Asia
Times tells us that there is a "secret mining war" taking
place in space over helium-3, a version of helium which is surprisingly
abundant on the Moon. Helium-3 is an isotope of helium with two protons
and one neutron. The far more prevalent arrangement is helium-4, two
protons and two neutrons.
(For those only vaguely familiar with the periodic table, helium is an element which therefore cannot be manufactured from other other elements and must be harvested from nature.*)
The fascination with helium-3 is as a fuel for fusion reactors. This
fuel, it turns out, would produce absolutely no radioactive waste—unlike
hydrogen-fueled fusion reactors which produce pesky neutrons that bombard
components of the reactor and render them radioactive.
So, let's get this straight. There is supposedly a "secret mining war"
between China, the United States and possibly Russia over potential
resources on the Moon, resources that might provide very clean fuel for
fusion reactors of which there are zero of the commercial variety. And,
the number of commercial fusion reactors is likely to stay at zero until
at least mid-century. And, there is no assurance that the type of reactor
that could use helium-3—which would require much higher temperatures than
the hydrogen-fueled ones being contemplated now—will be commercially available any time
soon after mid-century.
Some of the challenges of building such a helium-3 friendly reactor are
detailed in this
piece. Keep in mind that hydrogen is wildly abundant on the Earth in
the form of water. Even the far scarcer isotope of hydrogen, deuterium—which is used in current fusion experiments—is much easier to obtain than
helium-3 on the Moon and is
commercially available today.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to get helium-3 or other resources from
the Moon. Clearly, humans can retrieve things from the Moon as they have
already during missions by humans and probes.
It is the cost of doing so which ought to warn us that such schemes are
unlikely to succeed.
We have examples of similar challenges right here on Earth. There
is somewhere between 45,000 and 1.5 million tons of gold in the Earth's
oceans. But the gold is so diffuse that the cost of extracting it is
far above the price of gold.
Likewise, the cost of bringing helium-3 from the Moon would be colossal
for reasons of distance and low concentration. Concentrations
are believed to be around 20 to 30 parts per billion in the lunar soil
called "regolith." That implies that a huge amount of lunar surface
would have to harvested and processed to extract an amount worth
transporting. Yes, we might improve our technology over time and make it
less costly to do this. But keep in mind that the technology for
extracting the alternative, deuterium, will likely improve as well,
allowing it to keep its competitive advantage.
The obsession with mining the Moon strikes me as the kind of fantasy that
enters into civilizations when they are faced with huge, seemingly
insurmountable problems—climate change and resource depletion come to
mind—and they want magical solutions that allow them to forego having actually to face those problems.
In the Asia Times story linked at the beginning of this piece, scientists claim that helium-3 is so energy dense as a fusion fuel that "two fully-loaded Space Shuttle cargo bay’s worth of helium-3—about 40 tonnes worth of the gas—could power the United States for a year at the current rate of energy consumption." A Chinese researcher opines that "the Moon is 'so rich' in helium-3, that this could 'solve humanity’s energy demand for around 10,000 years at least.'"
We humans can produce fusion reactions here on Earth—just not ones that
give us surplus energy to use in our society. Humans can bring materials
back from the Moon—just not in any quantities that would justify the
expense.
We as a society seem to comfort ourselves with the idea that technology
will overcome these "small" problems just in time to save us from an
energy-deprived future. That belief is likely the worst product of
narratives that tell us we can import key things that we might lack on Earth from the faraway reaches of
space.
P. S. To read my previous pieces on helium supplies here on
Earth, see here,
here
and here.
*Helium is produced by the decay of radioactive substances, but this process happens at such a slow rate that commercial quantities could not be economically harvested. Particle accelerators and some nuclear reactors also create helium but the amounts are so small and the energy cost so high that these sources are impractical for commercial purposes.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider, and many other places. He
is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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