The Outfall of a Helium-3 Crisis 185
astroengine writes "The United States is currently recovering from a helium isotope crisis that last year sent low-temperature physicists scrambling, sky-rocketed the cost of hospital MRI's, and threw national security staff out on a search mission for alternate ways to detect dirty bombs. Now the panic is subsiding, what is being done to conserve, or replace, helium-3?"
Temporary problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:an outlaw of balloons (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Spread very thin though. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Extraterrestrial_supplies [wikipedia.org]
The Moon's surface contains helium-3 at concentrations on the order of 0.01 ppm in sunlit areas,[40][41] and concentrations as much as five times higher in permanently shadowed regions.[2] A number of people, starting with Gerald Kulcinski in 1986,[42] have proposed to explore the moon, mine lunar regolith and use the helium-3 for fusion. Because of the low concentrations of helium-3, any mining equipment would need to process extremely large amounts of regolith (over 100 million tons of regolith to obtain one ton of helium 3),[43] and some proposals have suggested that helium-3 extraction be piggybacked onto a larger mining and development operation.[citation needed]