It could be that helium-3 could be an important fusion power fuel in the future, but it is still a long, long way off. First they need to develop ANY kind of fusion power source that produces more energy than it uses. Scientists and nuclear engineers have been working on it for decades and still don't have a system that works. I remember reading an article about 25 years ago about a revolutionary new magentic "bottle" breakthrough that was going to finally make fusion work. Nope. Didn't work. And that was after they had been working on fusion for probably more than 25 years already.

So then after they have a fusion reactor that actually works, they need to take the even HARDER step of making fusion work with helium-3. That's something like a whole order of magnitude harder than hydrogen fusion in terms of heat and pressure.

And then the article says, "many hundreds of millions of tons of soil must be processed to extract a ton of helium-3," and "40 tons of this stuff has enough potential energy to meet the total U.S. electricity demand for a year." So helium-3 packs a lot of punch per ton, but it takes hundreds of millions of tons of lunar soil to get a ton of the stuff. It sounds like if we wanted to convert our electricity production to helium-3 we would have to process hundreds of BILLIONS of tons of lunar soil a year ON THE FREAKIN' MOON! That seems bit far fetched to me.

The sun is a huge fusion rector --- all the heat and light comes from fusion reactions in the core of the sun. I think it is a lot more likely that we could switch all of our electricity production to solar a lot faster and easier and cheaper than developing He-3 fusion and mining it on the moon.

That said, I am very enthusuiatic about lunar exploration and further space exploration. It may be that we never mine He-3 on the moon for use on earth, but we may use it in the future to power spacecraft where the huge energy density in each ton of He-3 would be an enormouse advantage in power-to-weight ratios for spacecraft.