Tell that to ITER, etc. They’re targeting 150 million K.
Pons and Fleischmann reported room temperature fusion. I suppose there’s not much difference between 300 K and 3000 K compared to hot fusion, but nevertheless that’s what they were claiming.
The 1989 Cold Fusion craze was specifically about room temperature.
It seems they were referring to paramagnetism instead:
Magnetic Separation of Lunar Soils
The magnetism of lunar soils increases with maturity due to inclusion of disseminated metallic iron. The iron is concentrated in the finest size and highest susceptibility fractions.
We have separated feebly magnetic material from the highland soils. This can serve as a source of anorthite for manufacture of cement and recovery of metals and oxygen by electrolysis.
We have separated intermediate magnetic susceptibility material from hi-titanium mare basalts which can serve as source of ilmenite for oxygen production by chemical reduction.
We have separated metallic iron from all soils. Magnetic susceptibility is a convenient measure of soil
maturity.
Paramagnetism is weak of course, but still perfectly usable with powerful magnets.
Obtaining metal from the moon rocks is much more difficult than on earth.
There is no ore on the moon, but for iron, nickel and so on as a metal or oxide from asteroids debris.
Only aluminium is better, slightly, in moon rock than in earth rock … Well we don’t extract aluminium from rock, we extract it from bauxite, the aluminium ore… The lack of “washing out” and vulcanism, tectonics, means that the moon rock is so homogenous… there’s no ore bodies. No bauxite, no magnetite, no rutile…
As I mentioned earlier, we are very far from it being worthwhile to retrieve aluminum from the Moon and bring it to Earth. But getting aluminum to the Moon, or even Earth orbit, is also expensive. Local production of aluminum on the Moon does not have to be very cheap to undercut the cost of imported material. It is also cheaper to launch material from the Moon than Earth, so large-scale orbital construction may make use of it.
In the very long run, we may simply decide to move all industry off Earth. Lunar aluminum may still cost more, but we’ll pay that price to keep Earth pristine.
Assuming civilization makes it that far, and all that.
Cold fusion allegedly can boil water. The problem is, it has never actually been shown to be real, to be actually fusion with a net output of energy.
Actually, claims were it boiled water and in one test produced enough energy to melt or explode the apparatus.
Why would you assume that? Feldspars frequently have oxide inclusions.
…but if all the major minerals have iron oxide inclusions, that’s not going to work because they’ll all be weakly ferromagnetic then.
Note how they don’t actually say they separated anorthite specifically, and note the “can serve as a source” weasel wording. Olivine and iron-rich pyroxenes are quite paramagnetic, but the Ca- and Mg- rich pyroxenes aren’t, they’ll react more-or-less the same as feldspars.
Would the anorthite have inclusions, though? It has no iron component. Whereas olivine contains Fe2SiO4. That some olivine might form into Fe3O4 instead is not too shocking to me, but I don’t know the involved processes. On the other hand, I see no reason why the anorthite would also have inclusions.
Note in any case that it’s possible to separate ferromagnetic from paramagnetic minerals. The two forms of magnetism don’t behave the same way, and it’s possible to use various means (such as the saturation of the ferromagnetic component) to distinguish the two.
At any rate, there’s clearly more work to be done, and a practical system probably can’t be built without access to tons of actual lunar minerals. Still–magnetic separation is clearly not excluded as a potential process.
Only if you can produce fuel on the moon, with resources just found there.
Otherwise you have to include the cost of shipping e.g. acids or electromagnets or whatever from Earth to process that fuel, into your costs.
The iron in the host silicate crystal has nothing to do with the inclusions, which are pure oxide micrograins physically bound in the feldspar/olivine/pyroxene host crystal, not chemically part of it.
Because it crystallized from the same magma as the olivine and pyroxene, which would have the same oxide microcrystals in it for them to grow around.
I think you don’t really have a handle on what crystal inclusions actually are. Maybe you need to learn a bit about them before offering them as a possible solution for ore beneficiation?
Yes, but if both the desired and undesired minerals exhibit the same magnetism (either ferro- or para-), that doesn’t help.
Or use a linear accelerator, space tether, etc. These things are not practical on Earth, but may be on the moon.
Mixed ISRU gives you an intermediate cost. Extracting oxygen from the moon is relatively easy. Hydrogen, a tad less so–you need access to lunar ice. Carbon is probably out, which means you need either a hydrolox rocket or to bring your own carbon. If the lunar Spaceship proves practical, it may be that it brings only the required methane propellant and uses ISRU for the oxygen.
I was clear that the suggestion was pure speculation–I didn’t know what the authors of that page had in mind, and offered the first possibility that came to mind. On the other hand, you had a hostile response to their claim that magnetic separation can be used at all. Their language was sloppy, but your response was false. Anorthite, olivine, and pyroxene do differ in their magnetic susceptibility and this–at least in principle–can be used for separation.
Getting back to the broader point, iron and other ferromagnetic materials do exist in pure form in lunar regolith. A child with a magnet on a beach already understands how to separate that. And again, while we’re a long way from the practicality of returning those metals, using them locally for habitat structures, etc. is more easily justified.
I’d be interested in seeing if the raw metallic dust could be used without further processing via laser sintering. You aren’t going to get great material out of it–it’s kinda like a lunar pot metal in that sense–it’ll be some poorly-controlled mixture of iron, nickel, and cobalt, and probably some minerals that are hard to get rid of. But maybe good enough for some low-load applications.
Again, things you are going to need to bring from Earth
Sure, but they’re reusable, unlike propellant. On the other hand, they have a high capital cost. So they probably make sense in the long term (and need a huge amount of development in any case), but not for now.
At any rate, I hope that the Artemis program provides many opportunities for researching ISRU in all its forms. NASA seems to be not entirely sure what they can use the 100 ton capacity of Starship for, but I’m certain that ISRU and local fabrication will play a role. And I hope that private industry will help with some of the research.
No, I had a hostile response to their specific claims about separating anorthite out of anorthosite using magnetic separation on ground-up rock.
All the lab work done on this (in the 90s) was on fine regolith, which has a very different composition to the highland anorthosites.
And you base this assessment of my response on your extensive geological experience, no doubt?
Sure. And I’m not saying you can’t separate pure samples of those minerals in a lab that way.
I’m saying the realities of actual messy rocks aren’t the same thing.
Sure, and lots of it. But AFAIK no-one’s proposed using Fe as fuel, the way they have Al. That was the big reason Al was brought up, not construction.
Sure, and that’s just the kind of thing that we’ll probably just have to go back to the moon to really figure out. And the first few iterations will probably not work all that well.
Sam_Stone brought that up, but others mentioned it only as a basic commodity. Personally, I’m a little dubious of its utility as a fuel component. It’s not that high performance of a fuel, and the tests I’m aware of were aluminum-ice, not aluminum-oxygen, so you still need the water extraction unless you figure out some other solution for a powder-phase engine. At that point, just use a hydrogen-oxygen engine. I guess the aluminum gets you some freebie performance if it’s already available, but it’s probably not worth setting up a production facility just for that reason.
Aluminum is certainly valuable as a structural material, though.
At any rate, it’s a broad topic. I think it’s worth exploring both the short-term possibilities (such as extraction of metallic iron for local use) vs. the longer range stuff like what is even conceivably worth returning to Earth (and what conditions we’d have to meet first).