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Anonymous
"Finally the spent ore needs to be carted off and dumped somewhere. Again, assume lunar ore trucks can transport 20 times their own mass per hour.
On top of the ore-handling equipment, you'll probably need centralized control and communication systems, mapping gear and location beacons, a storage yard for spare parts and repair vehicles to put them into effect, and finally a system to transport the refined He3 back to Earth.
Looking at our target numbers of 25 tons of helium per year, and 4000 hours of working daylight per year, we see that our lunar He3 plant needs to process 1,250,000 tons of lunar ore per hour. Adding up the masses of the required equipment above, we can see that setting up a lunar processing plant to provide our yearly needs of He3 will mean sending over half a million tons of equipment and supplies to the moon. That's rather a lot. Using a rough figure of 40 million per ton of payload delivered to the moon, it will cost over 20 trillion dollars just to send the He3 collection system there. That's not counting the costs to build the hardware, or to support and supply it once in operation.
I submit that we can deal with the nuclear waste generated by D-T fusion plants for much, much less than 20 trillion dollars.
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