Wilder: The Reset Is Happening

While a shift from the Middle-East to American oil producers is good for oil companies, it isn't good for the American consumer and most businesses who are going to pay higher energy costs. I just saw a headline for an article about airlines trying to charge fuel surcharges to people who had already booked flights. In his latest piece, "The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect," John Wilder discusses the downstream impact on prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And he ends with this cheerful thought:

    And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:  the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years.  Both of those props just got kicked.

    Hard.  The reset isn’t coming in some distant future.  It has already started.    

Read the whole thing.  

    But sometimes as some doors close, others open up. The special status the the dollar has enjoyed is the "petro-dollar"--that oil sales were denominated in dollars so, in order to buy oil, countries had to have U.S. dollars. One of the purposes of this war with Iran seems to be to perpetuate the petro-dollar.  But that is not the door that is opening. Rather, the opportunity that is here--if the U.S. is willing to seize it--is Helium-3. And there is only place we can get to that has it in abundance--the Earth's moon. 

    I know that some of you are probably sick of my bringing it up, but I'm not the only one talking about it: from the New York Post article, "Last man on moon, Apollo 17’s Jack Schmitt, reveals secret hidden in lunar dust that could spur space-travel boon." The article begins:

    The last man to walk on the moon says he can’t explain what it was like up there but that more and more people may learn soon enough — thanks to a trillion-dollar industry hidden in the lunar dust.

    Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, 90, an Apollo 17 astronaut who spent three days on the moon in 1972, told The Post this week that there is a superfuel locked within the lunar dust that could provide Earth with an abundance of clean and safe energy for generations.

    “I’ve been working on this for many decades — harvesting the light isotope of helium-3 from the moon,” said Schmitt, who is from New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque.

The article goes on to explain:

    Helium-3 is a key ingredient needed to run nuclear fusion reactors, which operate with extreme efficiency and without the dangerous radioactive waste today’s fission-based power plants create.

    But helium-3 is extremely rare on Earth — so rare that it’s rationed by the federal government — meaning fusion reactors have never been viable on a large scale.

    But the moon is believed to be ripe with it, since the sun has been bombarding its atmosphere-free surface with the isotope for billions of years and building it up in the grey lunar dust.

    Harvesting it could be a trillion-dollar industry providing humanity with clean and safe energy for generations, Schmitt said.

    As a result, he co-founded a business, Interlune, that’s developing the technologies to make it happen.

    “We think the business case has finally made it,” Schmitt said, explaining the process of extracting helium-3 from moondust is more akin to agricultural harvesting than mining.    

New fusion reactor designs, including from Helion, are premised on a  Deuterium-Helium-3 fusion reaction. Why? As Helion explains: "Among other benefits, D-He-3 maximizes our ability to directly capture electricity, a large advantage when building a fusion system for commercial deployment." The article goes on to explain:

    D-He-3 fusion requires the highest temperatures, about 200 M°C, which does pose an engineering challenge due to the need for stronger magnets and putting more energy into the system. However, both challenges can be addressed through designing better magnets or more efficient circuits. This reaction produces a 3.6 MeV alpha and a 14.7 MeV proton. However, with a D-He-3 mixture, D-D reactions can still occur, resulting in five possible outputs: 3.6 MeV alphas, 0.8 MeV helions, 14.7 MeV protons, 1 MeV tritons, and 2.45 MeV neutrons.
 
    Despite the higher temperature requirements, some key advantages of D-He-3 begin to emerge. The most significant is the type of particle it emits. Protons, unlike neutrons, can be contained using magnetic fields, reducing the material wear and shielding requirements compared to a D-T reaction. D-He-3’s reactions yield substantial energy – 18.3 MeV – more than tritium, and without the higher-energy neutrons. This is a significant benefit in Helion’s systems, as we directly recover electricity from this process. By not relying on a thermal conversion, we do not need to build large cooling towers and steam turbines; instead, we can pull energy directly from the reaction. For a commercial system, this helps to increase efficiency and reduce capital and operating costs.  

    And while helium-3 isn’t abundant on Earth, it can be created through a process of breeding within the D-D reactions. Additionally, the tritium created through the process decays into helium-3, which we can use in our fusion process.  

Pulsar Fusion, which recently achieved "first plasma" in a fusion rocket test, also plans on using a D-He-3 reaction for its fusion rocket.