
India launching moon rover to search for helium-3 deposits - adventured
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-26/the-quest-to-find-a-trillion-dollar-nuclear-fuel-on-the-moon
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Animats
"Trillon-dollar". Right.

\- We can't even do deuterium fusion as a power source, let alone He3 fusion.
Despite half a century of trying. So this is way premature.

\- He3 can be made by making tritium in a reactor and letting it decay for a
decade or so to He3. This is where He3 comes from now. Current price is about
US$20,000 a gram, which is higher than usual due to declining tritium
production. Tritium is viewed as an annoying waste product of nuclear power
today. Most of the cost is extraction from radioactive waste.

\- The concentration of He3 on the moon is low. Optimistically, 20 parts per
billion. So it takes a lot of mining effort. The numbers do not look that
good.[1]

[1]
[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014cosp...40E1515K](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014cosp...40E1515K)

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zaroth
What do you figure the demand curve looks like? If you could bring back 10kg
of He3 would it crater the price or could you actually hope to clear anywhere
close to $200m?

I assume not.

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blotter_paper
If you were the only entity/cartel bringing it back, you could trickle it onto
the market.

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senectus1
to me the idea of mining space to bring back to earth is insanely short
sighted and uneconomical to the point of being unethical.

Mining space, should be used for the express purpose of developing in space.

The one exception I have for that rule is energy, _transmitting_ energy to
earth from space may even be the best way for earth to exist long term (but
not in the sense of dragging chunks of "high tech coal" dirtside, I mean via
microwave or laser or some other high intensity energy stream)

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blotter_paper
Putting aside the suggestion of "ethics," I mostly agree with this; objects
should have more value outside of a gravity well than in one, all other things
being equal. Of course all other things are not equal, and as long as there
are masses of people living in gravity wells there will be demand for objects
to be sent into them. My original comment should be interpreted in the context
of its parent.

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epaulson
Wikipedia says you'd need to process 4 million tons of lunar regolith a week
to produce enough He-3 to power the world.

Wikipedia also says that the World Trade Center pile was 1.8 million tons.

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michaelbuckbee
I was curious (despite suspecting this isn't quite an apples/apples
comparison) but Wikipedia puts worldwide coal consumption at ~7 Billion tons.

