Fusion scientists from TAE will purchase fuel directly from the Moon

The American startup TAE Technologies, which has been trying to tame thermonuclear fusion for almost thirty years, has found a non-standard supplier of raw materials: an agreement was signed with a company that is going to mine helium-3 on the Moon.

On August 5, TAE Technologies announced a partnership with Black Moon Energy Corporation (BMEC), a company whose business model until recently would have sounded like the stuff of science fiction: extract a rare isotope on another celestial body and bring it back to Earth. The parties agreed to cooperate on the supply of helium-3 and its commercial development — the same fuel without which the future TAE thermonuclear energy industry risks running into a shortage of raw materials.

TAE CEO Michel Binderbauer explained the company's interest pragmatically: their thermonuclear fusion technology was initially designed to be flexible in the choice of fuel, which means it can be adjusted to what is most profitable on the market at the moment. Helium-3 in this sense is a trump card for the future: the reaction with its participation produces noticeably less neutron radiation than the classic deuterium-tritium cycle, which means the reactor is easier to protect and maintain, writes xrust. There is only one problem — there is almost none of it on Earth: the entire usable supply of the isotope is accumulated from the decay of nuclear materials, and the count is in grams.

BMEC is headed by David Worden, who previously worked in energy and space projects; Among its founders is Leroy Keao, who flew for NASA for fifteen years as an astronaut. The team's experience was tailor-made for such a task: BMEC states that the Moon has accumulated huge reserves of helium-3 in the regolith over billions of years thanks to the solar wind, and this is the only reserve of the isotope known to humanity that can, in principle, be reached on an industrial scale.

However, for now we are not talking about industrial production, but about exploration. In the next five years, BMEC plans to send a robotic mission to the Moon that will collect data on helium-3 deposits and test technologies for its extraction — in order to reduce the risks of future full-scale development of the field. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Caltech are already involved in the project: they are responsible for the robotic systems and scientific instruments of the expedition.

For TAE, the agreement with the lunar miner is part of a broader strategy to diversify fuel chains ahead of the first commercial construction. The company is preparing to build the Da Vinci fusion power plant with a capacity of 50 MW; They plan to select a site for it by the end of the year, and the launch is scheduled for 2031. Further stations in the series, according to TAE calculations, will produce from 350 to 500 MW. The installations are based on field inverted configuration (FRC) technology; The current sixth-generation TAE thermonuclear reactor called “Norm” was also built on it, testing solutions for the future station.

It is also worth keeping in mind that the five-year period for the lunar mission is only data collection, and not the start of deliveries: BMEC has not yet produced a single gram of helium-3 on the Moon, and the entire project relies on technologies that no one in the world yet has in industrial form. Nevertheless, interest in the isotope in the United States is clearly growing: in parallel with its lunar ambitions, BMEC is already supplying terrestrial helium-3 to a specialized program of the US Department of Energy, which has been providing medicine, security systems and quantum computing with this raw material for decades. And a few months earlier, Trump Media invested $6 billion in the same startup TAE — so interest in thermonuclear energy in the States is now fueled not only by physicists, but also by large capital.

Competition for lunar helium-3, by the way, is no longer an invention of enthusiasts: Japanese companies and a number of other American startups have previously declared their ambitions to extract the isotope on the Moon — so the application of BMEC and TAE makes the United States one of several players in the nascent race for extraterrestrial fuel, not the only one.

Sources:

• atomic-energy.ru
• nacleanenergy.com

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Xrust Thermonuclear scientists from TAE will purchase fuel directly from the Moon