The Future of Fusion and Helium-3

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 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

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

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,

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,

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 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 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. 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,

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,

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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,

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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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

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 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, so I'm glad we're able to talk about this. But you should send us an email that addresses fw think at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a

line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking at Facebook. Just search fw thinking in the search bar. We will pop right up and we will talk to you again. Really sim For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places