China is taking lunar mining seriously Source: Mining China is taking lunar mining seriously China’s plans to return to the moon early 2020s. Filling one shuttle’s cargo bay with helium-3 could bring the equivalent energy of 1bn barrels of oil back to earth. The moon is rich in rare earths, titanium and could support mining with recent evidence of the existence of water, the big prize when excavating the moon is helium-3. Almost non-existent on earth, helium-3 is abundant and accessible on the moon and could be used in nuclear fusion, producing much more energy than fission reactions and with much less radioactive waste. While the USA dabbles with the idea of lunar mining and both India and Russia have in the past floated ideas, China is the only power pushing ahead with an actual program. Writing in The Diplomat Fabrizio Bozzato, a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies at the Tamkang University in Taiwan, intriguingly argues China’s program to land on the moon within a decade could be a game-changer: It does, however, exist on the moon. Lacking an atmosphere, the moon has been bombarded for billions of years by solar winds carrying helium-3. As a result, the dust of the lunar surface is saturated with the gas. It has been calculated that there are about 1,100,000 metric tons of helium-3 on the lunar surface down to a depth of a few meters, and that about 40 tons of helium-3 – enough to fill the cargo bays of two space shuttles –could power the U.S. for a year at the current rate of energy consumption. Given the estimated potential energy of a ton of helium-3 (the equivalent of about 50 million barrels of crude oil), helium-3 fuelled fusion could significantly decrease the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, and increase mankind’s productivity by orders of magnitude.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 19:42:23 +0000
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