Eagle Station

Farrell shook his head. “Y’all are forgetting I’m an old hand in the energy business,” he said bluntly. “And I’ve read the Department of Energy’s report on that reactor. There’s no doubt the damned thing’s a technological and engineering marvel, but it ain’t a game changer… not in domestic energy production nor for our defense programs.”

Martindale sighed. “Because of the fuel mixture it uses.”

“Bingo,” Farrell said. “That Russian fusion generator relies on a deuterium-helium-3 mix to operate. To produce those ten megawatts it needs a supply of two and a half kilograms of helium-3. On the face of things, that doesn’t sound like much… feed in less than six pounds of this helium isotope and hey, presto, you get enough electricity to run ten thousand American homes for five whole years.”

“The catch being that helium-3 is an incredibly rare substance, sir,” Patrick said wryly.

“Rare is one serious piece of understatement, General.” Farrell shook his head. “You can’t just go mine this stuff anywhere on Earth. It doesn’t exist. Most of what we do produce comes from refurbishing deteriorating H-bombs. The Energy Department points out that even at the height of the Cold War, our total national production of helium-3 came to only about eight kilograms per year. And after all our weapons cuts, we’re down to under a kilogram.”

He held up a hand with a slight smile. “Now before y’all start pushing, I am not going to order a huge expansion of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal as a means of boosting domestic helium-3 generation.”

“I suppose that might send the wrong diplomatic signal to the rest of the world,” Martindale agreed with an equally humorless smile.

“So there you go,” Farrell went on. “Our existing stockpiles and production can keep Eagle Station’s own fusion generator fueled up, but that’s about the limit. Breakthrough or not, the technology’s basically a dead end.”

Patrick shook his head. “You’re overlooking other possibilities, Mr. President.” He leaned forward in his chair again, wholly intent on making his point. “You’re right that there aren’t any significant natural deposits of helium-3 on Earth. But there’s a lot out there elsewhere in the rest of the solar system, just waiting for the taking. Heck, the gas giants of the outer system — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — are practically awash in the stuff.”

“All of which are a hellaciously long way from here.” Farrell folded his arms. “I mean, NASA hasn’t even built a rocket that can put astronauts back on the moon yet… and that’s practically spitting distance compared to going to Jupiter and beyond.” He chuckled. “I know people expect folks from Texas to think mighty big, but there’s a pretty bright line between being naturally ambitious and just plain loco. And I’d just as soon stay on the right side of that divide.”

“The company the Russians stole the original fusion reactor tech from had plans for direct fusion drives,” Patrick pointed out. “Build one of those drives and put it on a spacecraft and you can get out farther a lot faster.”

“How much faster?” Farrell asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

“Some of our robotic probes took more than six years to reach Jupiter,” Patrick told him. “A fusion-powered spaceship could cover the same distance in less than a year.”

Farrell reined himself back in. “That’d be something, all right,” he agreed slowly. “But we’re going round in circles here, like trying to figure out which came first: the chicken or the egg. The way I see it, we need more helium-3 to seriously exploit this fusion power breakthrough. But we can’t round up enough helium-3 without developing these fusion drives you’re talking about… and we can’t build those drives without the helium-3 resources we don’t have.” He shook his head regretfully. “Like I said before, it’s a dead end.”

“Not quite,” Martindale said quietly. “There are large reserves of this isotope much closer than the outer planets.”

Farrell raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“The solar wind’s been bombarding the moon with helium-3 for billions of years,” Martindale explained. “And since the moon doesn’t have a magnetic field like Earth, there’s nothing to deflect it away. Soil studies of material collected by the Apollo missions and other probes have found significant amounts of the isotope trapped in the lunar regolith.”

“How significant?” Farrell prodded.

“Concentrations as high as twenty parts per billion.”

Farrell snorted again. Those were the kinds of numbers he had a lot of experience wrestling with. “For crying out loud, Kevin… that’s almost as bad as saying we could strain the gold out of seawater and all get rich. You’re talking about processing upwards of fifty thousand tons of this lunar regolith just to extract one lousy kilogram of helium-3. There’s no way that’ll ever be a paying proposition.”