Philospher ponders lunar 3He mining

[james_davis_nicoll]

He's agin it.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

11B+p (and the side-reactions) is cleaner than 3He+D (and the side reactions) and we can get boron down here on Earth. And a majority of it is the right isotope.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

I was faffing about with the notion of muonic doped atoms - basically take a regular atom like Carbon-12, and replace some of the electrons with muons that are artificially stabilised or regenerated somehow *handwave*.

One thing I found was that this µ-doping has been observed, in experimentally produced muonic helium at least, to basically make what ever atom you're doping behave chemically like a heavy isotope of an element with atomic number N-µ, where N is the atomic number of the original element you're doping and µ is the number of muons you've snuck into the lepton orbital around the nucleon.

So for instance, 2µ-C12 would behave a bit like Boron, and muons are produced by energetic cosmic rays so while I can't prove scientifically that all the carbon in the lunar regolith are muon doped and thus usuable in 11B+p fusion reactors, I am however tempted to do a powerpoint presentation suitable to get me booked into one of those "future of NASA" drinking and gnoshing events to tell all and sundry about how the hyper-abundance of muonic carbon on the moon and its use in terrestrial fusion reactors totally justifies and indeed REQUIRES the creation of lunar mining camps as a "sensible" solution to the US's shameful and dangerous dependence on foreign oil (gotta squeeze that terror$ teat, even if the foreign oil in question is really mostly canadian).

Note that that fact that all of is largely complete nonsense and gibberish would be less of an impedence to getting pride of place and heavily covered by news media at such a conference than a lack of a suitable engineering degree is not at all depressing or a sad testimony to the full absorbance of NASA by a click-whoring news media.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Except that for H-11B, calculations indicate that bremsstrahlung will exceed fusion power production if the plasma is quasi-neutral and in thermal equilibrium. H-11B might be made to work via inertial confinement fusion. But that requires compressions in the implosion by a factor of a 100,000 or so, much larger than for DT fusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Bremsstrahlung_losses_in_quasineutral.2C_isotropic_plasmas

(Some tricks might be able to suppress this, but they appear fairly heroic and not really compatible with a practical concept.)