Production of He-3 is actually a major concern in the nuclear industry. It's pretty much the best medium to make a neutron detector out of because it has an enormous probability to capture a neutron. Neutron detectors are rather important for many reasons, but mostly because they're the best way to detect nuclear weapons.
He-3 is rather rare naturally and was only really produced in quantity as a byproduct of nuclear weapons fabrication. Basically nobody is making nuclear weapons these days (at least in significant quantities) and there's not really any viable source of He-3. Alternative detector media like BF3 is crappy by comparison and the only other way to make He-3 en masse is via fusion, which isn't yet feasible.
So nowadays a tube full of He-3 about the size of a typical fluorescent light can run into the $100000 range (ish, it's so rare that it isn't really sold by anybody).
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.
Even if the entire world were using the same amount of energy per capita as the United States, and all of that was supplied via fusion reactors, the Helium produced by those reactors would be significantly lower than current levels of Helium usage.
EDIT: I thought you meant there was some wasteful high-energy way to get it from something, the way you can do electrolysis on water (to get oxygen and hydrogen, though this isn't used due to it being easier to just get hydrogen from fossil fuels.) I didn't think you meant we should literally fuse hydrogen to meet our helium needs!
Helium is the waste product of every serious contender for a power-producing fusion reaction.
One of the great things about fusion is that it requires so little fuel to produce huge amounts of energy, though, and correspondingly would produce very little helium waste. So, probably not gonna be all that practical for propping up the commercial helium supply.
"Lesser" is a relative term. My hope is that we replace hydrocarbons quite thoroughly with fusion if/when the tech becomes viable; which probably won't solve the problem but will certainly help.
We'll basically have the same situation as we have with plutonium once the terrestrial/natural resources die out - which is bad but not nearly as impossible as simply not having access to the element.
Even if we replaced all energy generation with fusion. And I mean all of it. As far as I'm aware, the amount of waste helium produced wouldn't meet our needs.
Maybe you don't realize just how much industrial helium is used... but it's a lot. According to:
As of 2013, some 47 million cubic meters, or 1.8 billion cubic feet, to be exact.
Every MRI uses Helium, as do many other systems, for cryogenics. It's also used in applications where an inert environment is required, which includes arc welding applications (think all those aluminum trucks rolling off assembly lines).
"Some" is more than "none" by a significant margin. A single functioning MRI is significantly more than no functioning MRIs.
> I'm aware, the amount of waste helium produced wouldn't meet our needs.
Yes, the energy produced by nuclear power is huge - which means you don't need to convert much mass and hence you don't wind up with much He.
Something is infinitely better than nothing. Again, take Pu as an example of that - we have very little of the stuff but we are careful with it because of the scarcity (something that we are not with He); if we were forced to we could probably stretch a limited He supply a bit further, just like we do with Pu (e.g. not using it for bloody balloons). He is a great cryogenic for MRIs but possibly it's not the only feasible solution to that specific problem: it might be possible to replace it with a more common element.
Eh, honestly, that's a largely meaningless statement.
Let's say we went from 40 million cubic meters of helium a day to 1.
That would effectively eliminate the vast majority of industrial helium applications due to cost.
So no, "something" isn't better than "nothing" if you go from "abundant" to "very scarce".
And yes, there are absolutely applications (such as welding) where there are alternatives available (argon and xenon, particularly). But that isn't solving the helium shortage problem. It's coping with it. Which we should be doing. But we can't expect fusion to help us along... it's not an answer, here.
I think zamalek is making a point about marginal value - kinda. The vast majority of helium users are screwed. they've just got to figure out something else. But some users, say MRI machine makers, really need it. And people want MRIs. So, they'll mark up the cost of their machines by a million dollars (or whatever). Really, if there's demand at thousands of dollars per cubic meter, we'll find a way.
my guess is harvesting from the moon, rather than fusion. We might also just say fuck it, reserve the last million cubic feet for science experiments and call it a day.
I think your point is, there are tons of industrial uses of helium right now, and if it were to be gone today, it would be a huge problem.
imho, we should probably tax the hell out of its usage right now to force people find alternatives and be more efficient.
The price change is coming even if we don't want it to. it can be gradual or a hockey stick. We both agree cutting the supply by 7 or 8 orders of magnitude one afternoon would really suck.
