The Future of Fusion and Helium-3

What is helium-3 and what does it have to do with fusion? Will we turn the Moon into a giant helium-3 mine?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks in the future and says, I'm your moon,
You're my moon. We go round and round. I'm Jonathan Strickland,

(00:21):
and I'm Joe McCormick, and our other host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
is not with us today, but she will be back
with us soon. She is off doing something awesome right now. Yeah,
she's vacating, and we just have to sit here and
talk about science that's gonna blow your brains out your ears. Yeah. Yeah,
We're gonna specifically talk about one of my favorite things

(00:42):
in science, and I really wanted to get some in
here so that we could, you know, have that moment.
Maybe we can have Noel pitch up our voices appropriately,
because we're going to talk about Helium three, specifically Helium three.
It's when you get to the third movie in a series.
Is it almost always goes downhill? Doesn't It pretty much

(01:02):
goes downhill after the second in the second one. How
many can you think of where you get to the
third one and it's still good, It's still good. Yeah,
that's a tough one. Man, maybe evil dead army attic
is pretty good. That's a good one. It is very different. So,
but of course helium three is not actually, uh what's
the word for a sequel, that's actually the third one,
a triquil. It's not that it's an isotope. It is

(01:26):
an isotope. So let's let's talk about what helium is
and then specifically what helium three is and why we're
interested in talking about this in the first place. Yeah, actually,
because this is going to be more than just a
chemistry lesson, will actually play into a discussion about technology
that could be highly relevant to life on planet Earth
and beyond. Yeah, exactly. So helium is an element, Yeah,

(01:48):
second lightest element in the universe, behind hydrogen. But it's
always looking at hydrogen and saying like, if only I
were that, then it's you know, hydrogen. It's just looking
at hydrogen on the ladder, and it's like, you just
watch yourself, buddy, I am one step behind, and if
you falter, I will take your place. I might be
anthropomorphizing elements a little bit, but no, it's it's a colorless, odorless,

(02:11):
and tasteless element. It is a gas at room temperature
and it makes up a whopping point zero zero zero
five of the Earth's atmosphere, and it's not gravitationally bound
to the Earth. Helium is so light that it just
continues to float up and up and up until it
can slip the earthly bonds of gravity and flow down

(02:33):
into space. Yeah. And if you're like, wait a minute,
how does that work? Just think about what happens to
a helium balloon. Yeah, I mean yeah, and it comes up,
it's it's lighter than the atmosphere, so uh, and eventually
you've got the balloon that is, the balloon part is
heavy enough to keep the the whole thing floating off
into space. That's why we don't have you know, if

(02:53):
you looked out into space, you wouldn't see the last
you know, it's fifty years of children's birthday party balloons
are cleaned the Earth. But no, I'm sure eventually the
balloon pops. Yes, But but the gas itself can escape
to the space. Yeah. So what makes an element that element? Well,
it's the number of protons in the nucleus of the element.

(03:15):
So the specific thing that makes helium helium is that
it's got two protons. Now, other things can vary. Yes,
you can have like charged particles, or you can have
charged atoms, or you can have isotopes that have different
numbers of neutrons. Exactly the standard helium you're gonna find
on Earth if you find it, because again it's pretty rare,

(03:35):
it's gonna be helium four. Yeah, that's two protons, two neutrons,
the four. It's a nice balance. It's referring to the
mass here really the atomic mass and total. Yeah, four total,
the two protons, the two neutrons, uh and UH. Helium
three obviously would mean that you'd have to have one
fewer of those nucleic particles, but as you pointed out, Joe,

(04:00):
you can't change the number of protons. Now, if you
did that, you would suddenly have tritium because you would
have one proton, two neutrons and well, actually, and you
don't have to get rid of an electron uh, and
that would end up being an isotope of hydrogen. So
if you you have the only thing you can get
rid of and still have it be helium is a neutron.

(04:20):
So you get rid of a neutron, you have two protons,
one neutron, and still two electrons you've got helium three.
So yeah, if you if you have a surplus or
a deficit of electrons, that's an ion of whatever you
know element you're talking about. And then the different the
different variations of neutrons, those are the isotopes. So I

(04:43):
have a question that Jonathan, you mentioned that it's not
gravitationally bound to Earth. Well, obviously everything has a gravitational attraction,
but I think what you're saying is that it's lighter
than the atmosphere, so it just goes, it just goes,
it just boils off into space. Right, Um, So how
come there's any on Earth at all? That's a great
question because obviously, if there were, you know, just some

(05:04):
limited supply of of helium by now throughout the Earth's history,
you would have expected it all to go away. But
in fact, helium can be the result of radioactive decay.
So one of the things radioactive decay can produce are
what are called alpha particles. That's specifically alpha decay, and

(05:24):
that's a form of ionizing radiation, right, and alpha particles
are essentially helium nucleus. So you've got the two protons
and the two neutrons, and if it captures two electrons,
it becomes a helium atom. But that would be helium four,
like we talked about regular old helium that's got that
nice nuclear balance. Yeah, and and that is by far

(05:44):
the more prevalent type of helium that you would find
on Earth. Like you know, some huge number per cent
of all the helium on Earth falls under the category
of helium four. Only a tiny percentage is helium three. Now,
if I want to put helium to very good use,
such as like buying a tank of it for a

(06:06):
child's birthday party, to fill up a bunch of balloons
that eventually flowed up in the atmosphere pop fall down
to Earth and kill some wildlife, and then also just
end up huffing some of it to make my voice
really high. Where does that helium come from? Like, where
did they fill up the tank? So yeah, this is uh,
you know, usually we get helium through as a byproduct
of other things. So it's not that we've got you know,

(06:28):
we don't have people in the you know, laboring away
in the helium mines deep under the ground. That would
be the most hilarious, mind though, they would definitely be
singing very high pitched songs and then when they emerge
from the minds, you see these just enormous dudes. Now, um,
it's mostly from natural gas deposits. Oh, hold on a second,

(06:52):
this is what happened to snow White seven Dwarves because
they sing that that song. Yeah, what is the song?
Which high high ho? It's off to work we go.
I guess that's not all that high pitched a song
for some reason, I was imagine it's Actually it's actually
fairly low for you know, it's high who high who?
Now snow White she's going falsetto city. But anyway, getting

(07:13):
back to this, Um, yeah, it's mostly from natural gas deposits.
And in the United States, we're talking about deposits that
are mostly found in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, the state,
not the band, right, Yeah, so that's that's where we're
getting it. Some other interesting facts about helium. You can
liquefy helium. You can get it to turn into liquid form.

(07:36):
In fact, that's very important for a lot of of
scientific purposes. But you gotta get the temperature nice and
chilly first. I imagine it also requires applying some pressure.
It does, so if you're talking about turning helium into
a liquid. It will be a liquid at minus four

(07:56):
fifty two degrees fahrenheit, which is minus two hundred sixty
eight point nine degrees celsius. Folks. Yeah, so the freezing
and boiling points of helium are lower than any other
known substance. I mean, there may be other ones out
there that we don't know of that could break this record,
but so far, so good. Um, and liquid helium is
what we what we well, what researchers and scientists are

(08:19):
using to super cool elements at stuff like the Large
Hadron Collider. You know, you want to make sure that
super conductivity is something that normally we can only achieve
through super cooling as well as a just removal of
all electric electrical resistance. Resistance that's where you lose energy
in the form of heat. By super cooling, you can

(08:41):
you can reduce resistance to zero, so you get electrons
flowing through the conductor. Material becomes like a super conductor.
So um, it's kind of like just turning whatever it
is into a greased luge for electricity. Yeah. Now, you know,
we we know about the main types of of matter.
You know, we will will discount plasma for the second

(09:02):
for the sake of conversation. But you know the three
that all elementary school kids here in the US learn about.
The You have the gases, you have the liquids, and
then you've got the solids. So you might wonder, well,
can you make helium into a solid, And the answer
is you can, but it requires tremendous effort because you
have to have it under a pressure of at least
twenty five atmospheres. That may have been the pressure I

(09:24):
was thinking about a minute ago. Yeah, I mean you
would normally, if you're going to turn helium into a
liquid here on Earth, you're going to be applying pressure anyway, right,
because it's not Getting the temperature down that low is
very difficult to do. The liquid helium is what you
switch to when liquid nitrogen isn't cold enough. So uh yeah,
So you'd have to apply a pressure of twenty five

(09:45):
atmospheres and at a temperature of one kelvin. Zero kelvin
keep in mind, is no molecular movement. That's absolute zero,
So that is minus four fifty eight degrees fahrenheit or
minus two d seventy two degrees celsiu. So pretty phenomenal stuff.
And we were talking about the isotopes. The fact that
you know, that's the difference between you know, how many

(10:06):
protons are how many neutrons are in the nucleus of
your atom. Right, so the one you'd most often find
on planet Earth is going to be your standard helium four,
two protons, two neutrons. We we are going to be
talking a lot more about helium three. That's where you
take one of the neutrons away. But how many isotopes
are there total? There are seven more than that, so
there's nine total, But there are only two that you're

(10:28):
gonna find in nature, helium four and helium three, because
those are the stable forms of helium. In the lab,
you can make other isotopes, but they don't last forever.
They decay. In the lab, you can make all kinds
of perversions of nature, It's true. And in the lab
we just laugh and laugh and and then you know,

(10:48):
and then there's the terror and the scariness, and the
dinosaurs get loose and and some helium atoms wake you
up in the middle of the night saying why did
you create me? Ugly? It's time. So, yeah, lots of
different isotopes, only two are and found in nature. Says
exactly the same too that we've been talking about all
this time. And um, now, there were a pair of

(11:10):
scientists who were the first to propose that the isotope
helium three would exist. That would be Mark Oliphant, who
was an Australian physicist, and Ernest Rutherford, who was a
New Zealand physicist. So I have to imagine that they
worked together, that they fought like cats and dogs, because
those Australians and New Zealanders, let me tell you, actually

(11:30):
they're both very nice. Just don't confuse one for the other.
That's the rule of thumb. But they were investigating the
possibilities of helium and hydrogen isotopes way back in the
nineteen thirties, and they discovered tritium, which is hydrogen with
a mass of three, so it's a a proton and
two neutrons. Uh. And they also discovered helium three, which
is helium with a mass of three. Three was an

(11:52):
interesting number for them. It's the magic number. So we've
known about helium three since the nineteen thirties. Uh. And
the question now is why on earth did we pick
helium three to talk about here on this podcast. Yeah,
I mean there are tons of isotopes that most of
them just what do they matter? Like, what can you
do with them? Yeah? The the interesting thing about helium

(12:14):
three is it's potentially a very useful source of fuel
for nuclear fusion, as in a nuclear reactor that uses fusion,
not fission to generate electricity. Hold on the second. Yeah,
I thought nuclear fusion was just one of those wacko dreams.
It may still be. We're hoping that it won't be,

(12:36):
but it's one of those things where the the the
science is saying something and now we're waiting for the
technology to catch up. Okay, well, let's do a real
quick and easy distinction between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Right,
nuclear fission are all the nuclear power plants we've got today. Yeah,
these are the nuclear power plants that we've talked about
in previous episodes before thinking these are the ones that

(12:59):
are generated nuclear waste. One of the big problems with
these these UH facilities they rely on uranium. They rely
on uranium decay. Essentially, it's it's to create a nuclear
reaction that becomes self sustaining. Right, So you take a
piece of uranium and you get it nice and enriched
so that it is primed to have a runaway reaction

(13:22):
of sending off radiation particles and and and then you
set it going right and it keeps itself going, so
you don't have to continuously pour energy into maintain that reaction.
So how does that turn into electricity, Well, it generates
a lot of heat. That heat ends up converting water
into steam. So you're using water to help main manage

(13:43):
the temperature of this nuclear uh reactor, and it's also
being generated turned into steam. The steam ends up turning
steam turbines and then ends up being recycled back into
the system. Like the steam condenses into water and is
used to cool it again. Sometimes you have a paired
cooling system where you've got um the coolant. The actual

(14:06):
water that's cooling the the core is not the same
water that's going through the turbine system. I mean you
can pair it that way. So essentially you have two
pipes next to each other. One pipe is the steam
that's been generated from direct contact with the nuclear material,
and the other pipe is a closed system of water
that then gets converted into steam because the heat from

(14:28):
the first pipe. But in either case you're talking about
creating steam. It turns the turbine. The turbine generates electricity,
and that's where we get electricity from nuclear power plants. Right, Okay,
So fission is taking very elements, big chunks of elements
that are very heavy atoms, and breaking them apart into
little pieces to create heat that we translate to electricity.
Fusion is taking very small atoms and gluing them together,

(14:54):
and that's also an energetic reaction. It also produces energy
when that fusion between the atomic nuclei occur, right, And
it's creating energy in a different way. So if you
think about how you know it's it actually makes a
lot of sense. If you take a big, heavy atom
and you break it apart and you get energy in
the form of heat, then in order to fuse two

(15:17):
atoms together, you need heat. You need to pour energy
into the system to make them combined together. As a result, uh,
they will eject other particles. Now in in nuclear fission,
some of those particles include things like neutrons that can
cause real issues if you don't have a containment system
for them. And fusion, you're talking mainly about protons. Protons

(15:41):
are easier to control, and I'll get to that in
a second. So The other big difference is that you're
not turning water into steam. With nuclear fusion plants. You
actually get a net electrical um energy uh from this fusion.
So it's it's it's like imagine, imagine that the fusion

(16:02):
reactor has a big outlet and you just plug your
thing into that, and it would be generating the electricity
running the thing. Of course, it obviously doesn't work exactly
like that, but you are saying direct electricity generation. It
generates a pressure of electrons that will flow into an
electrical grid. Well, and it's a little more complicated than that.
You have to look at a an electro magnet system

(16:23):
which is specifically used to help control the the protons
that get ejected in this process. Uh. And that's partly
where you're starting to get some electrical output. But yes,
ultimately there's no conversion of water into steam in this
In this scenario, it's not unlike almost every other version
of electricity we've talked about, with possible exceptions like solar energy,

(16:47):
it doesn't involve converting water into steam to turn and turbine.
It is it is in itself a means of generating electricity. Now,
the old methods that I've heard when when people used
to talk years ago about creating fusion, what I always
heard for fusion power plants was that it would involve
harvesting deuterium from the ocean. Tritium in deuterium, I believe,

(17:11):
and those are also different isotopes of elements, but those
are isotopes of the element hydrogen. Deuterium is hydrogen atom
that has a proton and a neutron, and it's also
called heavy hydrogen. And tritium is is extremely heavy hydrogen, dude,
because that's a proton and two neutrons. Uh So, yeah, exactly,

(17:31):
those were the ways that we thought about before. Now, obviously,
the other thing we should point out really quickly is fusion.
That's the same energy that we see in stars, right,
and typically what you hear is happening inside a star.
I'm sure it's actually you know, a star specialist could
tell you that more is going on, but the basic
process is hydrogen fusing into helium and a temperature of

(17:52):
millions of degrees right, right, Because you know, they might
be giants taught us. Actually they were. They were covering
a song from an old kid's album. But that's beside
the point. Exactly though, and so the deuterium and tritium. Uh.
The idea was that you could take these these isotopes
of hydrogen and fuse them together, and you would end

(18:12):
up with helium as one of your your byproducts. But
you would also end up getting neutrons that that would
be bounced off from this, uh, this fusing process, and
those neutrons are hard to control as opposed to protons.
And the reason why is that neutrons are have no charge. Right. So,

(18:34):
imagine that you've got a material that has no magnetic
charge to it, and let's think of it like a uh,
like a ceramic ball. Okay, so there's no magnetic there's
no magnetic activity here. It's a ceramic ball. It's a
big one. Let's say it's the size of a van
and it's rolling down a hill at you. You gotta

(18:55):
get out of the way. That ceramic ball. That's all
there is to it. Now, Let's say that instead of
it in a ceramic ball, it's something that can have
a charge to it and it's rolling down a hill
at you. But you have a really powerful electro magnet
that you have set to the opposite charge of that
giant thing. That's rolling towards you, and you flip a switch,
those opposite charges attract one another and it will slow

(19:18):
or even stop that charged ball from coming down and
crushing you. Yeah. Another way to think of it is
that protons are sticky and neutrons are not. And if
you have some the right kind of sticky fly paper
to attract some protons, you can catch them more easily
than you catch neutrons. And obviously, if you want to
control the the movement of particles that are going really

(19:41):
really super fast, you have to pour energy into the system.
In order to do that. With neutrons, that ends up
becoming a big problem. It's it's one of the reasons why,
one of the many reasons why, uh, nuclear fusion reactions
have been difficult to sustain, where you get a reaction
that's greater than the amount of energy you poured into

(20:01):
the system in the first place. Okay, so we're talking
about the difference between fusion reactions that produce protons versus
fusion reactions that produce fast moving neutrons. But how does
that How is that relevant to helium three? So what's
the difference Using helium three as a fuel, infusion gets
you around the neutron problem depending upon what you pair

(20:22):
it with. Okay, so you're saying, if we go with
the old the idea of tritium and deuterium fusion, that's
more likely to produce these fast neutrons. And if you
use helium three and deuterium, then the fusion between those
two would result in helium four atom and and an
extra proton. Uh. But that's easier again to contain because

(20:44):
the proton has a charge. So you can use an
electromagnet that has a negative charge because protons have positive charge,
and be able to attract it that way and stop
it from you know, being such a like being akin
to a fast moving neutron um and so you would
have a really efficiency them that way, and it doesn't
generate nuclear waste. But you could also use helium three

(21:05):
with itself, so instead of helium three and deuterium being
merged together, you merge to helium three atoms together and
that would produce helium and two protons. But either way
this approach, you don't end up with a an unstable
isotope that leads to decay, which would be another way
of saying you don't have radioactivity brilliant. Okay, Well, so

(21:28):
now that we know this, let's just gather up tons
and tons of helium three from those natural gas reserves
and uh and make a fusion reactory that will provide
abundant clean energy without producing nuclear waste. That seems like
an easy win. Why aren't we doing that right now?
Hold on, slick. So the main reason is that, again,

(21:51):
helium four is overwhelmingly the type of helium we we
have here on Earth. Uh, to the point where getting
helium three, like any there, there's so little helium three
in the United States that it will blow your mind.
So um, let's say that you know, you wanted to
have enough helium three to provide electricity to the United

(22:13):
States for an entire year, you would need about twenty
five tons more, give or take of helium three. Oh,
that's easy. The Earth's big. Yeah, right now we've got
of helium three in the United States. There's a large
gap you might notice, between what we need and what
we have. And and it's because it sounds more precious

(22:34):
than silver or gold. Yeah, and we don't have any
means of generating more of it in a way that
would be less problematic. For example, here's one way we
could generate helium three. You can just make it in
the lab, kind of if you think of a lab
as a nuclear fission reactor. So let's say you're using

(22:57):
a heavy water nuclear reactor. Heavy water nuclear reactors, you
have deuterium inside of them, uh, and tritium inside of
them inside the water itself. Oh. Wait, so you're saying,
like the water is H two oh, But that H
in the water instead of being standard hydrodium, which is

(23:18):
just a proton and an electron, the H in the
H two oh is actually heavy H. Yeah, really would
be tritium, not deuterium. I should have I think I
kind of misspoke earlier. But then you rate you could
generate tritium this way. Even if it was just deuterium.
You could generate tritium in this way, and then you
would have to store the tritium and giant tanks to

(23:40):
start to decay and undergo decay. When if they undergo decay,
then one of the things they generate is helium three.
But that would take like twelve years for it to
decay to any appreciable amount, give or take eight days.
So um, twelve years is a long time to wait too,

(24:02):
you know, for and plus that whole time, you're generating
nuclear waste because you're using nuclear fission, not fusion. So
we could do that here on Earth, but it seems
like that would be a problematic means of generating helium. Okay,
so that is another issue. We don't have a lot
of it here on Earth. Making more of it here

(24:22):
on Earth is not an ideal, uh solution, So maybe
we need to look somewhere else. Wait a second, now,
Earlier we were talking about how the fusion process inside
stars works by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium, and it's

(24:42):
gotta it's got a net helium output. So over time
more the mass of a star is going to be
made up of helium. But a star also ejects particles.
So particles are you know you who? You have this
solar wind and radiation pressure and all this stuff coming
off of the Sun all the time. Part of what's
coming off of the Sun particles from the Sun being
blown out into space. I bet a lot of that

(25:05):
is helium three, isn't it. Yeah, there's a there's a
significant amount of helium three being given off by the Sun.
And if only we didn't have this pesky atmosphere, it
would make its way here to Earth, but our atmosphere
pretty much, you know, the helium three is not gonna
enter Earth's atmosphere. It's just not a second. I know
a particular moon that doesn't have an atmosphere. It's the moon. Yeah,

(25:29):
that that one, the moon, one of the best moons.
It's my favorite moon. Um. Yeah, So the Moon does
not have an atmosphere, so helium three from solar wind
will impact the Moon. And actually the lunar soil absorbs
helium three. So there there is helium three locked away

(25:50):
in the lunar regulus, which that's that top soil above. Yeah,
and and rocks as well, I mean you know, but yeah,
there there's heli and three and then the our craters.
So that is a potential source for helium three. It's
amazing to think about how on the Moon, despite the

(26:12):
kind of like bigness and scariness and violence of space,
nothing happens on the Moon, you know, except unless there's
the occasional impact from some rock or something like that. Um,
there's no weather, there's no wind blowing. There's a Chinese
rover up there right now. Pretty much nothing happens. So
it's just been up there for billions of years, slowly

(26:36):
accumulating the dust that we could go and harvest to
use in our fusion reactors. One million tons of helium three,
remember tons, would provide enough for energy for the entire
United States for a year. Well, that's pretty good. So
a million tons would that would give us are assuming

(26:58):
that we could get nuclear refusion to work out. That
that's the base assumption that we have to keep in mind.
But assuming we get that to work out, and assuming
we could find some way of harvesting this helium three
from the Moon, we would have a potential energy source
for thousands of years. So the other thought is that
you hope at least that humans of the future would

(27:21):
continue to look at different ways of generating energy or
capturing energy and generating electricity that didn't even involve fusion,
and that by the time we would ever get to
a point where we're like, well, moon's looking a little scrawny.
Hopefully by then we'll have a dicensephere that just captures
all of the energy of the Sun. A boy can dream.
But okay, so we need to remember one thing that

(27:44):
you said a minute ago. I think it's good to
keep in mind. You make it sound like this is
not the only stumbling block to achieving fusion power. We
we still also have to figure out how to have
an optimal reactor design and how to initiate react actions
that are going to give us more energy than we
put in. But this is a significant part of the problem, right, Yes,

(28:07):
this would be This would be helium. Helium three would
be a huge solution to some very difficult problems, assuming
we could get the reactor part to work. So it's
you know that that part has to work too, But yeah,
assuming that has to work, helium three would be a huge,
huge bonus. Uh, as opposed to using deuterium and tritium. Well,

(28:29):
let's play that imagination game. Let's say we've got a
team here, who they say, all right, top men? Yeah,
and women and women. But I mean, I'm just quoting raiders.
And I'm sure some some some dogs too. And by
then we'll have genetically engineered really smart dogs. Maybe they'll
be deuterium sniffing dogs, who knows. Anyway, a team of wonderful,

(28:51):
brilliant organisms. We'll say, hey, we've got a reactor, a
fusion reactor, that can get the job done. You just
got to get us an off helium three. Ye, and
we know there's a bunch on the moon. What does
that operation look like? How do we get our hands
on it? How do we get it to the reactors
and turn that into a manageable electricity producing system. Well,

(29:15):
if we get to the point where the fusion reactors
are making sense, it will be a race to get
that helium three off the moon, because there's there is
absolutely no reason to not pursue it at that point
unless you you come to the conclusion that the effort
to get it is costing you more energy than what
you're getting out of using which seems unrealistic. Assuming that

(29:36):
we're able to transport a significant amount of helium three
back to Earth, it wouldn't be a big you know,
I could imagine that being something you know possible. So
let's let's put this into perspective. The amount of helium
three on the moon, or that's estimated to be on
the Moon is more than hasn't has more energy stored

(29:57):
in that potential energy stored there than ten times all
the coal, all the natural gas, and all the oil
that the Earth has ever had. More than ten times.
So think about that being attempting target. You're like, obviously,

(30:17):
we mean we have to go after that, assuming we
can get the reactor part to work. So all right,
So keeping that in mind that that we have to
have something to meet our energy needs. We want it
to be clean. We don't want to produce radio activity. Uh,
you know, this is like no carbon footprint deal. This
is fantastic. What does it take to get there? Well,

(30:38):
obviously it takes a system that would allow us to
send missions from Earth to the Moon to capture helium
three two then bring that helium three back to Earth.
So what might that look like? In the nineties there
was a proposal about a possible future mining system that

(31:00):
was beautiful in its insanity. Um, they suggest me, let
me guess the actual fusion power plant is on the
Moon and they send the energy it produces back to
Earth via a giant laser only slightly less crazy than
that moon laser, only slightly less crazy. So okay, well
you do get a moon laser. Don't don't get ahead

(31:22):
of me, all right, So imagine that you've got this rover.
And when I say rover, I'm not talking about a
tiny rover crawling across the Moon. I'm not even talking
about something as relatively large as the Curiosity rover, which
is pretty big. Actually, I'm talking something gargantuan, like imagine
the biggest piece of construction material, you know, like construction

(31:44):
of vehicles you've ever seen, and make that bigger, because
that's what I'm talking about. This is if you've ever
seen the vehicle that uh pulls the Space Shuttle to
its to its launchpad, that's kind of the size we're
talking about here. And this design, which by the way,
they just had a computer graphics kind of you know,
this is a proof of concept sort of thing. It

(32:07):
had a wheel on the front of it that would
scoop up regular up to two meters down from the
surface of the Moon, so you know that's that's a
big scoop, right. It pulls it into the machine, and
the machine has a series of vibrating screens that separate
the rocks from the dust. Now, the rocks are too

(32:30):
big to efficiently treat to get the helium three out,
so they get dumped back onto the surface of the Moon.
The dust keeps getting separated into smaller and smaller grains,
so anything that's larger than a hundred microns in size
gets dumped back on the moon. All the grains that
are hundred microns in size are smaller, get put into

(32:51):
a heating chamber. Now, in order to separate the helium
three from this lunar soil, you have to apply heat,
and a lot of it, like an excess of six
degrees celsius. This where the laser comes in. This is
where the laser comes in. Nice So their design also
had an enormous satellite dish like thing on the top.

(33:12):
It was really a mirrored array, so you pointed towards
the sun. It captures sunlight, concentrates that sunlight into a
very tight beam, similar to a laser. So when I
said it is a laser, I'm kind of exaggerating a bit,
but concentrates into a beam a very hot solar energy
that is then directed to a series of pipes that

(33:33):
contain liquefied metal that heat up the liquefied metal provide
the heat to the regular the little fine grains of
of moon dust. They get pushed through this heating chamber
that releases a lot of the stuff that happens to
be fused with that lunar soil, and it's not just
helium three, it's one of the things that is attached

(33:56):
to it. But also you've got stuff like water, You've
got carbon diox side, you've got um uh, methane, there's
all all these other like tiny molecules of the stuff
are are married to this dust. Yeah. And if you're like,
who cares well it matters on the moon? Yeah, if
you wanted to have an operation on the Moon where

(34:18):
you you know, we haven't really talked about what would
be required on the Moon itself to make this happen.
Most of the proposals I see suggest that eventually you
would have some sort of lunar base. And if you
have a lunar base, then if it's a lunar base
that has humans in it, you're gonna need stuff in
order to provide water, oxygen, you know, all these other

(34:38):
sort of things fuel, things that are really important, uh,
in order to maintain a presence there. Also, I've seen
proposals saying that, Okay, maybe we don't even have a
lunar base there. Maybe everything that's on the Moon is
operated autonomously by robots and that there are no humans there.
But you could still end up using a lot of
those materials for things like miss into Mars or other destinations.

(35:02):
So well, we've talked many times here on how having
water in space is useful in so many ways. Yeah.
So even if just for the fact that you're not
having to ship it up there in a you know,
rocket where it costs so much money. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
And so you would get access to this stuff. You
would also be able to rest assured that you're not

(35:24):
creating giant pits like mining pits on the Moon. It
would essentially look like it would definitely make the Moon
look different. Creators, small creators would get smoothed out, so
the surface of the Moon would actually change in appearance
over time. Um, but I mean it all depends on
what side of the Moon the operation is on. Keeping

(35:45):
in mind there's no dark side of the moon, not
at least not a permanent one. There's there's a night
side of the moon. Uh. And in fact, the night
becomes important because you've got all these different gases contained
in a part of this rover, right, and you need
to get to the helium three. So how do you
get the helium three separated from everything else? The night

(36:06):
cycle could actually help you in that endeavor and separating
out the different gases, right, so you've got them all
contained in this this chamber. But one of the things
we pointed out helium very very low liquefying point as
far as temperatures go, it gets gets really cold on
the lunar night cycle, which lasts a long time compared

(36:26):
to Earth. It's not a day. So this plan maybe
pretty high on the insanity meter, but it's also pretty clever. Yeah,
it's taking advantage of physics to say, like well, by
having the rover harvest in the daytime, right and and
convert the into the helium three during the daytime the
lunar daytime which lasts like fifteen days, uh, and then

(36:50):
go into the night cycle, that low temperature is going
to liquify nearly all the gases besides helium and hydrogen,
which you can then vent in to a different chamber
and then separate those out later. Uh. And there are
ways of separating helium from hydrogen, so you could do that,
and then the liquefied stuff you could separate in other

(37:12):
ways and use it for whatever it is you need
to use it. So that was really pretty interesting. So
that was the old plan though, Yeah, the one that
was never put into place. Yeah, yeah, that was the
old plan. And I think just us talking about this
in the in the very sketchiest way makes it pretty
clear that this would be an enormous investment required to

(37:34):
to actually set up like a lunar mining operation of
any kind. We don't even have the type of vehicles
that would be necessary to land on the lunar surface
to be loaded up with this stuff and returned back
to Earth like it was. You know, they were talking
about in the video that a vehicle similar to the
Space Shuttle would be able to carry the amount we

(37:57):
would need to fuel the Earth the United States energy
needs for a full year, But we don't have anything
like that right now. The Space Shuttle alone obviously would
not have been able to do it because it was
not designed to leave low Earth orbit. So we would
need to have a type of spacecraft capable of making
a journey to Earth and bringing back a substantial amount

(38:18):
of helium three. Or if you didn't do this, do
this the way that was suggested in that video back
from the nineties, you'll be bringing back lunar soil, and
that's a much I mean, that's that's heavier, right. You're
talking about bringing back a larger amount of material for
a smaller amount of the stuff you actually want, because

(38:42):
most of that mass is going to be made up
of the soil, not of the helium three that you
actually want to get. Whereas the proposed version that I
said from the nineties, they'd be getting just the helium
three or whatever, you know, other fuels or whatever sent back,
and you would you would leave the soil on the moon. Uh.
There has been a proposal. In fact, there is an

(39:02):
ongoing series of missions that is looking at the possibility
of using the Moon as a source for various stuff,
including helium three. And it comes from China. So UM,
I don't know. Have you read about the chung E
lunar Lander. I don't think I have, or if I have,

(39:22):
I forgot the name. So this was this was the
lunar lander that UH touched down last year on the
surface of the Moon. So the only the the so
China is the third nation to have successfully done a
soft landing on the on the Moon. UM. And the
lander also has a rover called the YouTube rover, and

(39:46):
the purpose of that mission was really just to do
scientific measurements of the soil on the Moon, as well
as you know, some other scientific research. But there's going
to be a future mission that takes advantage of what
was learned on this one, and it is called the
chung E five mission that's scheduled to happen sometime in

(40:09):
UH if if everything stays on schedule, and its mission
is a little different. It's to travel to the Moon,
land on the Moon, dig up a certain amount of
lunar soil, two kilograms of it, and then blast off
to UH end up meeting back up with a lunar orbiter.

(40:29):
So it's similar to the way the Apollo missions worked
and then return to Earth. So would actually be bringing
lunar soil back to Earth. UH. This is obviously not
ideal because again you are having to carry a lot
more material, and ultimately the stuff you are interested in
is just a fraction of that material. But it is

(40:50):
an actual step toward this, this proposal of using the
Moon as a source of of mining material. So I
mean it's while while you could argue it's it's not
efficient and that even if this all works that it
ultimately wouldn't make sense from an energy production perspective. What

(41:12):
you have to say is it's happening, right, Like, whether
whether this particular version is something that would ultimately be
used on a larger scale is kind of immaterial. It's
it's really to say someone has fired the first shot
in a new space race. Yeah, well, I mean, at
least metaphors, at least it could probably teach us. I

(41:35):
believe you said earlier that the amount of helium three
in the lunar soil, it we've got a pretty good
estimate we think of how much is in there, but
we don't know for sure yet. Now we don't know
for sure, and also the concentration within any given amount
of lunar soil could vary, and it's not it's not
as much like, yes, there there may be a million

(41:55):
tons of helium three in the lunar soil. This particular
thing is bringing back to two kilograms of lunar soil.
And when we talk about the helium three being in there,
obviously that's you know, depending upon the concentration, it's going
to be a pretty small amount of helium three. So
again you might you might say, well that doesn't seem
very practical, but it's a it's a step. It's it's

(42:17):
you can't think of it as this is an ends
to itself. No, this is this is a step on
a journey to use the Moon as a source of
material for energy or whatever. Um because you know, you
could use it for other things if you want to,
if you wanted to mind it for water, you could.
So the question I have is whether or not this
is going to start a new flurry of activity among

(42:39):
various nations to look at the Moon seriously as a
potential source for energy fuel, and if it does, what
that might mean in the next five to ten years,
where various entities will be trying to lay claim to that. What, well,

(43:00):
we get to a point where those treaties that were
assigned in the past need to be revisited because we're
now viewing the Moon as an actual, legitimate source of fuel,
Then how do we fairly designate that as as such? Right? Okay,
you're you're talking about like if people can um because

(43:21):
we've sort of had an agreement that you can't harvest
resources from planets and say that they belong to you.
You can't. You can you maybe can from like asteroids,
because that's not considered what is it a fixed body
or something. Yeah, I meanly, essentially, it's not supposed to
be a celestial body. But I think, I think, and

(43:42):
most most people would argue that you could probably get
away with mining stuff. You couldn't claim the entire body
as belonging to China, like you couldn't say this now
is the Great People's Republic of China. Lunar division. That
wouldn't stop us. You you aren't supposed to be able
to do that. So what we're looking at is the

(44:05):
possibility of that being, you know, adjusted over time. If
we've got lots of different interested parties all wanting to
go to the Moon and using different means, it also
could mean that our moon would look very different in
another like twenty years. So I mean, it's it's nothing.

(44:25):
None of this is set in stone, obviously. I mean,
if the nuclear fusion thing never works out, then it's
pointless anyway, no one's gonna do it. But well, I
don't know if i'd say it's pointless because we've talked
about this with several other things in space exploration, where
you might have a mission to discover a particular answer
to a question or to exploit a particular resource and

(44:46):
even if that doesn't pan out, space exploration is all symbiotic,
like every mission makes every next mission easier and more possible. Yeah,
I mean the missions themselves would certainly lead to advance
in science and technology that would be beneficial to us.
What I really meant, what I really meant was that
the the goal the goal. Assuming that the goal of

(45:08):
the mission is to create a sort or to get
to a source of fuel for fusion, that the fusion
doesn't work out in that mission, part of the mission
doesn't make sense. It doesn't mean that we don't benefit
in other ways, but that that particular, that particular part
of the mission becomes moot. Right. Well, I hope they
can exploit helium three and make fusion work, obviously, I
mean it would be a revolutionary thing for energy on Earth.

(45:31):
But and and I also just hope they build a
lunar base. Well so do I I mean, I there
was a few years ago NASA was trying to get
excitement about the potential for a lunar base. Again. I
remember we even had here at Hell stuff works, though
not here in this building and our old building. We
had someone from NASA come in and give a presentation

(45:53):
about a proposed lunar base. Um. This was a few
years ago when NASA was really kind of pushing for that,
but then, you know, budgets changed, things changed, and that
that plan got put on the back burner. But there's
always the hope that if this in fact looks like
it's a promising route, that that will encourage the funding

(46:14):
of such missions and not just a reliance upon private
companies here in the United States. I mean, that could
definitely help as well. Or it could lead to what
we saw in Moon, because that's the plot of Moon,
main character, and Moon is overseeing a helium three mining
operation on the Moon. Jonathan, don't scare the children, but

(46:39):
do go see Moon, because that's a good is really good.
It's a good one of the best science fiction movies
in the past ten years. So, you know, I the
optimist to me, certainly hopes that fusion works out because
it would be enormous. I mean, being able to to
shrug off our dependence on fossil fuels for the majority

(47:02):
of our energy needs would be phenomenal for so many reasons.
I mean, from a national security standpoint, that would be wonderful.
Although again this could raise serious questions about national security
for other nations. What happens to nations that don't have
the capability of sending mining operations to the moon. Are
they going to rely upon some sort of weird helium

(47:25):
three market, which I imagine that's exactly what would happen.
Would they have to you know, I mean, would there
be this crazy divide between nations that have access to
fusion technology and those that don't. Probably, at least for
a while, there would be. Um But I hope that
these sort of things could be ironed out over time
and that we could get our our dependence away from

(47:47):
fossil fuels, and that can in turn lead to at
least diminishing of the effects of climate change. We we
know that climate change is going to continue to happen,
and really at this point, what we need to do
is see how drastically we can reduce those effects. And
this would go a really long way to helping that happen,

(48:07):
particularly when you think China's leading the way here. That's enormous, right,
So big hope that it all pans out. I mean,
it's there are a lot of ifs, but I don't
you know, I don't see any of them as being
um pessimistic, Like, I don't think any of them are. Uh,
there's not enough indicators there to tell me that this

(48:29):
is just totally crazy. It's just it's it's like, this
is the long shot of long shots, and if it
works out, it's great, and if it doesn't work out,
no one is surprised. I think that there's a much
greater chance of this working out than that, at least
I hope so too. But yeah, this was kind of
fun to talk about. We did not get balloons to
celebrate this particular episode because we're generally of the opinion

(48:52):
that helium should be used for really important things besides
our entertainment um or at least I am, and so
we didn't do that. However, big surprise, We're gonna go
and enjoy some nice frosty coffee based beverages in just
a moment, so because we're gonna go talk about some
episodes of Forward Thinking video series uh with our director

(49:13):
and editor. Shortly they will peek behind the curtain. We're
actually gonna be talking about what's coming up in the
future of the show. So if you guys haven't checked
out the video series for Forward Thinking, you should definitely
go do that. Uh, it's it's a lot of fun.
Joe and I both work on it. I hosted, Joe
writes a lot of the episodes. I write some of
the other episodes. Lauren right some of the episodes, and

(49:33):
we explore all sorts of topics and there Those videos
are great. So if you haven't checked this out, do so.
If you have any suggestions for future topics, you should
write into us. We love getting your messages. We've been
getting a ton of them and it really helps us
choose which topics we're going to cover. We've had a
few people talk about fusion and helium three in the past,

(49:54):
so I'm glad we're able to talk about this. But
you should send us an email that addresses fw think
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(50:18):
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