By Jan Mortier and Benjamin Finnis
States are quietly preparing to secure fuel for the fourth generation of nuclear weapons, and China is winning.
In October 2014, China’s Chang’e 5-T1 lunar probe, known as Xiaofei or Little Flyer, successfully completed an orbit around the Moon. This was the first time that a trip around the Moon and back of this sort had been made since the USA and Russian trips in the 1970s. The Little flyer is a precursor to Chang’e 5 which will bring back lunar soil (regolith) containing the nuclear fuel helium-3 that can be used for baseload energy production and the next generation of nuclear weapons.
The Little Flyer mission lasted eight days and its primary objective was to conduct atmospheric re-entry tests on the Chang’e 5 capsule design which will be launched by 2017. The destination on the lunar surface for Chang’e 5, like that of the Yutu Jade Rabbit rover, is the Mare Imbrium also known as the Sea of Rains, one of the vast lunar crater seas visible from Earth and a known repository of high concentrations of helium-3. This now puts China strongly in the lead in the secret space race between states to secure helium-3, which has one of the highest known energy return on investment ratios while also being a fourth-generation nuclear weapons fuel.
In the words of former president of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, “The Moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of helium-3 than all the fossil fuels on the earth.”
To put this into perspective one ton of helium-3 can produce 10,000 megawatt years of electricity. This is enough energy to power 80 percent of Tokyo’s energy needs for a whole year, or a city of 7.3 million people like Hong Kong, Hyderabad or Singapore. This much energy is comparable to 315 petajoules released in a nuclear weapon explosion.
Compare this to the largest nuclear weapon explosion on record, the 1962 test of the Russia Tsar Bomba, which released 210-240 petajoules. The bomb had a 50-58 megaton destructive capacity, equivalent to 1,350 times the combined power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ten times the combined power of all the conventional explosives used in World War II. The detonation left behind a zone of total destruction with a radius of 35 km and produced a mushroom cloud 64 km high. The explosion was so powerful that it registered 8.1 on the Richter scale, shattering windows more than 900 km away and sending seismic shockwaves around the Earth three times. It was the largest ever nuclear explosion.
One ton of helium-3 has the potential to produce 1.5 times more destructive power than the Tsar Bomba. In other words, the potential to make a nuclear weapon with a 75 megaton yield.
Read the full story at The Diplomat