A one-thousand year supply of energy...

[Beestie]

Has been found on the moon.

"If we could land ... on the moon, fill the cargo with canisters of helium-3 mined from the surface and bring the shuttle back to Earth," he said, "that cargo would supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year."

John Santarius, a professor at the university's Fusion Technology Institute, said helium-3 provides 1 million times more energy per pound than a ton of coal. *emphasis added

And that's just one shuttle bay of this stuff. Sounds easy to extract, too. Just heat the lunar dust to 700° and it gives up the helium-3 along with oxygen and hydrogen which can be siphoned off for use as water.

Gee, if the moon has all this stuff, I wonder what we are going to find on Mars? Is it too late to change my mind about not sending a manned mission there??

Hopefully, there aren't any caribou on the moon

[lumberjim]

nice!

see. that's why we should all drive SUV's and use oil to heat our homes....
if we would just run out of oil, we'd have to get moving seriously on a cleaner, replenishable energy source. we might also stop sticking our nose into the middle east where it doesn;t belong.

we should redouble our efforts on cold fusion research so that we can take advantage of this energy source.

How'd you like to win the contract for mining this stuff? BIG$$$.

[Beestie]

Another thing is that it would be taxpayer financed so no private interest (e.g., Enron) would control it. A true public good.

And certain countries in the middle east would, overnight, become ... well... less important than they are today.

[russotto]

I'm going to call bullshit here.

1) He-3 is only a good source of energy given a practical fusion reactor. We don't have one.

2) He-3 is present on Earth

3) He-3 can be manufactured in fission reactors.

Getting He-3 from the moon would be plain silly, except for use ON the moon.

[lumberjim]

yeah, but if we have this energy source, we won't have fission reactors to get the H-3 in the first place. it's the ease of the mining that makes it worth going to the moon for. maybe

and yeah, all bets are off until we can get fusion right.

[Beestie]

and yeah, all bets are off until we can get fusion right.

Are you thinking about cold fusion? I didn't think fusion was that big of a deal.

[russotto]

Thermonuclear fusion isn't that big a deal. Unfortunately, it's not practical for power generation. Practical controlled fusion for power generation has not been achieved.

[richlevy]

Originally posted by Beestie
Another thing is that it would be taxpayer financed so no private interest (e.g., Enron) would control it. A true public good.

Yeah, right.

[elSicomoro]

I wish there was a way to harness the methane from my farts into a viable energy source...man, talk about a renewable resource. I'd save so much money...

I've even come up with a slogan..."Methane...the REAL natural gas!"

[xoxoxoBruce]

Finally, "our third-generation research showed that if helium-3 was combined with helium-3," there would be no radioactive fallout at all — just the production of normal helium and hydrogen, Kulcinski said.

WTF? doesn't it combine when they bake it out of the soil and put it in a container?

[P-J]

i think they're talking about combining the atoms... creating a more dense gas... it probably wouldn't be stable, and so react in such a way that the energy can be harnessed(basically, a harnessed explosion)

or, at least, thats how i figure it.