Wendy Zukerman

So you don't need much to generate a lot of energy.

If you were to...

To have enough helium, about 220 pounds, so that's the weight of a tall person.

So 220 pounds of helium, you bring it all together, you generate energy, it will be enough to light up a city like Dallas for a full year.

That's the amount of energy that you have from just 220 pounds of helium

Wow.

And that would have no waste, not like the nuclear reactors we have now?

No radioactive waste.

The beauty of helium-3 is that what is the waste is just helium, the same thing that you put on balloons.

Yeah, every one of these nuclear reactors could just be like, hello, hello, we're making clean energy.

So, this all sounds great.

You might say, it sounds really, really great.

But here's the catch.

While it's true that the moon has way more of this special helium than we have here on Earth, if today you went all the way to the moon and grabbed some helium-3, then brought it back, you couldn't use it to power a city right now.

And that's because the kind of nuclear reactor that we would use for this stuff, it doesn't exist.

Right now, the way that we make nuclear power is by ripping atoms apart and using the energy for power.

It's called nuclear fission.

But for helium-3, we'd need to do something called nuclear fusion.

This is the opposite.

Instead of splitting the atom, you bring two of those atoms together, you fuse them, and that way you generate energy.