Ran across an interesting ‘He-3 Reactors and the Moon’ discussion and naturally thought of Mike.Sierra.Echo. Let’s talk about clean power, He-3 reactors and the Moon. Futurology time!
Yes, I talk about clean power as a plot point in Mike.Sierra.Echo because I’m a fan of any greentech innovation. I want the solarpunk future we were promised as much as you do! Lofty motivations aside, we’re reward-based creatures. The idea of cheap and/or limitless energy to serve the world’s growing desire to make stuff and not starve to death is a pretty strong reward. TL;DR – we need to shift into carbon-neutral or negative technology, like yesterday.
How do we get there? Clean power! That’s why I’m listening to anyone who can get us there – or talk about engineering problems we need to solve. One of the common clean power / greentech ideas we’re pursuing is fusion energy. A fusion reactor could provide the power for thousands of homes from a single decentralized power source. The problem is, current fusion reactors run on tritium – which costs around $30K/gram. Helium-3 AKA He-3 and 3He – would be a simple alternative. Most scientists say you can mine He-3 on the Moon, but then someone on Reddit said: ‘Since it *can* be produced on earth, I see almost no way that mining it on the moon could ever be economically viable.’
Ooh, ooh – is the ‘Grandma got rich off of rocket shipping’ plot point in Mike.Sierra.Echo nothing but a bad joke? Let’s do some investigation.
Whenever I’m confronted with a question like this, the first thing I want to do is ‘get the data.’ Basic Google-fu and use of research AI (Hello, Perplexity) can save you hours and hours of backbreaking homework.
So let’s define the rules of our research. We’re working with two givens here: yes, we’ll get our fusion reactors and yes, we’ll use He-3 to run them. How much He-3 will we need to run nuclear reactors on Earth? No one knows yet, although it’s safe to say the the world’s current supply of He-3 (less than 1M liters) probably won’t be enough. Even Congress is talking about this, so let’s skip ahead.
So will we need He-3? Yes. Can we synthesize it on Earth? Will it be better to find He-3 on the Moon or just synthesize it? Here are the pros and cons of each.
Getting He-3 from Earth
The United States has stockpiles of He-3 right now, thanks to decades of nuclear weapon production. “Tritium is a critical component of nuclear weapons and historically it was produced and stockpiled primarily for this application. The decay of tritium into helium-3 reduces the explosive power of the fusion warhead, so periodically the accumulated helium-3 must be removed from warhead reservoirs and tritium in storage. Helium-3 removed during this process is marketed for other applications.” This method provides a steady, albeit limited, supply of He-3.
So yes, we’ve got He-3 and yes, we can synthesize it on Earth. But what if we need more of it? Other methods of ‘making He-3 on Earth’ might appear, but we should start thinking about other supplies. That’s when we start talking about:
Getting He-3 from the Moon
It’s a cool idea, no? Getting all our energy ‘free’ from the Moon sounds cool but let’s break it down:
- The moon contains more He-3 than Earth due to solar wind bombardment
- He-3 concentration in lunar regolith is extremely low, estimated at 20 parts per billion
- To extract 1 ton of He-3 would require processing about 60,500,000 tons of lunar regolith – by comparison, you’d need 160,000 tons of earth ore to produce one ton of gold (at 5 tons ore / ounce). If we had to compare He-3 on the moon to today’s current gold price based on ore extracted (5 tons of ore to get one $2,677.00 USD / oz), we’d be around $900K / oz. Close to a million dollars, per ounce.
- The infrastructure needed for lunar mining on this scale is currently non-existent and would be extremely costly to develop
So when you start looking into the nuts and bolts of it – it’d cost us $900,000 for one once of He-3 material to power nuclear reactors. Will that be an acceptable price? Will we find ways to bring that pricepoint down? Only time will tell.
For the purposes of Mike.Sierra.Echo – it’s conceivable that humans are willing to pay that price, and so I’m going to keep this part of the story in place. And now we have some numbers to drive our research – I’m glad we could do this together.
I’m glad we took the time to research this ‘He-3 Reactors and the Moon’ discussion, I hope you are, too! If space travel is economically unviable as some suggest (“Conquest of the solar system without Mars is useless, unsustainable and simply unnecessary.“), that creates a number of philosophical questions I don’t have a clear answer for.
Sometimes it’s not about having the answer, but asking the right question. Hope you enjoyed this little sci-fi investigation as much as I did. Have a great evening.
