Comment Re:He-3 is not all that abundant on the moon (Score 1) 63
Meh, fast reactors aren't cheap either. They're actually very expensive. Fuel efficiency isn't the big deal with fission, it's a minor share of the costs (as is waste disposal). Your big costs are capital, and fission has struggled with that, due to how insanely toxic everything it creates is, with the isotopes in question spanning the entire periodic table's worth of chemical properties. Which mandates equally strong efforts to prevent their release. Because nuclear disasters themselves, while not high fatality, are insanely expensive to contain and cleanup. They're disasters in slow motion, but you very much have to get out of their way.
Lunar Helium-3 is idiotic, and I love your quote about it feeling like a Rube Goldberg competition to come up with the dumbest way to generate electricity
Offsetting this, of course, is that fusion is hard. But while we still don't know how economical it will be, the advent of high-temperature superconducting magnets now makes fusion far easier, so it's absolutely worth pressing on.