>>12235015>We need a moon base NOW for the helium first and foremostNo, lunar He3 is pure meme.
It is almost a thousand times harder to create a burning plasma with helium-3 than it is using a mixture of deuterium and tritium, and it's almost a hundred times harder than creating a burning plasma using jus deuterium.
Deuterium exists on Earth in concentrations a million times greater than the He3 on the Moon, AND there's a vastly larger inventory of deuterium on Earth vs He3 on the Moon.
Tritium is a geologically short lived isotope and therefore needs to be manufactured if we want to use it as fusion fuel. To make tritium you just expose lithium to thermal neutrons; the lithium absorbs the thermal neutron and splits into tritium and an He-4 nucleus. Since both D-T and D-D fusion fuel cycles produce neutron flux, the operation of either reactor design can generate more tritium from lithium than is actually being used in the reactor, meaning the D-T reactor effectively runs on deuterium and lithium fuel. Both of these are vastly more available than He3 and the energy density is on par. Again, if we have the technology to even make a self sustaining He3 fusion reactor, we have the technology to make a very high specific power pure-deuterium fusion reactor, which makes the He3 reactor moot.
Finally, in order to sustain the united states alone, we'd be using about 20,000 kg of He3 per year, which would require the 100% efficient zero-loss processing of two trillion kilograms of lunar soil in order to be extracted. Realistically, given the extremely low concentrations and no ability to increase concentrations via chemically fixing the helium, you're looking at about 100 trillion kilograms of lunar regolith being mined, ground to ultrafine dust in a super high vacuum extraction chamber, and then dumped on a big pile, every single year. It's completely unfeasible and also stupid. For WAY less effort we could go full retard and do geostationary solar power satellites.
