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Moon Power Space

The Quest To Find Nuclear Fuel On the Moon (businessweekme.com) 109

Posted by EditorDavid from the space-rocks dept.
Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East reports: India's space program wants to go where no nation has gone before -- to the south side of the moon. And once it gets there, it will study the potential for mining a source of waste-free nuclear energy that could be worth trillions of dollars. The nation's equivalent of NASA will launch a rover in October to explore virgin territory on the lunar surface and analyze crust samples for signs of water and helium-3. That isotope is limited on Earth yet so abundant on the moon that it theoretically could meet global energy demands for 250 years if harnessed....

[A]ccomplishing feats on the cheap has been a hallmark of the agency since the 1960s. The upcoming mission will cost about $125 million -- or less than a quarter of Snap Inc. co-founder Evan Spiegel's compensation last year, the highest for an executive of a publicly traded company, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index... The upcoming launch of Chandrayaan-2 includes an orbiter, lander and a rectangular rover. The six-wheeled vehicle, powered by solar energy, will collect information for at least 14 days and cover an area with a 400-meter radius. The rover will send images to the lander, and the lander will transmit those back to ISRO for analysis. A primary objective, though, is to search for deposits of helium-3. Solar winds have bombarded the moon with immense quantities of helium-3 because it's not protected by a magnetic field like Earth is.
The European Space Agency points out that helium-3 isotope isn't radioactive and "would not produce dangerous waste products." And one former member of the NASA Advisory Council estimates that the moon-derived fuel could generate enough power to meet the world's energy demands for between two at least two centuries.
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The Quest To Find Nuclear Fuel On the Moon More

The Quest To Find Nuclear Fuel On the Moon

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  • Yeah sure (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Feel free to look for unicorns too. We have no such reactors, and if we had the energy and technology to mine the Moon in that fashion, there wouldn't be an energy crisis in the first place.

    Stupid Space Nuttery.

    • Yep. Because new reactors just appear out of nowhere, they don't need building.

      Nobody's bothered developing a reactor that uses 3He because there isn't much of it here on Earth.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      If we can figure out a way to get lots of it from the moon then maybe somebody might think it's worth trying to develop one.

      • Re:Yeah sure (Score:4, Informative)

        by dryeo ( 100693 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @01:33PM (#56871296)

        It's a lot harder to fuse 3He then 2H, which would be the first step that we haven't taken.

        • It's a lot harder to fuse 3He then 2H, which would be the first step that we haven't taken.

          Indeed. I would like to nominate 3He fusion as "The dumbest idea that is actually taken seriously by anyone."

          1. 3He fusion is WAY harder than D-T fusion, and we aren't even close to achieving that.
          2. 3He is not "plentiful" on the moon. It is extremely rare, just less so than on earth.
          3. There is enough 3He on the moon for 250 years. There is enough Deuterium in the earth's oceans to meet our current needs for several billion years.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsa ( 15680 )

        By the time it's finished all the He~3 will be evaporated and we need to go back to the moon.

      • Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @01:40PM (#56871326)

        Nobody's bothered developing a reactor that uses 3He because there isn't much of it here on Earth.

        There's the little issue that He3 reactions are orders of magnitude harder to create and contain than the D-T reactions that we still haven't figured out how to harness.

        Not to mention that if you did manage to create super high-tech reactors, then you might as well use boron. It has even less neutron-producing side reactions, and it's plentiful here on earth.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          "then you might as well use boron"

          that's the goal of Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion project - fusion power without producing neutrons or radioactive waste.
          I've been rooting for them for years but I'll be pleasantly surprised if *any* fusion project is successful in what's left of my lifetime.

          https://lppfusion.com/ [lppfusion.com]

          • Whilst _I_ won't be around to see it, I doubt that fusion will be commercially viable in the lifetimes of the grandchildren of anyone alive today.

            As for the current fission reactor mess, if Nixon hadn't killed MSR research 45 years ago we'd be a lot better off than we are today but it can still be turned around and with the potential looming ecological crisis (global warming/climate change is "best case scenarios" and looking increasingly unlikely, vs anoxic events and food chain collapse) there's likely to

      • Nobody's bothered developing a power reactor that uses 3He because we haven't even gotten the much easier D-T reactions usable for such things yet.

        Nobody *will* bother developing a power reactor that uses 3He because p-11B fusion is just as good (better actually, the more feasible 3He reactions involve side reactions that produce neutrons) and doesn't require processing 2 billion+ tons of lunar regolith every year.

      • You can make 3He here on Earth, though. That's probably more practical than setting up a remote mining operation on the moon (where the 3He isn't exactly plentiful either)

        • It'd probably be more practical to set up D-T fusion helium-3 factories on the moon, for that matter. Not that it'd be a good idea, just not quite as bad of one as strip mining a hundred thousand square kilometers of the lunar surface per year for it.

  • If Wishes Be Horses (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Marlin Schwanke ( 3574769 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @12:42PM (#56871098)
    I think they forgot about a thing or two. For one, after like 50 years, commercial fusion power is still 50 years off. For two, returning mass to the earth going to be cheap. For three, building a mining infrastructure on the moon will be exorbitantly expensive. There are already simpler, cheaper options here on earth.

    • And when we do get fusion power, the flat-earth lobby will still think up reasons to be against it until their oil company money runs out. Let's not sit around waiting for fusion.

    • I'm a bit more optimistic than most on the timeline. Here is a company that wants to get it done by 2030. [nextbigfuture.com] There are a couple of other interesting and serious Tokamak designs that are actively being built. I also think that with global warming concerns becoming more pressing governments will be looser with the purse strings to accomplish something sooner rather than later.

      As much as finding H3 is concerned, I do think that terrestrial sources will be more viable than any possible moon source.

      • The design youâ(TM)re referring to is a spherical tokamak. We have good data on them from a number of experimental machines like START and MAST. That data tells us it is extremely unlikely the ST will work. Ever.

        The problem is the scaling law. ST reactors work great when you make small ones, so you get all excited and think that if you just make it twice as big youâ(TM)re good to go. Then you make a larger one based on the same tech and itâ(TM)s only a tiny bit better.

        So they think that they

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      For four, 3He isn't even a first-generation fuel. It could take 10-20 years more after fusion has become useful. It will probably remain a meme at least until the end of the century. Anyone who says this is why we should go back to the moon is a TFM.
  • If I remember, it didn't turn out well. Loved the roving ATM machine robot.

  • Praiseworthy, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @12:47PM (#56871112)
    Quite frankly, the rest of the world would take India and its government a bit more seriously if, instead of making big announcements to the effect that they can pee farther than anybody, they announced the investment in the implementation of a policy to supply with running water, electricity and sanitation to the more than 600 million Indian citizens who lack such basic services.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      India is trying to help all it's citizens with infrastructure, but it can't do that if it remains poor and dependent on aid money. The space program is profitable, it helps the whole country by bringing in revenue.

      This isn't a pissing competition. It's a demonstration that they can land a rover on the moon and analyze samples for only $125M, which is well within the budget of many corporations and other space agencies that may then decide to buy that service. They need to demonstrate it to build confidence

    • Quite frankly, India will do the effort and -- if that happens to be successful -- US, RU and CH will rush to get their [more than] fair part of He3

    • India? You mean the country which has a 7% YoY increase in energy production over the past 10 years compared to America's 0.05%? Or Europe's 0.1%? I'm not sure what you expect, that they flick a switch and it all happens over night? Basic services in India have been improving year on year. But I'm not sure how you expect to fund it if a country doesn't invest in sectors that make money, such as technology and agriculture (a big consumer of water).

      • "You mean the country which has a 7% YoY increase in energy production over the past 10 years compared to America's 0.05%? "

        It's worth pointing out that just about every historic economy has been driven by access to cheap energy. In the old days it was slaves, water and wind. More recently it was coal, then oil and gas and now we're chasing other major energy sources, (electricity is a transmission medium, not a source)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      Frankly I'd prefer you keep your (virtual) mouth shut and realize that the real fucking world is multi-tasking. That applies to all other self-righteous assholes that can't even start thinking about things before waving their ignorance for the other idiots to nod their empty heads in agreement.

      The reason there aren't running water, electricity and sanitation for everyone are many and complex like people actively destroying infrastructure, nature actively destroying infrastructure, people choosing to live we

  • We already know where useful stuff is. [wikipedia.org]

    for between two at least two centuries

    Boo, editors, boo.

    • There is a lot of potential energy in thorium, but sitting around waiting for it to be developed is only slightly less nonproductive than sitting around waiting for fusion.

      • 1: There's a LOT of thorium already waiting to be used. It's an annoying byproduct of rare earth minining, to the tune of somewhere between 20-100,000 tons per year. The USA DOE buried several tens of thousands of tons of the stuff in the Utah desert because they couldn't get rid of it.

        2: Thorium designs already exist, have already been proven in trials and don't suffer from the scaling problems of PWR systems (ie, you don't end up with a massive radioactive steam bomb). Recreating them will take far less t

        • the reason there's no Thorium and MSR research happening in the USA is because it's specifically illegal in the USA. You can thank Richard Milhous Nixon for that. Oak Ridge is researching non-nuclear aspects of molten salts but they can't fire up a reactor again.

          The rest of your post is composed of overly simplistic and misleading talking points, which I intended to let slide .... but this part here just seems to be a complete lie. I can find zero reference to Nixon banning anything thorium related, nor is it illegal to research thorium in the US. Lastly, there is absolutely nothing preventing Oak Ridge from "firing up a reactor again" especially since their original MSR didn't use thorium fuel in the first place.

          For anyone curious about the ACTUAL benefits and d

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      And how many successful commercial Thorium reactors are currently operating?

      • For example, CANDU can apparently run on thorium, although low prices of uranium make it much less necessary on Earth.
      • There are only 2 good reasons to build a nuclear reactor: 1-for medical isotopes, 2-for building nuclear reactors. Thorium reactors are poorly suited both so they don't get built.

  • He3 is great but we still don't know how to make an economically viable fusion reactor. A sufficiently scaled up magnetic confinement fusion machine will work, but its not clear how the costs can ever be competitive. Unlike fission where you basically just pile up fuel and it gets hot, all the current fusion designs require that a substantial portion of the reactor output be redirected into the reactor in some technically complex (eg expensive) system. (neutral beams, plasma jets, millimeter waves etc e

    • Re:Still don't know how to do practical fusion (Score:5, Insightful)

      by careysub ( 976506 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @03:35PM (#56871782)

      He3 makes things better, but I don't see how it helps enough.

      Really it makes things far worse.

      The only area where it helps is reducing the neutron damage and activation of the inner reactor parts, which are estimated to run only 5-8% of the capital contribution to the cost of electricity. But the reaction itself is ten thousand times harder to do (D/D fusion is only a few hundred times harder). We have good ideas for doing D/T fusion, that should work (at unaffordable cost) in several decades. We have none for He-3/D fusion, at this point it while the reaction is real, the technology is wishing for pink unicorns.

      And then there is the fuel cost. One kilogram of D can be bought today for $3000. To get the equivalent amount of He-3 from the Moon you have to process ~300,000 tons of regolith on the Moon, and ship it back to Earth. Show me any sort of conceptual process that can do this for a penny a ton. Here on Earth currently total ore extraction and processing costs are in the range of $2 to $200 per ton, it is not going to be 100 to 10,000 times cheaper on the Moon, rather we can expect the reverse to be true.

      • And when reactors get to the point where they can make use of aneutronic reactions, there are aneutronic reactions that don't require helium-3. Which do you pick, the most abundant isotope of boron, or the least abundant isotope of helium? Oh, and the easily achievable reactions involving the latter aren't actually fully aneutronic.

        Even if you ignore that and press ahead with helium-3...by the time we get there, we'll have been operating D-T reactors for some time, and keeping stockpiles of tritium, which p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      India gets free energy on the moon, the ultimate high ground.
      Looking down at earth with no need to worry about limited energy for any project. Thats winning.
  • This didn't end well in SPACE: 1999.

  • the south side of the moon (Score:3)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @01:30PM (#56871288) Journal

    Best album of all time.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • On the Dark side of the moon (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It won't be as hard as they think to find it on the moon. Just head over to the Dark side of the moon and that Nazi base, they'll have lots of spent fuel rods built up in their dump by now.

  • If one were to pause and think about looking for a mineral on the moon, and the logistics cost, I think this project is truly representative of all H1Bâ(TM)s. But hay, it would be fun to be a part of the lunar exploration team.

  • I'm certain that He3 will be a critically important energy source for Lunar colonies. Solar will also be important, but (as here on Earth) the Sun is only up for half the time. After 14 "days" of lunar "day", there will be 14 "days" of lunar darkness.

    If we ever figure out how to fuse He3 and generate energy, THEN we can start an economic discussion on the costs and benefits of shipping it down to Earth.

    • Good plan, except for the fact that a moon colony is a giant useless waste of effort.

      • A woman with a baby asked Benjamin Franklin, during the debates on the Constitution, "What good is your new government?" Franklin replied, "Of what use is your new baby?" Wilbur & Orville Wright built a flying machine in 1903. What good was it? In 1993, when DARPA allowed commercial use of the internet, what use was it?

        A permanent lunar base will, for at least 10 years, be totally pointless. After that, we'll FIGURE OUT what it's good for, and we will discover that it is very useful indeed.

    • Lunar colonies would just store heat in phase transition material. Then in the dark, extract it and generate power. Or just store electricity. Huge vacuum capacitor farms.

  • The Hype Is Fearsome (Score:5, Informative)

    by careysub ( 976506 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @03:17PM (#56871700)

    Mapping the helium-3 distribution on the Moon is a worthy scientific endeavor - it will tell us much about how the solar wind interacts with the lunar surface.

    But promoting the project for its "nuclear fuel" potential is so out of line with reality that it is deception, pure and simple.

    First there is no prospect of building a helium-3 reactor. We currently cannot build a power-producing fusion reactor using the easiest fuel, deuterium-tritium, even though is reaction rate is ten thousand times faster than He-3/D at plausible temperatures.

    Second we already can accurately forecast that when we can build a fusion reactor that uses that easiest to burn D-T fuel it will not be able to compete with any commercial source of electricity. The capital and operating costs of such a plant place the electricity cost at about ten times what wholesale electricity has been selling at for decades (an inflation adjusted current $30/MWh). This recent paper [sciencedirect.com] (accessible through Sci-hub) places the economics of a D-T plant in the best possible light and comes up with electricity costs due to the high capital cost of $175-$312 MWh*. Remember that He-3 fusion is ten thousand times harder, and we now have to mine the fuel on the Moon.

    The only theoretical advantage of He-3 fusion is the lack of neutron emission from the main reaction (side reactions would still produce some). This would greatly reduce the neutron damage that requires periodic replacement of parts in D/T (or D/D) reactor, and greatly reduce the radioactive waste produced from neutron activated components. These are not major contributors to the projected cost of fusion power (the paper above assigns $14/MWh for these combined, 5-8% of the projected costs), so greatly reducing them does little to improve it.

    And long before we can build a working He-3/D reactor, we will be able to build a D/D reactor using cheap, plentiful deuterium, available for a few thousand dollars a kilogram on Earth in effectively unlimited supply. The D/D reaction is "only" a few hundred times harder than D/T.

    *The paper ultimately claims that it would be competitive, when externalities are costed, mostly by assigning very high externality costs to every other form of power, and assumes that all of that will be some day captured in electricity pricing. Its treatment of on-shore wind, and solar PV is especially suspect since it assigns levelized costs per MWh, 40 years in the future, that are several times higher than current, demonstrated costs now. This is a lot of special pleading.

    • He3 is very useful in low temperature cryogenics and neutron detectors, but I imagine a few kg would saturate these markets...

    • "we already can accurately forecast that when we can build a fusion reactor that uses that easiest to burn D-T fuel it will not be able to compete with any commercial source of electricity."

      Remove carbon-emitting sources from the equation and run that competition again. Include anything burning wood in that "carbon emitting" list, because it's likely that we're going to be frantically planting them to generate enough oxygen to actually survive in the face of oceanic oxygen sources going away..

    • I agree with your assessment that it's ludicrous to source fuel from the moon, however large-scale, energy-creating structures simply won't be the future.

      Improvements to PV-capture at the nano level (incidental capture, being the biggest) and cheap fabrication of nano-arrays will make almost any surface energy sink, i.e., clothes, paint, etc. Homes equipped with battery storage can link to other homes, thus creating a mesh. Goodbye utility companies.

  • Mining He3 -- "Moon" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1... [imdb.com]

  • Silicon for solar panels, any rare earths needed would be minimal, and the entirety of the lunar surface is pretty much a better clean room for prodding them. Or sterling engines. The take the generated power beam it as microwaves to a station at L4 or L5 (or both) and then to earth. Orbital logistics might make other arrangements possible too. No need to haul material from the moon to the earth. Though a huge lunar catapult would be cool to heave containers to earth orbit...

  • I saw the movie "Iron Sky" last night. Will the Indians build a giant space saucer to attack us with if we allow them to mine the He3?

  • You mean the fools don't realize why? Over the past billions of years, moon rock has absorbed enough solar radiation helium-3 that one single Space-shuttle load of just 25 tons would be able to power all the electrical needs of the entire United States for a year! It's the fuel source of the future. So YES, you better believe humans will indeed be back up there collecting it.

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