Helium-3 and mining it for fusion engines discussion

[GoldForest]

6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

He-3 + D reactor is aneutronic, and is required before you can use pure D reactors.
So, you should start spending He-3 before you can start producing He-3 from D.

As I described above. Not the seawater itself, of course, but lithium. Seawater has a lot of it.

Natural lithium consists of two isotopes: Li-6 and Li-7.
Li-6 being irradiated by neutrons, splits into Tritium and Helium-4.
Tritium naturally inevitable decays (halflife ~ 12 years) into the desired Helium-3.

So, you should get as much lithium-6 as you can, expose it in a reactor, then put it in a can and just keep waiting and collecting the naturally exhausting from the can Helium-3.
You don't need special reactors for that, you can put the Lithium into existing ones, as a passenger.

***

On the Earth Lithium is usually mined in several special salt lakes in South America where it's concentration is ~0.01..1% of mass.
But as the lakes are limited, you should better mine it from any available water, i.e. mostly from the seawater. Its concentration in the natural water is ~0.3..3 mg/kg.

As the Lithium is lightweight, its two isotopes have very different mass (6 vs 7), so it's many times easier to separate lithium isotopes than, say, uranium ones. Not a problem at all.
(Though in game the separation and different Lithium isotopes can be ignored, just productivity of the plant should be decreased, so it can be single resource - Lithium).

***

In addition to lithium, seawater contains other resources dissolved. Particularly, Uranium, used in reactors and nuclear engines.
Their extraction is same, so no need to distinguish it in game. Just a plant requiring presence of water and producing Lithium, Uranium, etc..

***

The extraction process is basically simple.
There is an aquatory with strong natural flow (a straight or so), to save power. (In game - just any sea aquatory).

In the aquatory there is a field of floating plastic nets, hanging tens meters below the water.
Just a huge artificial plastic washcloth.

Depending on resources being extracted, the nets may contain additional fibers like titanium ones, etc.
In game no need in such detalization.

The seawater flows through the nets, dissolved ions (of Lithium, Uranium, etc) react with the net fibers and stay there.

From time to time you take away a "dirty" net, replacing it with a clean one.
Then you wash the "dirty" net with chemicals, and return the washed net back to the plantation.
Then you chemically extract the required Li, U, etc from the collected "dirty" water, and start processsing them as described.
(No need to show all this in game.)

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So, you should collect Lithium from any available source, just seawater is the most easy and available.

Then you can produce as much Helium-3 from this lithium as you wish, without Moon mining or Jupiter diving.

Okay, but from the sounds of it tritium has a very slow decay rate. If we need a fast source of He-3 there's only really two options. D+D Fusion or Jupiter/Saturn diving. 

Of course, in Kerbal space program the only way to get He-3 would probably be Jool and any other gas giant. I doubt they will add seawater converters into the game. Though... the modding community could do that. 

And actually, there is a third way. Solar Space Station. Solar Winds carry He-3. Having a space station around the sun would allow it to collect He-3, but you would need to have it survive large amounts of heat. 

[Incarnation of Chaos]

11 minutes ago, GoldForest said:

Okay, but from the sounds of it tritium has a very slow decay rate. If we need a fast source of He-3 there's only really two options. D+D Fusion or Jupiter/Saturn diving. 

Of course, in Kerbal space program the only way to get He-3 would probably be Jool and any other gas giant. I doubt they will add seawater converters into the game. Though... the modding community could do that. 

And actually, there is a third way. Solar Space Station. Solar Winds carry He-3. Having a space station around the sun would allow it to collect He-3, but you would need to have it survive large amounts of heat. 

No; the solar winds don't directly carry He-3. They create it via knocking protons/neutrons off other elements; this is one of the main reasons why the moon has so much He-3 compared to earth (even though it's still a tiny fraction)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_spallation

You can achieve the same process with particle accelerators; if you could create viable tabletop accelerators then you could use warehouses filled with them to create tritium/he-3 given proper targets. 

[GoldForest]

24 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

No; the solar winds don't directly carry He-3. They create it via knocking protons/neutrons off other elements; this is one of the main reasons why the moon has so much He-3 compared to earth (even though it's still a tiny fraction)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_spallation

You can achieve the same process with particle accelerators; if you could create viable tabletop accelerators then you could use warehouses filled with them to create tritium/he-3 given proper targets. 

ah

[juanml82]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

More complex than diving into Jupiter atmosphere, gathering the most volatile and "undense" gases from a hurricane, getting back to orbit at 40 km/s orbital speed?
Or than gathering and frying 100 t of regolith on the Moon per every gram of ³He.

Instead of just sitting, fishing, washing nets, and waiting?

It one of the worst ways. Just a good PR. A coastal refinery is by orders of magnitude more effective, but looks less impressive.

As far as gameplay is concerned, yes, unless you want to abstract all those steps and just use one part that takes "water", converts some if it into "fusionables" and feeds it to another part called "fusion reactor". Otherwise, it's like KSPI-E with dozens of different resources and, as the player, you keep cycling through fuels, reactor types and reactor fuels wondering "Which one should I use to take this payload to Neidon" and finding no answer anywhere

Edited August 29, 2019 by juanml82

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, juanml82 said:

As far as gameplay is concerned, yes, unless you want to abstract all those steps and just use one part that takes "water", converts some if it into "fusionables" and feeds it to another part called "fusion reactor". Otherwise, it's like KSPI-E with dozens of different resources and, as the player, you keep cycling through fuels, reactor types and reactor fuels wondering "Which one should I use to take this payload to Neidon" and finding no answer anywhere

Then why not just convert Ore to Helium3?

[KerikBalm]

I hope the resource system is more detailed than just mining ore to supply all your fuel needs...

[GoldForest]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

I hope the resource system is more detailed than just mining ore to supply all your fuel needs...

The resource and mining system is getting an overhaul. I can't find the post that said it, but iirc, that's what they said. 

Colonies will most likely have more than one resource to gather. 

My guess: 
Ore - For processing into Metal
Oxygen - Made from either breaking CO2 or H2O
Hydrogen, Methane, Xenon/Argon, Kerosene - All for fuel
Nitrogen/Helium - For RCS and or Cooling systems
Uranium - For Orion Drive of course. 
Helium-3 - for Fusion drives and Daedalus
Biomatter - For making trees and other oxygen creating habitats
Deuterium and tritium - for turning D and T into He-3 or He-4

And then for refiners we'll have:
Water splitter - To split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, which can go on to make fuel
Ore refiner - For turning Ore into Metal for rockets and parts
Nuclear Reactor - For processing the uranium into nukes for Orion Drives
Fusion reactor - For processing fusion fuel
Green house - For using biomatter to create trees and other plants