Klimabedrag.dk

Is powering the Earth a question of prestige?  I ask you this for the following reason:  The NASA invests in the In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) to provide a base for mining Helium-3 (He3) to produce electricity in a nuclear fusion process.  He3 exists on Earth as well as on the Moon and is not to be confused with He4 used for birthday balloons.  Although the concentration of He3 is much higher on the Moon, we still talk major excavating, Moon colonization, Moon logistics and global unified financing. 

Utilizing He3 for universal power will demand an organization like the UN to provide a global, universal government that can again provide funding and framework for NASA and cooperating institutes in other countries.

At the current level of development, the mining of He3 on the Moon and the transport of this to Earth makes the Moon-walk and the robot landing on Mars look like a game for toddlers.  Even if we manage to develop a plausible technical and economical solution, the He3 project would be an absolute monopolistic solution, where any country not complying fully with the unified world power, would leap into utopia.
There are many ways to solve the need for electrical power.  At present there is fossil fuel, conventional nuclear, the cleaner and cheaper thorium nuclear.  In particular the thorium reactor is a potential long-term solution which provides distributed, cheap and clean energy with minimum waste problem.  Nuclear in any form can be build and maintained by any technologically developed country and will therefore flourish without the need for a world government like the UN.

If we one day find viable ways of extracting He3 on our brilliant mother Earth, this form of nuclear would certainly be the most favorable solution of them all, but going over the Moon to force this technology is not only academic, but also political questionable and without a doubt a further restraint of individual as well as national freedom and last but not least utterly without common sense.

Russia intend to have a permanent moon base ready by 2020 with the main purpose of mining He3.  The Chinese wants to land an unmanned vehicle in 2011 as an exercise to He3 mining later on.  You guessed it, India has also announced their intension to mine H3 on the Moon.  Also Japan and Germany have aired strong intentions towards He3 mining on the Moon.

With all these countries apparently going for He3 extra terrestrial mining, one could think that this is an entrepreneurial task like building a Hoover Dam, but I personally don't think so.  Firstly all the He3 mining projects are led by governments and not by individual engineering companies.  Even if the He3 technology could be made viable, it would be run by government(s) and realized without public voting or consent.  Could it be that the He3 Moon mining for power generation needed COP15 to succeed for the sake of adequate financial and political willingness.

Why do we fall for control freaks ever so often?  Going over the Moon for electricity at a Titanic price, when you can have your local thorium reactor provide you with electricity at 0.4cent per KWh.

In case you wonder what thorium reactors can do for you and what you can do to promoter this genuinely green thousand-year technology, have a look here.