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It's a good (perhaps the only good) reason to go back to the moon. There's tons of that stuff there.



Well, honestly it's hard to imagine any situation where it would be economically viable to extract He-3 from lunar regolith and bring it back to Earth any time soon and that's ignoring the fact that we still can't yet build a fusion reactor to burn it in. D-T fusion will be more practical for a long time because we can breed the fuel pretty easily by sticking lithium in a fission reactor. That same breeding reaction is the one that ultimately produces He-3 since the tritium decays into He-3, but it's way faster/easier to just use the tritium instead of waiting around for it to decay. Helium fusion also has most of the same materials issues as D-T fusion and a higher ignition temperature, so really it's not particularly ideal.

Outside of fuel for fusion, radiation detectors and a few other minor applications there's not much use for He-3. The more interesting possibility to me is the idea of extracting He-3 on the moon and keeping it there, using it to fuel a fusion reactor powering some sort of sci-fi type lunar city/port. Since it's available in relative abundance on the moon directly and doesn't have to be bred indirectly it starts to make sense as a fuel.




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