Most people who crunch the numbers think that this will never be sufficient in and of itself to justify a lunar program, it only makes economic sense if it can piggyback on top of a program that exists for other reasons.
If you want helium3, seawater is probably a better source than the moon. The difference between 150 tons of lunar rock and something like five times that of seawater is probably a wash, even ignoring the expense of gravity wells.
- pfdietz 6y agoThere is no significant amount of 3He in seawater. Perhaps you were thinking of uranium?
- playerm1 6y agoDeuterium and Tritium probably.
- pfdietz 6y agoThere's very little tritium in seawater either (and it was mostly put there by hydrogen bomb tests.)
- mandevil 6y agoHelium-3 coming from active seafloor vents has something like 10x (to in some locations 30x) the ratio of 3He/4He in the atmosphere. This is so consistent that it is often used as a way to detect underwater vulcanism. Yeah, it's still an order of magnitude less than in the lunar regolith, but we have lots of experience handling seawater at scale, and we have zero experience handling rocks in 1/6th G at scale, so I would probably bet on it taking a long time for the lunar mining to get to the same effectiveness as the seawater handling.