The Economic Development of the Moon 408
MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Smith, the author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, recently published a polemic in the British newspaper The Guardian, entitled Plundering the Moon, that argued against the economic development of the Moon. Apparently the idea of mining Helium 3, an isotope found on the Moon but not on the Earth (at least in nature) disturbs Mr. Smith from an environmentalist standpoint. An examination of the issue makes one wonder why."
Re:Wonder and amazement (Score:2, Informative)
Re:a thought experiment about a thought experiment (Score:1, Informative)
So, the "mining" process involves scraping regolith off the surface, then processing that to extract the He-3 and a few other exceedingly-difficult-to-extract things, such as water for your manned lunar outposts. Energy for all this processing typically comes from Solar collectors.
But the evil anti-environmentalist in me favors placing large coal-fired power plants on the moon to provide the power for extracting He-3, with the coal being launched into space in large numbers of heavy-lift launches of conventional rockets fueled by any number of exceedingly nasty propellants.
I'm sure it all balances out in the end. Or ends. One of the two.
A lot of dirt, not much helium-3 (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, Helium-3 already exists in smaller amounts on earth. It makes up about 0.00138% of the helium on the earth, as opposed to 0.00138% of helium on the moon. More importantly, it can also be synthesized by deuterium fusion or by tritium decay, although current production is only a few kilograms per year. However, one of the first generation fusion fuels is deuterium, so it's very likely that first generation technology could eventually be used to make fuel for second generation fusion plants.
Second, obviously, we have not achieved practical hydrogen fusion yet, much less helium fusion, which is harder. The current ITER timeline estimates the first commercial hydrogen fusion plants will come online around 2040-2050. Helium fusion, if we decide it's worth the effort to develop, will come later.
Third, you have to move a lot of dirt to get a useful amount of He-3. Estimates are the US alone would need at least 15-20 tons per year for our current electrical generation. At the quoted 0.01 ppm on the moon, that means you need to process 2 billion tons (approx 670 million cubic meters) of regolith every year. In comparison, the giant Three Gorges Dam in China required excavating only 134 million cubic meters of material over a period of 10 years, using thousands of workers and who knows how many tons of heavy equipment.
Additionally, processing the regolith for the helium requires first boiling out all of the gasses by heating the excavated dirt several hundred degrees, then separating the minute fraction of He-3 from all the "waste" gasses. It will be very energy intensive. By my very rough math, every cubic meter of moon you excavate requires on order of 100 kW-hours of heat, so a year's worth of digging would take 47 billion kW-hours. This is about 4% of our current electrical usage, which hints at the scale of the power production facilities that would have to be built on the moon to facilitate this mining...over 5,000 MW of capacity not counting digging and gas segregation energy needs.
Re:Wonder and amazement (Score:3, Informative)
No, it's because the size of the optics was limited by what they could carry in the shuttle. Here's the math [cornell.edu], for the interested.
In any case, pictures from the Hubble will never convince the moon hoax people. If the landings were faked in the first place, how much harder is it to fake a few telescope pictures?
Err...that was a typo. (Score:3, Informative)
As I understand it, the difference is because most of the He-3 on the earth is primordial...from the earth's formation. He-3 from the sun also strikes the earth, but is quickly lost again from the upper atmosphere. On the moon, there is primordial He-3 plus new stuff from the sun that gets trapped in the rock since there is effectively no atmosphere to slow it down before encountering the surface.
The dilution of He-3 on earth is also increased due to radioactive decay producing alpha particles (He-4).
Actually, it's a law of thermodynamics (#2) (Score:3, Informative)
Not for mining, for launch (Score:5, Informative)
The "Helium 3 on the moon" people have it backwards. As someone else pointed out, you have to mine a lot of dirt to get any useful amount of the stuff. On the other hand, deuterium is available at moderate prices. Heavy water costs about $300/Kg. If we ever get fusion to work as a power source (a big if, after half a century of failure), deuterium fusion will work first.
There's some grumbling about deuterium fusion producing radioactive waste products, but it's nowhere near as messy as fission. You get some tritium (which is a useful material; among other things, it decays into ... Helium-3!) and the reactor components may become radioactive, but the isotopes are relatively short-lived; decades, not millennia, of decay time are required. The concrete and steel has already cooled off for many older decommissioned reactors.
Helium-3 fusion is potentially cleaner, though. If we ever get fusion to work, it's the fuel of choice for getting off the earth with fusion power, because you could dump the reaction products into the atmosphere without causing fallout.
So forget about mining the moon to power Earth. Dumb idea. Think about mining helium on Earth to power launch vehicles.
Re:Wonder and amazement (Score:5, Informative)
We're talking about fusion fuel here. Worldwide energy needs can be provided by a few thousand tons of fusion fuel per year. So with the moon's total mass of almost 1e20 tons, it would take hundreds of times the age of the universe to make any significant impact on tides.
But don't worry, it's not going to happen anyway. To harvest usable amounts of the trace quantities of He3 on the moon, we'd have to remotely mine and process countless gigatons of lunar dust. This would be an operation that dwarfs coal mining on earth, but be thousands of times more expensive to carry out. It would almost be certainly easier and cheaper to develop boron/hydrogen fusion technology here on earth, or deal with the drawbacks of simpler deuterium/lithium fusion technology, than to undertake this outer space pipe dream.
'Reefer Madness' (Score:3, Informative)
"Reefer Madness" was a bunch of lies made to induce fear in people. For instance it makes marijuana smokers as being driven to violence, however there is no scientific data to support this. Actually what science evidence there is show it has the opposite affect, it calms people so they only want to relax. That's why the Soviet Union made it illegal, they couldn't afford people who only wanted to hang out.
(it's now in the public domain-Yay!)
Another movie, also in the public domain, on hemp is the movie "Hemp For Victory" [archive.org] which the US government made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the WWII war effort. The current president Bush's dad, former president Bush Sr may have had his life saved by hemp. Bush Sr was in a plane that was shot down in the Pacific by the Japanese and he bailed out, the cords from the parachute he used may of had been made from hemp. Hemp was used for ropes as well as cords. Something surprised me when I looked at the Archives page, it has "Reefer Madness" as the fourth, last, movie listed. I've got the link bookmarked, bookmarked it several years ago at least, and never saw "Reefer Madness" listed before. Maybe because it's now in the public domain.
They admit to 'blowing it out of proportion' to get the public's attention to this new menace being brought across the border by Mexicans,
I can see it now, Thomas Jefferson would of been rolling in his grave when the movie came out. TJ was a farmer who grew hemp on his farm, as many other of the USA's Founding Fathers did. Oh, I see you mention George Washington, yeap he grew it. TJ once wrote that there should be a law requiring farmers to grow hemp, but as he knew such a law would deny farmers their rights he never proposed such a law.
Bach to the point, hemp would be a good addition to the biofuel solution. Easy to grow, prolific, and high yield if cultivated.
Yeap, it is and would be good for that.
FalconRe:space tourism and resources (Score:3, Informative)
There was a McDonald's nearby on the same road, and I don't ever remember seeing a tanker truck come by daily to being them new cooking oil.
Any given restaurant doesn't go through that much oil but a lot of used oil ends up in the waste stream. I worked in some fast food joins and the only thing I had ever heard used oil being used for was adding it to slop to feed pigs. Most of it ends up being dumped though, it's a waste. However it can be combined with raw oil to make biodiesel. That way there's no waste, well not nearly as much. It's not hard to make biodiesel either, basically mix lye and vegetable oil together letting them react for a while, then there will be a separation of liquids. A top film of glycerol, will separate from the biodiesel. And the glycerol doesn't have to be wasted either, it can be used to make body soap.
How much does a typical fast-food joint use per week, and how much biodiesel could be produced from it? How much of that biodiesel would be wasted in the process of collecting that fuel, processing it, and redistributing it?
However it's done, and for whatever reason, used oil still has to be picked up or collected. Even if it means it's put into the dumpster. It has to be disposed of somehow. One of the places I worked at had some steel barrels in back the oil would be dumped into. Weekly then, or whatever, a truck would come by to pick up the oil. For someone to use used vegetable oil to make biodiesel all that would be required is a tank truck to drive to the restaurants where the oil can be emptied or pumped into the tank. Go from the processing plant to restaurant 1 to restaurant 2 then to restaurant 3 before going back to the plant. If the oil were to end up in the waste stream then the restaurant has to pay for disposal, however a biodiesel maker can offer to pickup the used oil cheaper, for free, or pay them depending on the economics.
Falcon