Harrison H. Schmitt reports in Chapter 2 of the EMD Memoir 101 that the financial, environmental, and national security carrot for helium-3 fusion power requires access to low-cost lunar helium-3. Helium-3 fusion potentially would provide an environmentally benign means of helping to meet an anticipated ninefold increase in energy demand by 2050. Not available in other than research quantities on Earth, this light isotope of ordinary helium-4 reaches the Moon as a component of the solar wind. Embedded continuously in the lunar dust for billions of years, concentrations have reached levels of potential economic interest.
Near the United States Apollo 11 landing site in Mare Tranquillitatis, approximately 2 square kilometers or 0.8 square mile, to a depth of about 3 meters, could contain about 100 kilograms or about 220 pounds of helium-3, which is more than enough to power a 1,000 MWe - 1 gigawatt - fusion power plant for a year. In 2008, the energy equivalent value of helium-3 relative to 2.50 dollars per million Btu of industrial coal equals a value of about 1.4 billion dollars per metric tonne. One metric tonne of helium-3, fused with deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, has enough energy to supply a city of 10 million with electricity or more than 10 GW of power for that year.
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