Moon Fuel: A New Multi-Trillion Dollar Treasure
Let’s get to the bottom of this. The estimated H3 saturation in the lunar regolith is about 20 ppb – yes that’s billion. This is an incredibly thin soup. We would need thousands of automated mining vehicles in order to extract the tonnage we would need in order to make a meaningful impact on earths power supply. The logistics issue comes on top. This is a hard sell. If we are really serious about H3 fusion, we better look at the outer giant planets Uranus and Neptune which have far higher concentrations of H3 in their atmospheres. Automated balloon probes could go down into the atmosphere, extract the H3 and then get out of the gravity well ad come back to earth. That’s about as futuristic as it sounds. Don’t hold your breath just yet. But it makes for nice science fiction. We don’t need dreams – we need solutions that work, and we have them if we only looked at them without prejudice. But AOC is probably going to like H3 from the moon.
India’s space program wants to go where no nation has gone before – to the south side of the moon. And once it gets there, it will study the potential for mining a source of waste-free nuclear energy that could be worth trillions of dollars.
