A potential gas source found on the moon's surface could hold the key to meeting future energy demands as the earth's fossil fuels dry up in the coming decades, scientists said Friday.

Mineral samples from the moon contained abundant quantities of helium 3, a variant of the gas used in lasers and refrigerators as well as to blow up balloons.

"When compared to the earth the moon has a tremendous amount of helium 3," said Lawrence Taylor, a director of the US Planetary Geosciences Institute, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

"When helium 3 combines with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) the fusion reaction proceeds at a very high temperature and it can produce awesome amounts of energy," Taylor told AFP.

"Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one full year," said Taylor, who is in the north Indian city of Udaipur for a global conference on moon exploration. Helium 3 is deposited on the lunar surface by solar winds and would have to be extracted from moon soil and rocks.

To extract helium 3 gas the rocks have to be heated above 1,400 degs F. Some 200 million tonnes of lunar soil would produce one tonne of helium, Taylor said, noting that only 10 kilos of helium 3 are available on earth.

Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam told the International Conference on Exploration and Utilisation of the Moon on Wednesday that the barren planet held about one million tonnes of helium 3. 

"The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of Helium 3 than all the fossil fuels on the earth," Kalam said.

However, planetary scientist Taylor said the reactor technology for converting helium 3 to energy was still in its infancy and could take years to develop. "The problem is that there is not yet an efficient type of reactor to process helium 3. It is currently being done mostly as a laboratory experiment. Right now at the rate which it (research) is proceeding it will take another 30 years," he said. 

Other scientists said the reactor would be safe in terms of radioactive elements and could be built right in the heart of any city.

"Potentially there are large reservoirs of helium 3 on the moon, said D.J. Lawrence, planetary scientist at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"Just doing reconnaissance where the minerals are and to find out where helium 3 likes to hang out is the first step, so when the reactor technology gets to work we are ready and have precise information," Lawrence said.

"It really could be used as a future fuel and is safe. It is not all science fiction."

In the long term, the Moon is likely to be very important in supplying construction facilities with raw materials. Zero gravity allows materials to be processed in ways impossible or difficult on Earth, such as 'foaming' metals, where a gas is injected into a molten metal, and then the metal is annealed slowly. On Earth, the gas bubbles rise and burst, but in a zero gravity environment, that does not happen. Annealing is a process that requires large amounts of energy, as a material is kept very hot for an extended period of time. This allows the molecular structure to align in the strongest possible way. Materials which cannot be alloyed or mixed on Earth because of the gravity field effects on density differences could be combined in space, resulting in composites which could have exceptional qualities. No one knows, because no one has been able to experiment along these lines on any scale. However, it is possible that a material or process will be identified which will be highly valuable on Earth, but impossible to make here.

So we now know that Helium 3 is sought after by all the major countries of Earth with NASA's Constellation Program, The joint Chinese-Russian Chang'e Program leading the way for the exploitation of the Moon. With an estimated 100 tons needed to power the entire planet and an estimated million plus tons on the Moon it is easy to see why this fuel source is so lucrative! Here is NASA's plan for mining the precious fuel:

NASA's planned moon base announced last week could pave the way for deeper space exploration to Mars, but one of the biggest beneficiaries may be the terrestrial energy industry. Nestled among the agency's 200-point mission goals is a proposal to mine the moon for fuel used in fusion reactors -- futuristic power plants that have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept but are likely decades away from commercial deployment.

Helium-3 is considered a safe, environmentally friendly fuel candidate for these generators, and while it is scarce on Earth it is plentiful on the moon. As a result, scientists have begun to consider the practicality of mining lunar Helium-3 as a replacement for fossil fuels.

"After four-and-half-billion years, there should be large amounts of helium-3 on the moon," said Gerald Kulcinski, a professor who leads the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Last year NASA administrator Mike Griffin named Kulcinski to lead a number of committees reporting to NASA's influential NASA Advisory Council, its preeminent civilian leadership arm.

The Council is chaired by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt, a leading proponent of mining the moon for helium 3. Schmitt, who holds the distance record for driving a NASA rover on the moon (22 miles through the Taurus-Littrow valley), is also a former U.S. senator (R-New Mexico). The Council was restructured last year with a new mission: implementing President Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration," which targets Mars as its ultimate destination. Other prominent members of the Council include ex-astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Schmitt and Kulcinski are longtime friends and academic partners, and are known as helium-3 fusion's biggest promoters. At the Fusion Technology Institute, Kulcinski's team has produced small-scale helium-3 fusion reactions in the basketball-sized fusion device. The reactor produced one milliwatt of power on a continuous basis.

Wired.com

So we now have the US, Russia, and China's plans for mining Helium 3. How close to reality are the reactors? Well that will greatly be sped up if it's confirmed that large amounts of Helium 3 are indeed on the Moon

Professor Kulcinski's lab is running the only helium-3 fusion reactor in the world. He has an annual research budget that is barely into six figures and allows him to have five graduate research assistants working on the project. Compared to what has been spent on other fusion projects around the world, the team’s accomplishments are impressive. Helium-3 would not require a tokomak reactor like the multibillion-dollar one being developed for the international ITER project. Instead, his design uses an electrostatic field to contain the plasma instead of an electromagnetic field. His current reactor contains spherical plasma roughly ten centimeters in diameter. It can produce a sustained fusion with 200 million reactions per second producing about a milliwatt of power while consuming about a kilowatt of power to run the reactor. It is nuclear power without highly radioactive nuclear waste.

Let's get the funding to this man! Although I think he will get it in a few years when the US realizes China's going to get Helium 3 first if we don't jump on it first. Either way I think the funding will come in a few years when we get more detailed information about the exact amounts on the Moon. Either way I believe within 30 years oil will be near obsolete and the world will be running on Helium 3 mined from the Moon. Here is some more information I would like to share with you:

That 1 million metric tonnes of He3, reacted with deuterium, would generate about 20,000 terrawatt-years of thermal energy. The units alone are awesome: a terrawatt-year is one trillion (10 to 12th power) watt-years. To put this into perspective, one 100-watt light bulb will use 100 watt-years of energy in one year. That's about 10 times the energy we could get from mining all the fossil fuels on Earth, without the smog and acid rain. If we torched all our uranium in liquid metal fast breeder reactors, we could generate about half this much energy, and have some interesting times storing the waste.

The Value

About 25 tonnes of He3 would power the United States for 1 year at our current rate of energy consumption. To put it in perspective: that's about the weight of a fully loaded railroad box car, or a maximum Space Shuttle payload. To assign an economic value, suppose we assume He3 would replace the fuels the United States currently buys to generate electricity. We still have all those power generating plants and distribution network, so we can't use how much we pay for electricity. As a replacement for that fuel, that 25-tonne load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per tonne.

The Payoff

A guess is the best we can do. Let's suppose that by the time we're slinging tanks of He3 off the moon, the world-wide demand is 100 tonnes of the stuff a year, and people are happy to pay $3 billion per tonne. That gives us gross revenues of $300 billion a year.

Asi.org

Here's a vision for 30 years from now we can all appreciate:

Imagine a world thirty years from now. NASA has led the way to returning humans to the Moon and is in the final steps of preparing for human exploration and settlement of Mars. On Earth our environment is cleaner with reliable fusion reactors steadily replacing coal-fired plants and fission reactors. The fuel for these reactors is being mined from the surface of the Moon relegating the mercury, radium and carbon dioxide-laced exhaust from coal-fired plants to "the ash heap of history". The growth of highly radioactive waste from fission power plants is following coal into history. Dependency on highly volatile regions of our planet for energy supplies is steadily diminishing. Clean power is allowing economic development of the world to continue, lifting a higher and higher percentage of the population out of poverty. Is this a possible future for our country and the planet? Professor Kulcinski and his small team of researchers just might have the answer and NASA might provide access to the key enabling resource.

Peakoil...

So the fusion reactors are still in their infancy, no worries as mentioned above a scientist has already demonstrated a working, efficiant model. You can bet that "barely six figure funding"will make a couple decimal point leap in the next few years. It has become or is becoming apparent to the world that our energy solutions lay with Helium 3 and you can bet that with that and Hydrogen fuel cell cars that's what our world will be fueled off of within 30 years in my opinion. Now on to explain my "new wild west" statement. I say that because just like the American west was full of settlers looking to strike it rich on oil, so too will be the Moon and other planetary bodies in our solar system in the future. We will see Capitalism reach new heights (literally) never before imagined outside of science fiction books, full of opportunistic investors looking to oust the guy competing next to him. Like the old west I believe we will see an influx of mining companies in space; first the Moon, and then on to the Jovian planets. Like the old west I believe we will see 'not so ethical' means of business and competition with people pushing ever harder to lay claim to the 'big well' of Helium 3.