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2004-11-26 Afghanistan/South Asia
Moon gas may solve Earth's energy crisis
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Posted by tipper 2004-11-26 8:49:49 AM|| || Front Page|| [11130 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Helium 3 may not work so all of this is hypothetical. I think it's worth sending up a sample return mission to bring back some of the stuff though.
Posted by RJ Schwarz 2004-11-26 9:06:40 AM|| [http://politicaljunky.blogspot.com]  2004-11-26 9:06:40 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 as the earth’s fossil fuels dry up in the coming decades

I've heard this how many times now?
Posted by Raj 2004-11-26 9:16:26 AM||   2004-11-26 9:16:26 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 The last 3 decades, anyway. :)
Posted by eLarson 2004-11-26 9:18:12 AM|| [http://larsonian.blogspot.com]  2004-11-26 9:18:12 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 Only 10 kilograms of helium are available on earth


why, oh why, do we persist in expending this scarce resource in balloons and making us talk like Donald Duck??? Why? Oh...Helium 3....
Nevermind
Posted by Emily Litella  2004-11-26 9:54:04 AM||   2004-11-26 9:54:04 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 We can fly turkey guts to the moon to power the helium 3 extractors.
Posted by Shipman 2004-11-26 10:48:26 AM||   2004-11-26 10:48:26 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 "Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one full year."
To extract helium 3 gas the rocks have to be heated above 800 degrees Celsius. Dr Taylor says 200 million tonnes of lunar soil would produce one tonne of helium.

The 25 metric tons of helium 3 would require the processing of 5 billion metric tons of rock. I wonder if any of these bright folks bothered to calculate the energy cost of heating 5 billion metric tons of rock to 800° C, not to mention transporting the needed equipment to the moon and the mining of the rock. I have serious doubt this scheme could ever be a net positive energy producer.
Posted by Biff Wellington 2004-11-26 11:21:16 AM||   2004-11-26 11:21:16 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 Lets just say, for the sake of discussion, that this He3 thing is real and really works. Any bets on how long it would take the luddites to start screaming about "Destroying the Pristine Lunar Environment"? Or that it is a plot by BushCheneyHalliburtonetc. to, ohh, heck, you think of something.

Note, present concerns about contaminating extraearth sites to throw off scientific discoveries dosen't count. I'm talking about the purely irrational concerns over the Lunar Enviroment.
Posted by N Guard 2004-11-26 11:24:51 AM||   2004-11-26 11:24:51 AM|| Front Page Top

#8 Aside from the cost of processing 5 billion tonnes of rock each year on the moon, the quoted enery figures are based on extracting the energy using nuclear fusion. So far, the only way we have to do this with high efficiency is in a bomb. This is just a bunch of moon bats talking to hear themselves.
Posted by Tom 2004-11-26 11:48:00 AM||   2004-11-26 11:48:00 AM|| Front Page Top

#9 No blood for helium!! Make the Moon a nuclear-free zone!!
Posted by Desert Blondie 2004-11-26 12:25:15 PM||   2004-11-26 12:25:15 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 They are talking about using helium 3 in a fusion reactor. The researchers working on fusion reactors have been “predicting” commercial fusion power plants in only twenty years since the ‘70’s. The scientists making the “predictions” are the one’s who stand to benefit from more research money.

Someday I expect fusion to be a viable method of generating power. (Of course sunlight is already fusion generated.) Unless there is some unforeseen development such as “cold” fusion or a nanotech breakthrough, I expect fusion to remain a “promising” power source for the next fifty years. Keeps promising, never delivers.

I do support limited fusion research. The knowledge gained is valuable even if it doesn’t lead to commercial power generation. (I don’t support the moonbat project of mining helium 3 on the moon.)
Posted by Anonymous5032 2004-11-26 12:59:09 PM||   2004-11-26 12:59:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 They are talking about using helium 3 in a fusion reactor. The researchers working on fusion reactors have been “predicting” commercial fusion power plants in only twenty years since the ‘70’s. The scientists making the “predictions” are the one’s who stand to benefit from more research money.

Someday I expect fusion to be a viable method of generating power. (Of course sunlight is already fusion generated.) Unless there is some unforeseen development such as “cold” fusion or a nanotech breakthrough, I expect fusion to remain a “promising” power source for the next fifty years. Keeps promising, never delivers.

I do support limited fusion research. The knowledge gained is valuable even if it doesn’t lead to commercial power generation. (I don’t support the moonbat project of mining helium 3 on the moon.)
Posted by Anonymous5032 2004-11-26 1:14:30 PM||   2004-11-26 1:14:30 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 Great resources here.

From which;

One tonne He3 requires 22km^2 of terrain to be processed to a depth of 3m. This is roughly 4690m * 4690m * 3m (about 2.75 miles on a square and a yard deep), which whilst big is not really huge compared to the operations that go one everyday in the farming of corn (US or Canada).

It would effectively be strip mining (the replacement rate of He3 is essentially irrelevant), but there's quite a lot of regolith on the moon.

Now all we need is a Deuterium-He3 reactor, a reliable method of shifting the good stuff home and some good ole tractor boyz and we're laughing!
Posted by Tony (UK)  2004-11-26 1:20:36 PM||   2004-11-26 1:20:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 I'm already laughing. We'd produce more energy if we'd just put these clowns to work winding up springs.
Posted by Tom 2004-11-26 1:26:08 PM||   2004-11-26 1:26:08 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 "We'd produce more energy if we'd just put these clowns to work winding up springs."

Or hold them captive and force-feed them baked beans, and harvest the resulting methane.

As an engineer, all I can do when reading whimsical crap like this is just laugh.
Posted by Dave D. 2004-11-26 1:40:35 PM||   2004-11-26 1:40:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 "Lets just say, for the sake of discussion, that this He3 thing is real and really works"

Its a bunch of crud hyped up about by environmentalist type scientists. Heres a little factoid, fusion reactions using deuterium and tritium are easier to produce than a He-3 reaction, however the difference is the neutrinos as well as the other harmful radioactive byproducts that are produced in a deuterium/tritum reaction are mainly absorbed by an He-3 variant. Hence the whole hypothesis says that this is merely a CLEANER way of doing a fusion reaction. Yet what they don't seem to get is why would earth's scientists who are working on these projects not try to do the easier reaction first to make sure it works?
Posted by Valentine 2004-11-26 2:33:55 PM||   2004-11-26 2:33:55 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 Strip mining the moon is OK by me as long as they dig in a huge Star of David pattern that can be seen by certain moon worshippers in the middle east.
Posted by ed 2004-11-26 3:22:02 PM||   2004-11-26 3:22:02 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 I thought Coca Cola owned the advertising rights to earth side?
Posted by Shipman 2004-11-26 4:34:13 PM||   2004-11-26 4:34:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 Or hold them captive and force-feed them baked beans, and harvest the resulting methane.

I think Michel Moore can produce more methane as one hundred scientists.
Posted by JFM  2004-11-26 4:35:18 PM||   2004-11-26 4:35:18 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 Does Allan approve of this project?
Posted by Rafael 2004-11-26 7:25:05 PM||   2004-11-26 7:25:05 PM|| Front Page Top

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