Strip-mining the Moon

In the midst of a surprising Reuters story that puts the Moon-Mars initiative in the appropriate context of the US militarization of space, the piece also mentions the possibility of the US achieving independence from OPEC oil through the mining of the moon's Helium 3. (link)

The moon, scientists have said, is a source of potentially unlimited energy in the form of the helium 3 isotope -- a near perfect fuel source: potent, nonpolluting and causing virtually no radioactive byproduct in a fusion reactor. "And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn't have to worry about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what the price of energy was going to be," said (John) Pike. Gerald Kulcinski of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison estimated the moon's helium 3 would have a cash value of perhaps $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil. Scientists reckon there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the earth for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 30 tons could meet all U.S. electric power needs for a year.

Hmm. Not only would the expropriation of the moon's Helium 3 be a land grab in violation of the UN treaties we never signed, but whaddya wanna bet that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-et-al. corporate cabal figure out some way to profit from its exploitation? Instead of a NASA-Russian-European mining operation freeing the world from fossil fuels, the oil industry becomes a space-based helium industry, and life goes on.