Talk:Helium-3

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Humans did not invent Tritium

The article implies that all helium-3 is either primordial or man-made. Every time a Uranium fissions it creates neutrons, that usually get absorbed by a nucleus. Sometimes that nucleus is a deuteron. Cosmic rays can also produce He-3 or tritium through a rather long list of interactions in addition to hitting a lithon. All of this is incredibly obvious and should be mentioned in a discussion of the origins of Helium-3 on planet Earth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Octaazacubane (talk • contribs) 03:44, 11 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Contradiction

From the 'Manufacturing' section:

"Commercial use of fusion reactors would require tens of tons of helium-3 each year to produce a fraction of the world's power."

From the 'Lunar supplies' section:

"Accordingly, helium-3 seems less likely than other reactants for use in fusion power generation"

I've amended the sentence from the manufacturing section to make it clear that helium-3 is only one of several possible fusion fuels by changing it to:

"If commercial fusion reactors were to use helium-3 as a fuel, they would require tens of tons of it each year to produce a fraction of the world's power."

I'm pretty sure this is the correct resolution of this contradiction.

Disgusting, unsightly typo

I had to remove an apostrophe from "it's" to turn it into the correct "its".

How come this has been ignored for so long? Are you all illiterate?

Tralphium?

Why is "tralphium" listed as an alternate name in the helium-3 infobox? I cannot find any source that mentions this. Is this vandalism? Nrco0e (talk) 01:32, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Nrco0e: It is an invention of George Gamow. There are a few hits, but it seems to be hardly used beyond referring to or quoting his work. Double sharp (talk) 09:49, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

From Gamow, The Creation of the Universe: Tritium (H³) and tralphium (He³), serving as transition stages from mass 2 to mass 4, were always present in extremely small quantities, as is shown in the diagram.
But from Cosmology and Controversy (Helge Kragh, 2021): Fermi and Turkevich considered twenty-eight possible nuclear reactions between neutrons, protons, deuterons, tritons (hydrogen-3 nuclei), and helium-3 nuclei. The latter were called tralpha particles by Gamow, who invented the name tralphium for helium-3; the names seem not to have been adopted by other physicists.
They were however adopted a little by popularisers in the 1960s, like Willy Ley and Levitt and Cole.
Probably the most famous occurrence (and certainly the only one I had heard of for a long time) was the one in Gamow's New Genesis. Double sharp (talk) 17:58, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah thanks for the explanation, I was quite confused because of the lack of citations here. Nrco0e (talk) 18:27, 11 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

He-3 sources on earth

"The contribution from cosmic rays is negligible within all except the oldest regolith materials, and lithium spallation reactions are a lesser contributor than the production of 4He by alpha particle emissions. "

Regolith is an extremely illdefined material type on earth, and the second part compares pears with apples. 2001:9E8:2B1F:2200:C1B1:8906:795B:4076 (talk) 09:11, 16 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]