A Mars Odyssey

The Earth’s moon is beginning to gather some attention due to our need for much needed energy sources–with mining fuel for future reactors in the near future already becoming a reality. The fuel that seems to be in such high demand is helium-3, which is involved with high energy collisions. Michael Schirber has written an article for LiveScience titled, “How Lunar Soil Could Power the Future.” Considered a lighter isotope of the type of helium used in birthday balloons, helium-3 fuses with other forms of nuclei to form more energy and less waste than the present fuel used in traditional nuclear reactors. Earth is struggling to keep pace with the demands of its population growth, global warming, and many forms of pollution, so many space researchers and scientists are enthusiastically viewing the moon as the answer with the perfect fuel source with no radioactive by-product making it non-pollutive.

“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. But what he isn’t saying is that 40 tons of helium-3 will take care of the United State’s total electricity usage for about a year, unfortunately with very little helium-3 on Earth. Of course, this much needed fuel on the Moon has peaked the interest of several of the space agencies–notably the United States, China, Russia, and India–even though none are stepping forth with it as the main reason to return to the moon.

The price for what small amount is available on Earth is about $1,000 per gram, with a continuous supply found in the solar wind and some collected as a by-product inside nuclear weapons. With the magnetic field around Earth deflecting the solar wind’s expensive little gems away, it is no wonder that the moon is looking better and better, with the solar wind bringing from 1 million to 5 million tons of the helium-3 to it over the past 4.5 billion years. We know this because of the lunar rocks returned from our previous lunar voyages having a level of 10-20 parts per billion, estimated at providing enough power to Earth for thousands of years. One space shuttle load of 25 tons has the ability to provide this energy need for a year in the United States alone.

The catch to this is its very small concentration level, requiring many hundreds of millions of tons of processed soil in order to extract “one ton of helium-3″. In addition to this large amount of soil, it also requires heating the lunar dust to around 1,3000 degrees Fahrenheit. It is estimated theorized that specially designed rovers could move along the lunar surface and scrape up the soil, heating it with concentrated sunlight. This may work, with the entire process retrieving 300 times more energy than used to obtain it at a cost of $800 million to bring it back to Earth–at least according to Schirber’s article–counting the cost of flying to and from the moon. On Earth, mined natural coal resources return 15-20 times what energy is put in, while selling the moon’s fusion energy at a gasoline price for oil at $100 a barrel would net one load at $10 billion per ton.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Mars News, Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.