Foreign Policy: "Is there money on the Moon?"

Five to ten kilometer resolution map of Thorium, related to the lunar surface in parts per million by Japan's lunar orbiter Kaguya. While many have long noted the practical mineral wealth on the Moon, as Joshua E. Keating draws those threads together below, the Moon's most valuable resource is probably still its proximity and its volatiles just outside Earth's gravity well.

Joshua E. Keating
Foreign Policy Blog

In a new article for Foreign Policy, John Hickman ponders what the political ramifications might be if China were to declare sovereignty over a swath of territory on the moon, triggering a lunar land grab. But what about the economics of this extraterrestrial Great Game? Maintaining a permanent manned presence on the moon is an awfully pricey undertaking just to make a political statement. Is there any way to make some money from mining the moon's riches?

Possibly, but it's a long-term investment. The biggest cheese on the moon is probably helium-3, an isotope that's abundant in the moon's regolith, but rare and getting rarer here on Earth. Helium-3 is currently used mostly for scientific research, but some see it as a future source for non-radioactive fusion power. Unfortunately, the United States and Soviet Union exhausted much of the world's supply during Cold War-era nuclear tests. Several private companies, including Silicon Valley's Moon Express, are exploring the development of helium-3 mining on the moon and governments including India and Russia have discussed the possibility. (It's also the basis of the plot for the 2009 movie Moon.)

It's hard not to be enticed by the numbers. Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, estimated when contacted by Foreign Policy that given the potential energy of a ton of helium-3 (the equivalent of about 50 million barrels of crude oil) and the estimated amount of recoverable helium-3 (around 75,000 tons, or 15 percent of the total amount on the moon) we could be looking at around $375 trillion worth of the stuff.

Read the full Foreign Policy blog post HERE.

"To read more about China's lunar ambitions, click HERE."

Nobel Prize winner warns of helium scarcity

Probable distribution of helium-3 (3He) on the lunar surface is strongly linked to mare basalt with a high solar incidence and the presence of thorium and titanium oxide. Geologist Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 lunar module pilot, with Gerald Kulcinski of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has long and urgently advocated a fusion-powered Helium-3 Economy by 2050. Though not all the more familiar near side lunar 'seas' show the high likelihood of ready reserves of helium-3, Schmitt notes one area likely to hold future economical reserves of this commodity are within Mare Tranquillitatis and under the landing site of Apollo 11.

Discover Blogs/80beats

The United States currently holds around half of the world’s helium supply and we’re selling it, for cheap.

We’ve known this for a while. We started stockpiling the stuff near Amarillo, Texas in 1925, in part for dirigible use, and stepped up reserves in the 1960s as a Cold War asset. In 1996, Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act mandating that the United States sell the gas at artificially low prices to get rid of the stockpile by 2015. This February, the National Research Council published a report estimating that, given increasing consumption, the world may run out of helium in 40 years. That’s bad news given helium’s current applications in science, technology, and party decorations–and possible future applications in fusion energy.

Now physicist Robert Richardson, who won a 1996 Nobel Prize for work using helium-3 to make superfluids, has come forward to stress the folly of underselling our supply of the natural resource. He suggested in several interviews that the gas’s price should mirror its actual demand and scarcity. He estimates that typical party balloons should cost $100 a pop.

“They couldn’t sell it fast enough and the world price for helium gas is ridiculously cheap,” Professor Richardson told a summer meeting of Nobel laureates…. “Once helium is released into the atmosphere in the form of party balloons or boiling helium it is lost to the Earth forever, lost to the Earth forever,” he emphasised. [The Independent]

Read the full review, HERE.

See also:
"Helium-3 powering the future?"
August 14, 2008

Is helium-3 mining, as seen in "Moon," a realistic possibility?

Southwestern Sea of Tranquillity - Nov. 2007 - Japan's Kaguya orbiter imaged the flat and exceedingly ancient spot where humans first walked upon the Moon, from 100 kilometers above.

Rare on Earth, Helium-3 is fused deeply in the lowland plains that characterize the Moon's Near Side, and particularly within the Sea of Tranquility near the equator. No one knows how deeply, but it's presence is thought to be within these basins together with certain iron and titanium oxides, as discovered in samples collected here and the Ocean of Storms. Scarce in the lunar highlands, Helium-3 is believed to make up around 20 percent by weight of the loose regolith of the Near Side Seas.

John Matson in 60 Second Science Blog, Scientific American - What if we found a clean, abundant resource that could provide the lion's share of the world's energy needs? How far would we be willing to go to get it...?

That's the question posed—in both a moral and a logistic sense—by the new sci-fi film MOON, directed by Duncan Jones (the son of musician David Bowie), which opens in New York City and Los Angeles this week...

As it turns out, the film depicts a vision quite close to what some researchers describe as a powerful—if extremely difficult—solution to our energy woes.

Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineer and director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been researching the possibility of mining the moon's helium 3 for decades. He is, along with Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the concept's most prominent advocates. (Schmitt wrote an article for Popular Mechanics in 2004 that describes a harvesting operation much like the one Bell manages at Sarang.)

The lunar surface, Kulcinski says, should indeed be loaded with the isotope, which is in the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the sun. It is scarce on Earth because the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field largely deflect the brunt of the solar wind, but the moon is far less protected. "The only thing that's close to the sun that has neither an atmosphere nor a magnetic field is the moon," Kulcinski says. And samples from the Apollo program show elevated levels of helium 3 compared to the puny amounts available on Earth. Kulcinski estimates that there are a million metric tons of helium 3 embedded in the outermost layer of the moon's crust.

Read the Posting HERE.

Helium-3 powering the future?

Updated August 30, 2010, 2036 UT
Michael Schirber
Special to LiveScience

The moon is once again a popular destination, as several space-faring nations are talking about setting up bases there. One reason would be to mine fuel for future fusion reactors.

The fuel in this case is helium-3, a lighter isotope of the helium used in balloons. In high energy collisions, helium-3 fuses with other nuclei to release more energy and less waste than the reactions in traditional nuclear reactors.

"If we can show that we can burn helium-3, it is a much cleaner and safer energy source than other nuclear fuels," said Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Just 40 tons of this stuff has enough potential energy to meet the total U.S. electricity demand for a year. However, there is almost no helium-3 on Earth. The closest supply is on the moon.

Several space agencies, notably in China, Russia and India, have mentioned helium-3 as a potential payoff for their lunar projects.

"I don't think that the main motivation to go back to the moon is helium-3," Kulcinski said. "But over the long-term, we do face an energy problem."

Fusion solution

All current nuclear power is based on fission, in which a large nucleus (such as uranium) breaks apart into smaller nuclei.

The alternative is fusion, in which two small nuclei come together to form a bigger nucleus and release copious amounts of energy.

A commercial fusion reactor has never been built, but a prototype called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) has just begun construction in Cadarache, France. The plan is to generate the needed 100 million degree plasma by the year 2016, but a power plant that can supply electricity might not come online for another 20 years after that.

The reaction that will occur in ITER is the fusing of two hydrogen isotopes: deuterium and tritium. One concern is that tritium is radioactive and a component of nuclear weapons, so care must be taken in dealing with it.

Another problem is the highly energetic neutrons emitted from the deuterium-tritium reaction. These neutrons slam into the reactor walls and cause structural damage. It is expected that the walls in ITER will have to be replaced every one to two years, Kulcinski said.

This is why Kulcinski and others advocate trading the tritium with non-radioactive helium-3.

"The advantage is that it makes very few neutrons," said Rich Nebel of Emc2 Fusion, a company based in Santa Fe, N.M. "This reduces radiation issues and also greatly simplifies the engineering."

Furthermore, the reaction products of helium-3 fusion are charged, so their energy can be directly converted into electricity without having to go through the inefficient step of boiling water to make steam.

Helium sources

Despite its apparent attractiveness, helium-3 is often neglected by fusion researchers. One reason is that the Earth has very little of it. A small portion of helium-3 is collected as an unwanted by-product inside nuclear weapons and sold for about $1,000 per gram, Kulcinski said.

A continuous supply of helium-3 can be found in the solar wind, but our planet's magnetic field deflects these particles away. The same is not true on the moon. The moon has collected 1 million to 5 million tons of helium-3, from the solar wind, over its 4.5 billion year history, Kulcinski said.

Evidence for this was found in the lunar rocks (brought back by the Apollo astronauts and Russian rovers) at a level of 10 to 20 parts per billion.

"Helium-3 is present on the moon, but in very small concentration levels, meaning that many hundreds of millions of tons of soil must be processed to extract a ton of helium-3," said Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, a NASA-funded research institution.

This extraction requires heating lunar dust particles to around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius), Spudis said.

Kulcinski and his colleagues have designed rovers that could move along the surface, scraping up lunar soil and heating it with concentrated sunlight.

Such a mining operation would retrieve 300 times more energy than it uses (including all the energy to fly to the moon and back), Kulcinski estimates. In comparison, mining coal returns 15-20 times the energy put in. His team has estimated that it might cost around $800 million to bring back each ton of lunar helium-3.

This might sound like a lot, but if you could sell the fusion energy at a price comparable to gasoline based on oil at $100 per barrel, the helium-3 would be worth $10 billion per ton.

"Our real challenge is not obtaining the helium-3; it is demonstrating that we can burn it," Kulcinski said.

Tough to burn

Burning helium-3 requires higher initial energy than burning hydrogen isotopes. This is why ITER is not considering helium-3 as a possible fuel at this time.

However, Kulcinski's group works on a different method — called inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) — for achieving fusion reactions. Instead of using magnetic fields to confine a very hot plasma like ITER plans to do, IEC works by accelerating nuclei towards each other with electric fields.

Kulcinski and his collaborators have managed to sustain nuclear fusion in their small prototype system. The company Emc2 Fusion is also working on a similar design.

However, all of these IEC demonstrations, at least for now, require much more input energy than they can deliver. Most researchers agree that helium-3 is unlikely to be the first fuel used in fusion reactors.

"One should never say never — it may come to pass that helium-3 could become an important source of energy in the coming century," Spudis said. "That time has not come yet. And I suspect that it is still some time off."