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This article was originally published on Motherboard.
On Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which will send a rover to the south of the moon later this year. This will be India's second lunar mission and the first time a country has visited the south side of the moon. The ISRO six-wheeled rover will badyze the lunar crust looking for traces of water and helium-3, an isotope that is integral to the development of fusion energy on earth.
The common joke among nuclear physicists is that the fusion energy is still in 30 years, but when it arrives here, India wants to be the one that provides the fuel.
"Countries that have the ability to bring this source of the moon to Earth will dictate the process," said Kailasavadivoo Sivan, president of ISRO, at Bloomberg. "I do not want to be part of them, I want to lead them."
Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the sun and involves breaking down together hydrogen atoms to produce helium, which releases a ton of energy into the process. If this fusion energy can be captured, it would indeed be an unlimited source of energy on Earth. Unfortunately, building a nuclear fusion reactor, aka "star in a jar," has proven incredibly difficult.
Today, most fusion reactors use a mixture of isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium as nuclear fuel. Although the techniques of fusion induction differ, one of the most successful approaches involves a deuterium / tritium fuel cell that is struck with a high dose of concentrated energy. This makes the fuel cell turn into a plasma that is compressed with magnetic fields (or liquid metal) to fuse the nuclei and release a large amount of energy. Until now, no laboratory has been able to extract more energy from this reaction than it took for this to happen in the first place , which is needed to create a power plant with scalable fusion energy.
A related problem has to do with the by-product of the fusion of deuterium and tritium: the high-energy neutrons that emerge from the nuclei of these isotopes during the melting process. These so-called "fast" neutrons are the source of energy that must be harvested in a fusion reactor, but they are remarkably difficult to contain. Neutrons react more with the walls of nuclear reactors than with protons, forcing them to replace them more often. Moreover, they are not charged particles, they are therefore more difficult to handle with electric and magnetic fields.
It is there that helium-3 intervenes. By extracting tritium from the equation and using a mixture of deuterium and helium-3, the fusion process produces a proton rather than a neutron. This results in less energy wastage and easier containment since protons are charged particles, which facilitates the direct recovery of energy from the fusion reaction by manipulating protons with electric fields. and magnetic. In short, adding helium-3 to the mixture would make fusion reactors non-radioactive and incredibly more efficient.
Work on the fusion of helium-3 has been slow because they are so rare on Earth, but early results have been incredibly promising. Last year, for example, MIT researchers increased the efficiency of a fusion reaction by an order of magnitude after adding small amounts of helium-3 to a fuel cell containing hydrogen and deuterium. Other research using two isotopes of helium-3 instead of a deuterium-helium-3 mixture has also been shown to be remarkably effective in small reactors.
Among the many triumphs of NASA's Apollo missions in the 60s and 70s, it was confirmed that the lunar surface contained an abundance of helium-3 as the moon did not have any atmosphere to repel things. In fact, the amount of energy that could be produced using all the helium-3 stored on the moon is more than 10 times the amount of energy stored in all fossil fuels on Earth. As the prospect of fusion energy seems more and more realistic, it has launched an international race to the moon to be the first to extract this precious resource from the lunar surface.
Moon Express, which became the first private company to receive permission from the US government to launch an object beyond the Earth 's orbit last year, set its sights on the moon for the first time. exploitation of helium-3. In 2016, China also announced plans to put a mobile on the moon to spot helium-3 mine sites. Now India has announced its intention to join the race to reap what may be one of the most valuable sources of energy ever discovered.
In 2013, China became the first country to land a craft on the moon in almost 40 years. He intends to send a lunar rover called Chang & # 39; e 5 to the moon next year that will bring lunar samples back to Earth, the first step of his mining ambitions. ; helium-3. If India has its way, however, it will already have a rover on the lunar surface waiting to greet the Chinese mission.
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