Philospher ponders lunar 3He mining

[james_davis_nicoll]

He's agin it.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Broken link.

I think I am also against harvesting unicorn horns for rainbow juice.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Fixed.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

I'm only against it if it's not done sustainably.

Sustainable unicorn harvesting is the only way the industry can survive, long-term.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

No, we need to EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES!!! EXTERMINATE THEM, I SAY!!!.

(Reasons: to be published on tor.com at the end of September.)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Unicorn meat, however, is totally ok.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I only purchase meat from free-range unicorns. Virgin-caught unicorns are kept in cruelly-small pens-- I've seen the tapestry!

[heron61.livejournal.com]

What a bizarre argument - the practical argument against Lunar He3 are obvious, but protecting the landscape of a lifeless rock ball?

he's exploring a philosophical question

[(Anonymous)]

which is what philosophers are paid to do.

is the Moon a culturally significant object? I think we can all agree that it is. well then, is it okay to strip-mine culturally significant objects? you wouldn't want to use Stonehenge or the Pyramids as stone quarries, right?

I think his argument breaks down pretty quickly -- mining the surface of the Moon is comparable to scraping a very thin layer off the surface of the Pyramids, not quarrying them. but it's not a question so stupid as to not be worth raising.


Doug M.

Re: he's exploring a philosophical question

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Actually it's more like scraping the top 5 millimetres off of the Atacama Desert - you'd only be destroying some of the most interesting and scientifically useful elements of the Moon.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Actually, no. We only get to touch the pristine, unmodified lunar surface once. Thereafter, we've changed it. This is a heritage issue for the human species; by going for large-scale resource extraction we are placing our short-term energy requirements over the long-term historic record.

Let me give you an analogy: suppose we determine that there's shale oil under the center of Rome. We can go fracking and extract hydrocarbons! Trouble is, those minor earthquakes will cause the Colliseum and most of the historic center to collapse. (Posit for a moment that remediation is not possible in this example.) Do we have a right to discount the future utility of first-hand access to the historical capital of the Roman empire, for all future human beings, against our short-term convenience?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

What have the Romans ever done for us?

[andrewducker]

Personally, I care about Rome.

I don't care about the surface of the moon.

I understand that some people feel differently though.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

By the same logic, humans should have never touched any portion of the Earth ever.

[sesmo.livejournal.com]

The dust just hasn't been the same, since we started mining.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

I keep hearing about lunar Helium-3 around here, and I always feel like I'm missing the joke. I don't suppose anyone could explain to me first what the whole fascination with Helium-3 is all about, and then explain to me why it's stupid?

[gareth-wilson.livejournal.com]

It's an impractical fusion fuel not particularly common on the Lunar surface.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

It's a fusion fuel for a type of reactor nobody knows how to build yet.

Its relative abundance in the lunar regolith is roughly the same as the relative abundance of heavy water (D2O) in the Atacama desert.

He3 is rare enough that it's one of the only physical commodities that might be worth mining on the moon -- if we needed it in bulk for burning in magic unobtanium-burning fusion reactors that don't exist.

Even so, the energy costs of GOING TO THE MOOOOOOON!!!1!!!11ELEVENTY!!!! to mine the He3 are so outrageous that we'd spend 20-25% of the net energy dividend just on shipping.

Shorter version: "we can go to the Moon to mine He3 because FUSION!!" is a Hail Mary pass by the Space Cadets to come up with some kind of economic justification for colonizing the Moon. Unfortunately they dropped the ball. Which was made of lead. And the goal posts don't exist.

(If I ever write a book or story with Lunar He3 mining, it'll really be about new and exciting innovations in fraud.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actually, the energy cost of getting from the Moon to the Earth isn't all that large, esp given the (relatively) small amount we'd need. It's getting it out of the regolith in the first place that eats energy.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

(If I ever write a book or story with Lunar He3 mining, it'll really be about new and exciting innovations in fraud.)

Ah, so you have started out planning the prequel to Saturn's Children!

duck

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

(If I ever write a book or story with Lunar He3 mining, it'll really be about new and exciting innovations in fraud.)

Hope you will write it! (But set in near future, not post-Saturn's Children)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

After the Gerard O'Neill vision of an L5 colony/solar-power-satellite economy went out of fashion, fans of large-scale space expansion needed some kind of other justification for why people should do it. Mining helium-3 from the Moon emerged as one of the favorites, even though it doesn't make any sense on its own terms for a variety of reasons.

The space-fan party line is that this is a better and cleaner form of nuclear fusion than deuterium-helium, which is not clear in itself (and of course nobody's taken either type to the point of practical power generation), and that it makes more sense to get 3He from the Moon than to get it on Earth, which it doesn't.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Lucky you, you got snarky responses that skipped the actual point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions

The easiest form of fusion, D-T, spews lots of neutrons. It's actually way more neutronic per energy than fission, which both has rather high energy per atom (fusion is superior per mass) and consumes lots of its own neutrons.

2He3 fusion is aneutronic, making it safer as well as easier to extract energy from (just decelerate charged particles in an electric field! No need for steam engines!) D-He3 fusion is also aneutronic, but D-D side-reactions can spew a fair bit of neutrons on their own.

So He3 looks attractive to some for cleaner energy in general, or for use in space drives (since you don't need the mass of neutron shielding or of a heat engine), but it's really rare, and some people think He3 from solar wind has conveniently accumulated in the lunar regolith for mining. Others think that'd be an energetic loss and we'd be better off scooping the atmosphere of Saturn if we did this at all.

Note if one were really committed to space, He-3 mining could make sense even if an energetic loss; you'd be converting cheap energy into space-useful energy.

Except, of course, no one's gotten even D-T fusion working as a power source, and that's by far the easiest kind, so we get back to the snark: "you want to do this thing that may not pay off to fuel this other thing that you don't even know how to do?"

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

He-3 is hard to extract from the moon, can only be used as a fuel in a fusion reaction no one's made work as a power source yet, and the far easier fusion reactions, like D-T fusion which ITER will be investigating in a few years, will produce He-3 as a side product anyway (as indeed, can one produce He-3 from just letting tritium decay - and given that Tritium is abundant enough on earth to make it a good fuel for fusion reactors...).

Therefore Lunar He-3 is of course the GREATEST JUSTIFICATION FOR MANNED SPACE TRAVEL EVER IN THE HISTORY OF EVER, according to sf writers james has inflicted upon him in his job as a reviewer (Baxter is especially prone to using it for instance, among the many other reasons James has for disliking Baxter's work).

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

Mining the Moon is dangerous. Just ask Steve Austin. He had to go to the Moon to stop a lunar mining expedition from destroying Earth. (As seen in the Six Million Dollar Man episodes "Dark Side of the Moon, Part One and Two" which feature a scientist who sounds bit like today's He3 fanboys.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Just look at how overmining made the Klingons' moon explode.