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He-3 Aff ...................................................................................................................................................................1 Suggested 1AC..........................................................................................................................................................3 Necessary 1AC Cards/notes....................................................................................................................................13 Plans.......................................................................................................................................................................14 1AC Sustainability Advantage [1/4].......................................................................................................................15 1AC Sustainability Advantage [2/4].......................................................................................................................16 1AC Sustainability Advantage [3/4].......................................................................................................................17 1AC Sustainability Advantage [4/4].......................................................................................................................18 1AC Nuclear detection Advantage [1/3].................................................................................................................19 1AC Nuclear detection Advantage [2/3]................................................................................................................20 1AC Nuclear detection Advantage [3/3]................................................................................................................21 1AC Coal Advantage [1/7]......................................................................................................................................23 1AC Coal Advantage [2/7]......................................................................................................................................24 1AC Coal Advantage [3/7]......................................................................................................................................25 1AC Coal Advantage [4/7]......................................................................................................................................26 1AC Coal Advantage [5/7]......................................................................................................................................27 1AC Coal Advantage [6/7].....................................................................................................................................28 1AC Primacy Advantage [1/6]................................................................................................................................31 1AC Primacy Advantage [2/6]...............................................................................................................................32 1AC Primacy Advantage [3/6]...............................................................................................................................33 1AC Primacy Advantage [4/6]...............................................................................................................................34 1AC Primacy Advantage [5/6]................................................................................................................................35 1AC Primacy Advantage [6/6]...............................................................................................................................36 ***2AC Add ons***................................................................................................................................................38 Cryogenics Add on [1/1].........................................................................................................................................39 Econ Add on [1/1]..................................................................................................................................................40 ---A2: Econ resilient...............................................................................................................................................41 Chemical Industry Add on [1/2]............................................................................................................................42 Chemical Industry Add on [2/2]...........................................................................................................................43 Cancer Add on [1/2]..............................................................................................................................................44 Cancer Add on [2/2]..............................................................................................................................................45 Amazon Rainforest Add on [1/3]...........................................................................................................................47 Amazon Rainforest Add on [2/3]..........................................................................................................................48 Amazon Rainforest Add on [3/3]..........................................................................................................................49 Space Debris/Tourism Add on..............................................................................................................................50 Energy Security add on [1/1].................................................................................................................................54 Asteroids Add on [1/1]...........................................................................................................................................55 --A2: no asteroid....................................................................................................................................................56 Innovation Add on.................................................................................................................................................57 Middle East relations add on.................................................................................................................................63 Exploration add on................................................................................................................................................64 Internal Link: Cryogenics......................................................................................................................................65 Internal Link: Terrorism.......................................................................................................................................66 Internal Link: Prolif...............................................................................................................................................67 Internal Link: Fossil Fuel reliance [A2: no he3 on moon]....................................................................................68 Low He3 supply.....................................................................................................................................................72 He3 ends dependency............................................................................................................................................73 A2: Alt causes/cant solve [air pollution]...............................................................................................................74 A2: Moon treaty & PA CP.......................................................................................................................................75

He-3 Aff

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A2: Moon will run out of He3................................................................................................................................77 A2: Process expensive/difficult/cant extract.........................................................................................................78 A2: no fusion/long timeframe...............................................................................................................................79 --A2: no reactor.....................................................................................................................................................80 --A2: no fusion/timeframe.....................................................................................................................................81 A2: Cant sustain a lunar base...............................................................................................................................84 A2: no spaceship big enough.................................................................................................................................85 A2: Private actor CP...............................................................................................................................................86 A2: Politics ............................................................................................................................................................87 A2: cant extract......................................................................................................................................................89 A2: mining dangerous...........................................................................................................................................90 A2: Other countries solve......................................................................................................................................92 random k card?......................................................................................................................................................93 ***Random cards***.............................................................................................................................................94 Backfiles - space militarization inevitable.............................................................................................................95 Backfiles - space militarization inevitable.............................................................................................................97 Backfiles - space militarization inevitable.............................................................................................................98 Backfiles - space militarization inevitable.............................................................................................................99 ***Neg ***............................................................................................................................................................101 A2: Inherency.......................................................................................................................................................102 A2: Nuclear fusion adv.........................................................................................................................................103 A2: Reliance solvency..........................................................................................................................................104 Moon base link.....................................................................................................................................................105 Politics Links........................................................................................................................................................107 1NC Private Sector CP[helium specific]...............................................................................................................108 2NC cards.............................................................................................................................................................110

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Contention 1 is the status quo

Suggested 1AC

Helium 3 solves the energy crisis, is bountiful on the moon, and there are currently no missions to retrieve it The telegraph 2k7(01 May, Helium-3 factfile http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1550247/Helium-3-factfile.html)//Abraha Helium-3 was discovered in lunar samples brought back from the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and 1970s. Some scientists estimate that there are more than 100 million tonnes of helium-3 on the moon - more than enough to power the planet for hundreds of years. Theoretically, space engineers would super-heat the Moon's surface, process the helium-3 gas that lies at a depth of about nine feet and return it to earth to process it in fusion reactors. But despite Russian claims, the American energy department is not currently funding any helium-3 fusion research - an indication that Washington still needs to be convinced the project is worthwhile. Russia and China take it much more seriously if only because many believe that the country that controls the production of helium-3 will also enjoy superpower status as the world's dominant energy supplier. And, the use of He3 has skyrocketed and theres hardly any left on Earth Shea and Morgan 2k10 (Dana A., Daniel, December 22, Specialist in Science and Technology Policy, CRS Report for Congress-The Helium-3 Shortage: Supply, Demand, and Options for Congress) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41419.pdf )//Abraha The world is experiencing a shortage of helium-3, a rare isotope of helium with applications in homeland security, national security, medicine, industry, and science. For many years the supply of helium-3 from the nuclear weapons program outstripped the demand for helium-3. The demand was small enough that a substantial stockpile of helium-3 accumulated. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal government began deploying neutron detectors at the U.S. border to help secure the nation against smuggled nuclear and radiological material. The deployment of this equipment created new demand for helium-3. Use of the polarized helium-3 medical imaging technique also increased. As a result, the size of the stockpile shrank. After several years of demand exceeding supply, a call for large quantities of helium-3 spurred federal officials to realize that insufficient helium-3 was available to meet the likely future demand. Thus, the plan: The United States federal government will substantially develop space beyond the Earths mesosphere by establishing a moon base for the purposes of mining and extracting Helium-3 Isotopes and Hydrogen from the moon; we reserve the right to clarify

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Contention 2 Advantages Advantage 1 is coal It devastates the environment multiple internal links, and clean coal technologies dont solve Fred Bosselman (Professor of Law Emeritus, Chicago-Kent College of Law) 2007 The new power generation: environmental law and electricity innovation: colloquium article: the ecological advantages of nuclear power, New York University Environmental Law Journal, lexis Virtually all of the coal mined in the United States is used as boiler fuel to generate electricity, 122 and although few users of that electricity realize it, half of the nation's electric energy is provided by coal. 123 In his recent book, Big Coal, Jeff Goodell points out that in the United States, the mining and combustion of coal typically occur in such remote locations that most Americans have no idea "what our relationship with this black rock actually costs us." 124 This is particularly true with regard to public understanding of ecological systems that are being destroyed in remote places or through chains of causation that only experts understand. Coal is ecologically destructive through (1) mining, (2) air pollution, (3) greenhouse gas emissions, and (4) water pollution; and (5) while so-called "clean-coal" technology is a long-range hope, it is not likely to be common in the next decade. 1. Coal Mining Is Destroying Vast Amounts of Natural Landscape Originally, almost all coal mining took place through the construction of a network of shafts underground from which coal would be cut and brought to the surface. Such "underground" mining still takes place in the United States, 125 but each year a [*26] larger share of the mining is "surface" mining. 126 Both kinds of coal mining have an impact on the landscape both directly and indirectly. Underground mining typically brings to the surface large volumes of minerals, only some of which constitutes usable coal. The residue is known as "gob" or "culm" and residue piles from both existing and abandoned underground mines are common sights in older mining areas. 128 The rain penetrates the piles and leaches out the soluble material, creating sulfuric and other acids, which are supposed to be stored in impoundments on the mine site but often flow directly into local watersheds or potable aquifers, particularly if the mine has been abandoned. 129 This kind of acid mine drainage pollutes streams throughout older mining regions, often turning them bright orange, rendering the water non-potable and uninhabitable by wildlife, and changing the ecological processes on the riparian landscape far beyond the mine site. Underground mining also destroys landscapes through subsidence. If a mine shaft is not properly supported, its roof will collapse, which typically causes the surface of the earth over the mine to subside. In older mines, such
subsidence regularly happened only after a mineshaft was abandoned, but many newer mines use a system called "longwall" mining, which makes no attempt to support the roof over the area where coal is

can change drainage patterns on the surface in ways that may destroy existing ecosystems. Even more directly damaging to the natural landscape is surface mining, which now produces the majority of our coal. 132 The two most prominent examples of surface mining in the United States and the resulting ecological consequences
removed, resulting in intentional subsidence. Both intentional and unintentional subsidence

are in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming, and in a section of the Southern Appalachians that includes parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. 133 In both areas, surface mining is used extensively, but the differences in the terrain result in quite different impacts. 134 The Powder River Valley is relatively flat and dry rangeland, supporting cattle and, in the streams, trout. 135 The coal seams in this valley tend to be massive, and the parts that have been mined are relatively close to the surface. 136 The earth overlying the coal, [*28] known in the trade as "overburden," is blasted with explosives and then removed by massive machines built for the purpose. 137 The scale of the operations is so large that seventeen Wyoming surface mines supply over a third of U.S. coal consumption. 138 Despite the effects from the dust created in these operations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed to classify such dust as a non-pollutant. 139 In December 2005, the EPA issued proposed rules that would exempt mining operations in rural areas from dust emission regulations. 140 In the Southern Appalachians, surface mining is taking place in a forested landscape of rolling hills

The current mining method is known as "mountaintop mining," and involves blasting and scraping off the tops of mountains to obtain access to the coal underneath. In an earlier era, this coal would have been accessed by underground shafts, but today's massive machinery and cheap explosives makes it more economical to remove the mountaintop and use surface mining equipment to take out the coal. 142 The rubble that was once the top of the mountain is simply dumped into a valley adjacent to the mountain, creating what is euphemistically called "valley fill." The result is the destruction [*29] not only of the ecological characteristics of the mountain itself but also of the adjacent valley. 143 Although this destruction has been widely criticized, it continues to be supported by both federal and state regulating agencies. 144 Although reserves of coal in the United States remain plentiful, the quality and accessibility of the coal is likely to decline. 145 "A good percentage of the coal that's left is too dirty to be burned in conventional power plants, and much of it is buried in inconvenient places - under homes, schools, parks, highways, and historical landmarks." 146 A future shortage of good quality coal may add to the ecological destruction involved in coal mining by requiring more disruption to get at equivalent amounts of coal. 2. Coal Combustion Pollutes a Wide Range of Environments In their recent "Nutshell" book on energy law, Joseph Tomain and Richard Cudahy concisely summarize the primary types of air pollution caused by coal combustion: [*30] Coal combustion generates four main sources of pollution: sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter; all of which spoil land, water, and air. Sulfur oxide, which increases with the sulfur content of the coal, causes
and mountains with relatively moist conditions. 141

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human health problems, crop damage, and acid rain. Nitrogen oxide contributes to the same problems and causes smog. Tons of particulate matter are emitted from coal burning facilities daily and cause property damage and health hazards. Finally, carbon dioxide causes what is known as the greenhouse effect, which is an increase in the temperature of the earth's surface. We have long known that air pollution from coal combustion damages crops and natural vegetation, in addition to its impact on human health. In the last thirty years, scientists have learned that pollutants from coal-burning power plants travel long distances and create acid rain that significantly harms plants and animals. Scenario 1 is air pollution It terminally results in extinction Driesen 03 (David, Associate Professor, Syracuse University College of Law. J.D. Yale Law School, 1989, Fall/Spring, 10 Buff. Envt'l. L.J. 25, p. 26-8 Air pollution can make life unsustainable by harming the ecosystem upon which all life depends and harming the health of both future and present generations. "human beings. . . are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature", because they are "at the center of concerns for sustainable development." While the Rio Declaration refers to human health, its reference to life "in harmony with nature" also reflects a concern about the natural environment. Since air pollution damages both human health and the environment, air quality implicates both of these concerns.
The Rio Declaration articulates six key principles that are relevant to air pollution. These principles can also be understood as goals, because they describe a state of affairs that is worth achieving. Agenda 21, in turn, states a program of action for realizing those goals. Between them, they aid understanding of sustainable development's meaning for air quality. The first principle is that health and the environment well beyond urban boundaries. Yet, the health problems these pollutants present remain most acute in urban and suburban areas.

Lead, carbon monoxide, particulate, tropospheric ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides have historically threatened urban air quality in the United States. This review will focus upon tropospheric ozone, particulate, and carbon monoxide, because these pollutants present the most widespread of the remaining urban air problems, and did so at the time of the earth summit. 6 Tropospheric ozone refers to ozone fairly near to the ground, as opposed to stratospheric ozone high in the atmosphere. The stratospheric ozone layer protects human health and the environment from ultraviolet radiation, and its depletion causes problems. By contrast, tropospheric ozone damages human health and the environment. 8 In the United States, the pollutants causing "urban" air quality problems also affect human

Ozone, carbon monoxide, and particulate cause very

serious public health problems

that have been well recognized for a long time. Ozone forms in the atmosphere from a reaction between volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, and sunlight. Volatile organic compounds include a large number of hazardous air pollutants. Nitrogen oxides, as discussed below, also play a role in acidifying ecosystems. Ozone damages lung tissue. It plays a role in triggering asthma attacks, sending thousands to the hospital every summer. It effects young children and people engaged in heavy exercise especially severely. Particulate pollution, or soot, consists of combinations of a wide variety of pollutants. Nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide contribute to formation of fine particulate, which is associated with the most serious health problems. 13 Studies link particulate to tens of thousands of annual premature deaths in the United States. Like ozone it contributes to respiratory illness, but it also seems to play a [*29] role in triggering heart attacks among the elderly. The data suggest that fine particulate, which EPA did not regulate explicitly until recently, plays a major role in these problems. 16 Health researchers have

pollution problems causing current urban health problems also contribute to long lasting ecological problems
associated carbon monoxide with various types of neurological symptoms, such as visual impairment, reduced work capacity, reduced manual dexterity, poor learning ability, and difficulty in performing complex tasks. The same

. Ozone harms crops and trees. These harms affect ecosystems and

future generations. Similarly, particulate precursors, including nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, contribute to acid rain, which is not easily reversible. To address these problems, Agenda 21 recommends the adoption of national programs to reduce health risks from air pollution, including urban air pollution. These programs are to include development of "appropriate pollution control technology . . . for the introduction of environmentally sound production processes." It calls for this development "on the basis of risk assessment and epidemiological research." It also recommends development of "air pollution control capacities in large cities emphasizing enforcement programs using monitoring networks as appropriate." A second principle, the precautionary principle, provides support for the first. As stated in the Rio Declaration, the precautionary principle means that "lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation" when "there are threats of serious or irreversible damage." Thus, lack of complete certainty about the adverse environmental and human health effects of air pollutants does not, by itself, provide a

governments need to address air pollution on a precautionary basis to ensure that humans can live a healthy and productive life.
reason for tolerating them. Put differently,

Scenario 2 is water Continued contamination of our freshwater destroys any possibility for life on Earth. Robert B. Jackson and Steven W. Running Spring 2001 Water in a Changing World, Issues in Ecology, Ecological Society of America, http://www.biology.duke.edu/jackson/issues9.pdf Life on earth depends on the continuous flow of materials through the air, water, soil, and food webs of the biosphere. The movement of water through the hydrological cycle comprises the largest of these flows, delivering an estimated 110,000 cubic
kilometers (km3) of water to the land each year as snow and rainfall. Solar energy drives the hydrological cycle, vaporizing water from the surface of oceans, lakes, and rivers as well as from soils and plants (evapotranspiration). Water vapor rises into the atmosphere where it cools, condenses, and eventually rains down anew. This renewable freshwater supply sustains life on the land, in estuaries, and in the freshwater

ecosystems of the earth. Renewable fresh water provides many services essential to human health and well being, including water for drinking, industrial production, and irrigation, and the production of fish, waterfowl, and shellfish. Fresh water also provides
many benefits while it remains in its channels (nonextractive or instream benefits), including flood control, transportation, recreation, waste processing, hydroelectric power, and habitat for aquatic plants and animals. Some benefits, such as irrigation and hydroelectric power, can be achieved only by damming, diverting, or creating other major changes to natural water flows. Such changes often diminish or preclude other instream benefits of fresh water, such as providing habitat for aquatic life or maintaining suitable water quality for human use

Scenario 3 is the biodiversity Environmental collapse causes extinction

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David N. Diner (Judge Advocate Generals Corps of US Army) 1994 Military Law Review, Lexis *This card has been gender modified* By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined effects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss. And that outweighs everything Richard Tobin, The expendable Future, 1990 p. 22 Norman Meyers observes, no other form of environmental degradation is anywhere so significant as the fallout of species. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is less modest in assessing the relative consequences of human caused extinctions. To Wilson, the worst thing that will happen to earth is not economic collapse, the depletion of energy supplies, or even nuclear war. As frightful as these events might be, Wilson reasons that they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoingthat will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by destruction of natural habitats. And we must act now their resiliency arguments are wrong, the environment cant take much more degradation Knight 10 (Matthew, Cites the GBO and CBD: The GBO-3 is a landmark study in what is the U.N.'s International Year of Biodiversity and will play
a key role in guiding the negotiations between world governments at the U.N. Biodiversity Summit in Nagoya, Japan in October 2010. The CBD -- an international treaty designed to sustain diversity of life on Earth -- was set up at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, May 10, U.N. report: Ecosystems at 'tipping point', http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/10/biodiversity.loss.report/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn)

The world's eco-systems are at risk of "rapid degradation and collapse" according to a new United Nations report. The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) published by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) warns that unless "swift, radical and creative action" is taken "massive further loss is increasingly likely." Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the CBD said in a statement: "The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history." The U.N. warns several eco-systems including the Amazon rainforest, freshwater lakes and rivers and coral reefs are approaching a "tipping point" which, if reached, may see them never recover. The report says that no government has completely met biodiversity targets that were first set out in 2002 -- the year of the first GBO report. Executive Director of the U.N. Environmental Program Achim Steiner said there were key economic reasons why governments had failed in this task. "Many economies remain
blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning eco-systems," Steiner said in a statement. Although many countries are beginning to factor in "natural capital," Steiner said that this needs "rapid and sustained scaling-up." Despite increases in the size of protected land and coastal areas, biodiversity trends reported in the GBO-3 are almost entirely negative. Vertebrate species fell by nearly

one third between 1970 and 2006, natural habitats are in decline, genetic diversity of crops is falling and sixty breeds of livestock have become extinct since 2000. Nick Nuttall, a U.N. Environmental Program spokesman, said the cost of eco-systems degradation is huge. "In terms of land-use change, it's thought that the annual financial loss of services eco-systems provide -- water, storing carbon and soil stabilization -- is about &euro50 billion ($64 billion) a year," Nuttall told CNN. "If this continues we may well see by 2050 a cumulative loss of what you might call land-based natural capital of around &euro95 trillion ($121 trillion)," he said.

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Fossil fuel use is the biggest internal link to warming, and its not anthropogenic Vandenbergh and Steinemann 2007 (Michael P., Anne C., Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Regulatory Program at Vanderbilt University Law School, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Public Affairs at the University of Washington, New York University Law Review, December, p. 1680-1) Although much has been made of the state of the scientific debate regarding climate change, a recent assessment of relevant scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals between 1993 and 2003 concluded that none disagreed with the statement that the "earth's climate is being affected by human activities." n Furthermore, even the Bush Administration, which has declined to adopt mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions and has opposed state regulation of such emissions, has accepted the conclusions of the IPCC report. n In addition, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded in 2006 not only that the earth is warming but that human emissions of greenhouse gases are driving the warming. Warming causes extinction Tickell 8 (8/11/08, Oliver Tickell Climate Researcher, The Guardian, On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/climatechange) to Defra. But the We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser

idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction. The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die. Watson's call was supported by the government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, who warned that "if we get to a four-degree rise it is quite possible that we would begin to see a runaway increase". This is a remarkable understatement. The climate system is already
catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the permafrost is already under way. To

experiencing significant feedbacks, notably the summer melting of the Arctic sea ice. The more the ice melts, the more sunshine is absorbed by the sea, and the more the Arctic warms. And as the Arctic warms, the release of billions of tonnes of methane a greenhouse gas 70 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years captured under melting

see how far this process could go, look 55.5m years to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal

Maximum, when a global temperature increase of 6C coincided with the release of about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, both as CO2 and as methane from bogs and seabed sediments. Lush subtropical forests grew in polar regions, and sea levels rose to 100m higher than today. It appears that an initial warming pulse triggered other warming processes. Many scientists warn that this historical event may be analogous to the present: the warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth. And, extinctions inevitable from climate, asteroids, and supernovas --- only Helium-3 solves Walker 2k2 (Bill, The Case Against Human Extinction, Bill Walker is a Research Associate at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, Free Republic, 7-31, http://www.freerepub...ws/725634/posts) The human species is not the source of ecological Original Sin. For any real "deep ecology" theory, the long-term survival of life requires an intelligent species to develop the necessary technologies. Contrary to myth, humans have benefited the ecosystem; already we may well have prevented the Final Ice Age. First of all, a reality check. All species up to this point have killed off other species. Nature (or the gods, if you prefer) gave them no choice, because they were all playing a zero-sum game. All life on Earth depended on two energy sources: the hydrogen fusion in the sun that powers photosynthesis in plants, and the radioactive decay energy that powers chemosynthetic bacteria in the deep-sea volcanic vents. All life is nuclear powered, but until recently no life form was making any new energy. From humble fern to mighty Tyrannosaurus, every life form had to displace another to take a share of the fixed amount of available energy. Winners lived, losers died. Reality check two: most everything is dead. The Solar System is not full of planets covered by sunlit glades and happy bunnies. The majority of the Sun's fusion energy that misses the
Earth heads out into dead vacuum; a little bounces off dead asteroids, the dead acid clouds of Venus and the frozen dead wastes of Mars. You can't blame this on Homo sapiens or any other species. Entropy kills. Asteroids Entropy is the ultimate source of ecological evil.

blast planets, supernovas irradiate systems light years away, planetary climates freeze and fry. We have only our intelligence to fight this ultimate enemy. The survival of other

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Earth species depends on how well we use the intelligence that grew out of our fight with other species over energy.

Our Cro-Magnon ancestors played Nature's zero-sum gladiator game well. The woolly mammoth, the Maltese elephant, the North American ground sloth, and the carnivores that depended on them disappeared as humans took their energy. The process continued into historical times with the Dodo and the Moa, and continues today in the oceans as hunting humans with no concept of property rights race each other to the last fish. Once the convenient big game animals were gone, the descendants of the Cro-Magnons developed farming to take even more energy out of the ecosystem. Farmers take ALL the energy for themselves through their crops and herd animals. The early farming civilizations drove more species to extinction. As civilization developed in complexity, it demanded more and more energy. This energy came from the ecosystem in the form of firewood and the labor of agriculture-fed work animals. Just like flowering plants or dinosaurs, humans continued to displace earlier species and take their energy. But then, for the first time in two billion years, a new thing happened. Humans started to get energy from coal, oil, and natural gas. Energy that didn't come out of another currently living being (some of the gas was never in a living being). Some of this energy was converted to food energy; energy in nitrogen bonds in fertilizers, energy for tractors instead of draft animals and slaves. There could now be more humans without killing off other organisms to make room. In the 20th century United States, farms actually shrank and forests grew back.

The new human powers also defended Earth against the Cold Death that killed Mars.

In the time of the dinosaurs, perhaps the peak of biodiversity and ecological exuberance, there was a lot of carbon. The atmosphere was around 1% carbon dioxide. But as the radioactive energy that powers volcanoes runs down, carbon keeps getting trapped in dead organisms and covered by sediments, leaving the biosphere. During the last Ice Age the CO2 level fell below .02%. This is a serious problem for an ecosystem based on photosynthetic plants. Someone (perhaps his third grade teacher) should have told Al Gore; when the CO2 concentration is too low everything photosynthetic dies. In the 1800s, CO2 levels were measured at .028%. Human use of fossil fuels has raised that to .037%; still far below optimum for plant growth, but better. The slight increase in greenhouse effect also gives the Earth a little more protection against ending up like Mars, with our CO2 lying frozen on the ground. (It is, however, a VERY slight increase in greenhouse effect. Most of Earth's greenhouse effect comes from atmospheric water.) The dinosaur eras were 10 degrees warmer than today, and the ecosystem liked that just fine. It's been less than 15,000 years since the last Ice Age. Anyone concerned about the ecology as a whole must worry far more about Ice Age than about greenhouse effect. Of course at some point there will be enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to ensure against an asteroid hit or episode of volcano activity darkening the skies and triggering the next Ice Age.

Fossil fuels can't be used forever, and they don't produce enough energy for a real technical civilization anyway. Burning coal may be good for the ecosystem as a whole, but it isn't good for individual humans. Just the radioactive pollution from coal burning is hundreds of times worse per watt than from even the current crop of early fission reactors. This radioactive pollution is miniscule compared to the natural background, but the chemical pollution from coal could be significant for long-lived, cancer-prone species like humans. Fortunately humans learned to tap nuclear energy directly. All life is nuclear-powered, but now humans can get their nuclear fuel from places denied to other life forms.
Now, if they choose, humans can leave most of the solar energy that reached the Earth's surface for the use of other species. Life is no longer a zero-sum game. There is room for wolves, deer.... and woolly mammoths, with the new life-giving powers of biotechnology. Humans can not only live without exterminating, they can resurrect the long dead. Humans can even carry life to places that it has never been. Bacteria have probably journeyed between planets as well, but

nuclear-powered humans can actually change the dead planets to make

them support life.

Or, if they choose, humans can continue the old genocidal ways. Unfortunately there are humans, like the Unabomber and Al Gore, that don't want to leave Earth's meager solar power for our cousin species. They want to darken the world with solar collectors and leave nothing alive underneath. Now, this could be done, given some optimistic engineering assumptions and a total disregard for environmental cost. Department of Energy report #:DOE/EIA-0484(2002) from March 26, 2002 estimates that the total human energy use in 2005 will be 439 quadrillion BTU, or 129 trillion kilowatt-hours. Solar energy reaches the Earth's orbit at the intensity of about 1.4 kilowatts per square meter. However, the Earth's surface receives only part of this due to clouds, dust, night, etc. So even a reasonable good location for solar power only gets an average of 200 watts per square meter. Assuming an unrealistically good solar-cell conversion efficiency of 20% cuts this to 40 watts per square meter. This energy has to be stored for use at night; an unrealistically good storage efficiency of 80% and now we're down to 32 watts per square meter. Ignoring transmission losses completely (this energy does have to get to Seattle and Sweden somehow), we find that we can produce this much energy while smothering all the life on only 176, 583 square miles. Of course the energy-storage system will cover up yet more area (especially considering that the only practical utility-size storage systems are hydroelectric dams.) So a static, impoverished, (this energy isn't going to be cheap) lower-technology human civilization could be powered at current levels by destroying all life in an area about the size of

any civilization that turns inward and away from space is doomed to be blasted one of the many Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids anyway.
Texas. If humans do this, then they do deserve to be extinct... and they will be, because

But, if I were arguing before a jury of other species, I would ask them to withhold their judgment. It is likely that a few more of these destructive solar power plants will be built. But economic reality will check their spread. Eventually, the only solar power plants will be over other human structures, not over forest. In general, humans who use energy from outside the ecosystem will do better than those who try to live

parasitically on the ecosystem. Within a few centuries almost all the original energy in Earth's biosphere will be returned to the use of other species because it will be cheaper to use other, more concentrated sources. Nuclear fusion from helium-3 extracted from the gas giants (or some other, more advanced nuclear energy source) will power a human civilization that protects the Earth's ecosystem from Ice Age and brings new ecosystems into being on other planets. Additionally, Conventional energy sources results in thousands of systemic deaths outweighs the one-shot risk of their disad Dr. Sovacool, 8 Senior Research Fellow for the Network for New Energy Choices in New York and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Virginia
Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, VA (Benjamin K., also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, The Costs of Major Energy Accidents, 1907 to 2007, 4-29-2008, www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2008/04/The-Costs-of-Major-Energy-Accidents-1907-to-2007)

coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric power generators-- may kill more people than you think. From 1907 to 2007, a new study finds that 279 major energy accidents in the coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear sectors have been responsible for $41 billion in damages and 182,156 deaths. The claim that
Conventional energy technologies-- namely nuclear,

humans are imperfect needs no further citation. It is unsurprising, then, that major energy accidents occur. But what counts as an energy accident, especially a major one? The study attempted to answer this question by searching historical archives, newspaper and magazine articles, and press wire reports from 1907 to 2007. The words energy, electricity, oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewable, and hydroelectric were searched in the same sentence as the words accident, disaster, incident, failure, meltdown, explosion, spill, and leak. The study then narrowed results according to five criteria: The accident must have involved an energy system at the production/generation, transmission, and distribution phase. This means it must have occurred at an oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewable, or hydroelectric plant, its associated infrastructure, or within its fuel cycle (mine, refinery, pipeline, enrichment facility, etc.); It must have resulted in at least one death or property damage above $50,000 (in constant dollars that has not been normalized for growth in capital stock); It had to be unintentional and in the civilian sector, meaning that military accidents and events during war and conflict are not covered, nor are intentional attacks. The study only counted documented cases of accident and failure; It had to occur between August, 1907 and August, 2007; It had to be

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verified by a published source; The study adjusted all damagesincluding destruction of property, emergency response, environmental remediation, evacuation, lost product, fines, and court claimsto 2006 U.S. dollars using the Statistical Abstracts of the United States. Unsurprisingly, the data concerning major energy accidents is inhomogeneous. While responsible for less than 1 percent of total energy accidents, hydroelectric facilities claimed 94 percent of reported fatalities. Looking at the gathered data, the total results on fatalities are highly dominated one accident in which the Shimantan Dam failed in 1975 and 171,000 people perished. Only three of the listed 279 accidents resulted in more than 1,000 deaths, and each of these varied in almost every aspect. One involved the structural failure of a dam more than 30 years ago in China; one involved a nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine two decades ago; and one involved the rupture of a petroleum pipeline in Nigeria around ten years ago. The study found that only a small amount of accidents caused property damages greater than $1 billion, with most accidents below the $100 million mark. The second largest source of fatalities, nuclear reactors, is also the second most capital intense, supporting the notion that the larger a facility the more grave (albeit rare) the consequences of its failure. The inverse seems true for oil, natural gas, and coal systems: they fail far more frequently, but have comparatively fewer deaths and damage per each instance of failure. While hydroelectric plants were responsible for the most fatalities, nuclear plants rank first in terms of their economic cost, accounting for 41 percent of all property damage. Oil and hydroelectric come next at around 25 percent each, followed by natural gas at 9 percent and coal at 2 percent. By energy source, the most frequent energy system to fail is natural gas, followed by oil, nuclear, coal, and then hydroelectric. Ninety-one accidents occurred at natural gas facilities, accounting for

energy accidents exact a significant toll on human health and welfare, the natural environment, and society. Such accidents are now part
33 percent of the total; oil, 71 accidents at 25 percent; nuclear, 63 accidents at 23 percent; coal, 51 accidents at 18 percent; hydroelectric, 3 accidents at 1 percent. Therefore,

of our daily routines, a somewhat intractable feature of our energy-intensive lifestyles. They are an often-ignored negative externality associated with energy conversion and use. This conclusion may seem quite banal to some, given how fully integrated energy technologies are into modern society. Yet

energy systems continue to fail despite drastic improvements in design, construction, operation, and maintenance, as well as the best of intentions among policymakers and operators. Perhaps one striking difference between energy accidents and other normal risks facing society concerns the involuntary aspects of energy accidents. Alcoholics, rock climbers, construction workers, soldiers, and gigolos all take a somewhat active
and voluntary role in their risky behavior. Those suffering from nuclear meltdowns, exploding gas clouds, and petroleum-contaminated water do not.

The death and destruction associated with large-scale energy technologies is significant. Tallied as a whole, the 182,156 energy-related deaths total more than twice the number that died in the Vietnam War. Indeed, if averaged out for each year, energy technologies have been responsible for the equivalent of a September 11, 2001 happening every 1.65 years, year after year. The fact that such deaths are systemic means that they can be predicted to occur, with certainty, well into the future. Therein also lies hope, for recurring events can be anticipated and responded to. Their high probability means that they can be more easily predicted, planned for, and minimized than unforeseen and catastrophic events. Advantage 2 is energy security

Its key to preventing extinction

Ulrich Becker et al, professor of physics at MIT, 2008. MIT Faculty Newsletter, Vol. XXI No. 2, http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/212/milner.html The reliable and affordable availability of energy is the lifeblood of human civilization in the twenty-first century. It is essential to the quality and security of everyday life of the citizens in the United States. For example, the sudden loss of electrical power invariably reduces living conditions of the most technologically advanced society to a primitive state. The protracted loss of electric power would lead to chaos in the United States, with resultant instability worldwide. Recently, it has become clear that the future energy security of the United States is at serious risk from two different sources. Most of the energy used in buildings, industry, and transportation arises from the chemical burning of fossil fuels. The waste produced in the burning process includes greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane) which for the last 200 years have
accumulated in the Earths atmosphere. The present concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earths atmosphere is estimated as 385 ppm, which substantially exceeds the estimated values over the last 500,000 years. Basic scientific arguments tell us that the increased carbon dioxide levels should result in heating of the Earths surface. Measurements indicate that the average temperature at the Earths surface has

significantly risen over the last 100 years. If humanity wishes to preserve the planet on which human civilization developed, significant changes in the way we produce energy are urgently required. This is a global security challenge where the U.S. must play a leadership role. Secondly, the energy supply of the United States relies to a great degree on the reliable and affordable availability of oil. For example, transportation (road, rail, sea, air) depends almost completely on oil. The worlds supply of oil is limited and it is located in many regions of the world which are politically unstable and unfriendly to the United States. In addition to this, it is possible that the total world oil supply
may have already peaked. In the last two decades, the U.S. has been involved in two wars in the Middle East where the worlds major source of oil is located. Until the U.S. dependence on foreign oil is significantly reduced, there is every expectation that increasing amounts of precious

U.S. blood and treasure will have to be expended in widening conflicts in the cause of energy security.

It is widely accepted that the U.S. must find a way to wean itself from its addiction to oil. In ground transportation, which is a major oil consumer, significant progress is being made with batteries and fuel cells to replace gasoline with electricity, which can be generated in alternative ways. Strongly motivated by these two considerations, the development of new technologies to increase energy efficiency and to produce reliable

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and affordable energy with minimal greenhouse gas emission to the Earths atmosphere is a high priority in the U.S. and in many other countries. It is essential that these efforts be encouraged and enhanced. However, the probability of success and the timescale for realization of these technologies is highly uncertain. The economic
stability and national security of the United States over the coming decades cannot be secured by assuming optimistically that these new technologies will succeed in time to avoid a major discontinuity in the supply of oil and gas from foreign and potentially hostile sources. Further, it is not acceptable, nor is it possible, that the U.S. continues to burn fossil fuels indefinitely at present levels, thereby putting in clear jeopardy the planet on which we have evolved. Nuclear Power is Carbon-free, Technologically Feasible, Scalable, and Economical

And now is key, Russia, China and India are already on the space race Williams, 2007 (Mark, August 23, Mining the Moon Technology Review is an independent science
magazine owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19296/?a=f )//Abraha

At the 21st century's start, few would have predicted that by 2007, a second race for the moon would be under way. Yet the signs are that this is now the case. Furthermore, in today's moon race, unlike the one that took place between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s, a full roster of 21st-century global powers, including China and India, are competing. Even more surprising is that one reason for much of the

interest appears to be plans to mine helium-3--purportedly an ideal fuel for fusion reactors but almost unavailable on Earth--from the moon's surface. NASA's Vision for Space Exploration has U.S. astronauts scheduled to be back on the
moon in 2020 and permanently staffing a base there by 2024. While the U.S. space agency has neither announced nor denied any desire to mine helium3, it has nevertheless placed advocates of mining He3 in influential positions. For its part, Russia claims that the aim of any lunar program

of its own--for what it's worth, the rocket corporation Energia recently started blustering, Soviet-style, that it will build a permanent moon base by 2015-2020--will be extracting He3. The Chinese, too, apparently believe that helium-3 from the moon can enable fusion plants on Earth. This fall, the People's Republic expects to orbit a satellite around the moon and then land an unmanned vehicle there in 2011. Nor does India intend to be left out. (See "India's Space Ambitions Soar.") This past spring, its president, A.P.J. Kalam, and its prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made major speeches asserting that, besides constructing giant solar collectors in orbit and on the moon, the world's largest democracy likewise intends to mine He3 from the lunar surface. India's probe, Chandrayaan-1, will take off next year, and ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, is talking about sending Chandrayaan-2, a surface rover, in 2010 or 2011. Simultaneously, Japan and Germany are also making noises about launching their own moon missions at around that time, and talking up the possibility of mining He3 and bringing it back to fuel fusion-based nuclear
reactors on Earth.

Contention 3 is solvency: Obtaining Helium 3 will require nuclear fusion reactors that are key to the nuclear industry, they need to be built to tradeoff with coal fired power plants Fred Bosselman (Professor of Law Emeritus, Chicago-Kent College of Law) 2007 The new power generation: environmental law and electricity innovation: colloquium article: the ecological advantages of nuclear power, New York University Environmental Law Journal, lexis
In 2005, there were 104 U.S. commercial nuclear generating units that were fully licensed to [*3] operate, and they provided about 20% of the Nation's electricity. But no new nuclear plants have been built in the United States for over twenty years. 2 Some policy

makers and designers of such plants believe that they can now build plants that avoid the mistakes of the past and produce power that is both safe and economical. 3 Although Wall Street remains doubtful about the economics of such
plants, the idea seems to be gaining momentum. 4 The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provided "Standby Support for Certain Nuclear Plant Delays," authorizing the Department of Energy to enter into up to six contracts with sponsors of new nuclear power plants under which the federal government will guarantee to pay certain costs incurred by the sponsors in case full power operation of the plant is delayed by litigation. 5 For individual projects, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consolidated its permitting processes and established an Early Site Permit (ESP) program to resolve in advance all on-site environmental issues associated with the licensing of a new reactor. 6 Although no company has [*4] definitely committed

to building a new plant, companies have filed applications for more than two dozen plants that are in various stages of the permit process. 7 The
NRC must take into account various issues when deciding whether to allow these applications to go forward. Although Congress and the Administration have made their support for new nuclear power plants clear, any decision to build a nuclear power plant requires the agreement of many entities, including: (1) a company prepared to build it; 8 (2) financial backers willing to invest in it; 9 (3) federal policymakers and regulators; 10 (4) state energy and environmental regulators; 11 and (5) a local community prepared to site it. 12 These entities will undoubtedly take into consideration a wide range of issues, including safety, efficiency, profitability, health, and security. 13 [*5] This article concentrates only on one issue related to that decision - an issue that often receives less attention than it deserves: How will the decision affect ecological processes and systems, both in the United States and

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globally? 14 The article makes three arguments: (1) if

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nuclear power plants are not built, the gap will be filled by more coalfired power plants; (2) the impact of coal-fired power plants on ecological processes and systems is likely to be increasingly disastrous; and (3) nuclear power's ecological impacts are likely to be neutral or even positive.

Additionally, plan solves for fossil fuel reliance

Popular Mechanics 2k4(December 7, Mining The Moon, science magazine, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283056)//Abraha
Small quantities of helium-3 previously discovered on Earth intrigued the scientific community. The unique atomic structure

of helium-3 promised to make it possible to use it as fuel for nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, to generate vast amounts of electrical power without creating the troublesome radioactive byproducts produced in conventional nuclear reactors. Extracting helium-3 from the moon and returning it to Earth would, of course, be difficult, but the potential rewards would be staggering for those who embarked upon this venture. Helium-3 could help free the United States--and the world--from dependence on fossil fuels.
Advanced nuclear Helium 3 power solves energy security, tech leadership and growth Jack Fuller, former CEO at GE, 12/7/2010. Expanded Use of Nuclear Energy Will Advance U.S. Energy Security, Technology Leadership and Exports, http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101207006474/en/Expanded-Nuclear-Energy-Advance-U.S.Energy-Security America and the world can benefit from advanced U.S. nuclear power technology but only if government levels the
playing field for U.S. companies. A nuclear energy policy partnership, led by Sens. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Tom Carper, D-Del., will help drive policy decisions that will launch renewed expansion of nuclear power in the United States and, if done right, the reemergence of

America as a nuclear energy technology export powerhouse. The economic and national security benefits of a robust domestic civilian nuclear power industry cannot be overstated. In order for the United States to lead the conversation on non-proliferation, it is critical that the domestic nuclear industry is strong and that it is selling into the countries that are moving forward with new plants. It behooves the U.S. government to adopt policies that strengthen the ability of U.S. companies to compete internationallyand thereby contribute to economic growth and job creation here at home. The partnership, which includes experts from Wall Street, also can potentially help create a new
financing model to support reactor construction. The cost of electricity from nuclear energy is among the lowest from any fuel source, but the initial capital investments required are daunting. Loan guarantees and other tools that lower the financial barriers to plant construction are investments in the future that will yield dividends for decades to come in the form of economical and reliable low-carbon energy for Americas homes and factories. In

the global race for energy technology leadership, America is still a leading innovator of nuclear energy technology, but with other nations modernizing their power infrastructure at a more rapid pace, we need to quicken ours to continue a leadership role. Lets take stock as we have many inherent advantages. U.S. prowess in

nuclear engineering, technology development and plant management is still the best in the world. The newly elected 112th Congress has a golden opportunity to set America on a new course. With the right policies in place, America can

capitalize on her advantages, build new power plants here in the United Statesthe surest route to greater U.S. energy securityand start exporting high value-added energy technology to the rest of the world. This weeks summit
will begin charting a roadmap for renewal in the U.S. power sector. Thats something policy makers in both parties can agree on.

And, energy security impossible without He3 Wakefield 2k (Julie, June 30, Moons Helium 3 could power the earth http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/pdf/space_com063000.pdf)//Abraha Researchers and space enthusiasts see helium 3 as the perfect fuel source: extremely potent, nonpolluting, with virtually no radioactive by-product. Proponents claim its the fuel of the 21st century. The trouble is, hardly any of it is found on Earth. But there is plenty of it on the moon.

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Society is straining to keep pace with energy demands, expected to increase eightfold by 2050 as the world population swells toward 12 billion. The moon just may be the answer.
Helium 3 fusion energy may be the key to future space exploration and settlement, said Gerald Kulcinski, Director of the fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Scientists estimate there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands

of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States energy needs for a year, according to Apollo17 astronaut and FTI researcher Harrison Schmitt.
Cash crop of the moon

When the solar wind, the rapid stream of charged particles emitted by the sun, strikes the moon, helium 3 is deposited in the powdery soil. Over billions of years that adds up. Meteorite bombardment disperse the particles throughout the
top several meters of the lunar surface.

Helium 3 could be the cash crop of the moon, said Kulcinski, a longtime advocate and leading pioneer in the field, who envisions the
moon becoming the Hudson bay of Store of Earth. Today helium 3 would have a cash value of $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil, he estimates. When the moon becomes an independent country, it will have something to trade.

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Necessary 1AC Cards/notes

Observation 1 is the status quo Helium 3 solves the energy crisis, is bountiful on the moon, and there are currently no missions to retrieve it The telegraph 2k7(01 May, Helium-3 factfile http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1550247/Helium-3-factfile.html)//Abraha Helium-3 was discovered in lunar samples brought back from the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and 1970s. Some scientists estimate that there are more than 100 million tonnes of helium-3 on the moon - more than enough to power the planet for hundreds of years. Theoretically, space engineers would super-heat the Moon's surface, process the helium-3 gas that lies at a depth of about nine feet and return it to earth to process it in fusion reactors. But despite Russian claims, the American energy department is not currently funding any helium-3 fusion research - an indication that Washington still needs to be convinced the project is worthwhile. Russia and China take it much more seriously if only because many believe that the country that controls the production of helium-3 will also enjoy superpower status as the world's dominant energy supplier. And, the use of He3 has skyrocketed and theres hardly any left on Earth Shea and Morgan 2k10 (Dana A., Daniel, December 22, Specialist in Science and Technology Policy, CRS Report for Congress-The Helium-3 Shortage: Supply, Demand, and Options for Congress) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41419.pdf )//Abraha The world is experiencing a shortage of helium-3, a rare isotope of helium with applications in homeland security, national security, medicine, industry, and science. For many years the supply of helium-3 from the nuclear weapons program outstripped the demand for helium-3. The demand was small enough that a substantial stockpile of helium-3 accumulated. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal government began deploying neutron detectors at the U.S. border to help secure the nation against smuggled nuclear and radiological material. The deployment of this equipment created new demand for helium-3. Use of the polarized helium-3 medical imaging technique also increased. As a result, the size of the stockpile shrank. After several years of demand exceeding supply, a call for large quantities of helium-3 spurred federal officials to realize that insufficient helium-3 was available to meet the likely future demand. Notes: 1) Coal advantage + No nuclear war on pre empts section would be a good combo. Otherwise just read a combination of advantages at your choice. The addons are pretty awesome, but are in context of certain advantages, so make sure you actually READ that advantage in the 1ac. In the process of making a full cryogenics advantage instead of just an add on. This is also great for impact turning the econ impacts so every time you get the chance to, go for it.

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Plan: The United States federal government will substantially develop space beyond the Earths mesosphere by mining Helium-3 isotopes from the moon; we reserve the right to clarify

Plans

Plan: The United States federal government will substantially develop space beyond the Earths mesosphere by establishing a moon base for the purposes of mining and extracting Helium-3 Isotopes and Hydrogen from the moon; we reserve the right to clarify

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Advantage ____ is the sustainability

1AC Sustainability Advantage [1/4]

Action must be taken to secure the environment, its on the brink now and it cant take the status quos rapid degradation Knight 10 (Matthew, Cites the GBO and CBD: The GBO-3 is a landmark study in what is the U.N.'s International Year of Biodiversity and will play a key role in guiding the negotiations between world governments at the U.N. Biodiversity Summit in Nagoya, Japan in October 2010. The CBD -- an international treaty designed to sustain diversity of life on Earth -- was set up at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, May 10, U.N. report: Eco-systems at 'tipping point', http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/10/biodiversity.loss.report/index.html? eref=igoogle_cnn) The world's eco-systems are at risk of "rapid degradation and collapse" according to a new United Nations report. The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) published by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) warns that unless "swift, radical and creative action" is taken "massive further loss is increasingly likely." Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the CBD said in a statement: "The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history." The U.N. warns several eco-systems including the Amazon rainforest, freshwater lakes and rivers and coral reefs are approaching a "tipping point" which, if reached, may see them never recover. The report says that no government has completely met biodiversity targets that were first set out in 2002 -- the year of the first GBO report. Executive Director of the U.N. Environmental Program Achim Steiner said there were key economic reasons why governments had failed in this task. "Many economies remain
blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning eco-systems," Steiner said in a statement. Although many countries are beginning to factor in "natural capital," Steiner said that this needs "rapid and sustained scaling-up." Despite increases in the size of protected land and coastal areas, biodiversity trends reported in the GBO-3 are almost entirely negative. Vertebrate species fell by nearly

one third between 1970 and 2006, natural habitats are in decline, genetic diversity of crops is falling and sixty breeds of livestock have become extinct since 2000. Nick Nuttall, a U.N. Environmental Program spokesman, said the cost of eco-systems degradation is huge. "In terms of land-use change, it's thought that the annual financial loss of services eco-systems provide -- water, storing carbon and soil stabilization -- is about &euro50 billion ($64 billion) a year," Nuttall told CNN. "If this continues we may well see by 2050 a cumulative loss of what you might call land-based natural capital of around &euro95 trillion ($121 trillion)," he said.

Plan solves for fossil fuel reliance

Popular Mechanics 2k4(December 7, Mining The Moon, science magazine, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283056)//Abraha
Small quantities of helium-3 previously discovered on Earth intrigued the scientific community. The unique atomic structure

of helium-3 promised to make it possible to use it as fuel for nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, to generate vast amounts of electrical power without creating the troublesome radioactive byproducts produced in conventional nuclear reactors. Extracting helium-3 from the moon and returning it to Earth would, of course, be difficult, but the potential rewards would be staggering for those who embarked upon this venture. Helium-3 could help free the United States--and the world--from dependence on fossil fuels.

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1AC Sustainability Advantage [2/4]

Fossil fuel use is the biggest internal link to warming, and its not anthropogenic
Vandenbergh and Steinemann 2007 (Michael P., Anne C., Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Regulatory Program at Vanderbilt University Law School, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Public Affairs at the University of Washington, New York University Law Review, December, p. 1680-1)

Although much has been made of the state of the scientific debate regarding climate change, a recent assessment of relevant scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals between 1993 and 2003 concluded that none disagreed with the statement that the "earth's climate is being affected by human activities." n Furthermore, even the Bush Administration, which has declined to adopt mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions and has opposed state regulation of such emissions, has accepted the conclusions of the IPCC report. n In addition, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded in 2006 not only that the earth is warming but that human emissions of greenhouse gases are driving the warming. Warming Destroys All Life On EarthRunaway Greenhouse Followed By Martian Deep Freeze Brandenburg & Paxson (Phds) 99 [John & Monica, Dead Mars, Dying Earth, p. 232 John E. Brandenburg is a researcher at Orbital Technologies Corporation in Madison Wisconsin, Monica Rix Paxson is a professional writer and creative consultant ] One can imagine a scenario for global catastrophe that runs similarly. If the human race adopted a mentality like the crew aboard the ship Californian- as some urge, saying that both ozone hole and global warming will disappear if statistics are properly examined, and we need do nothing about either- the following scenario could occur. The ozone hole expands, driven by a monstrous synergy with
global warming that puts more catalytic ice crystals into the stratosphere, but this affects the far north and south and not the major nations heartlands.

The sea rise, the tropic roast but the media networks no longer cover it. The Amazon rainforest becomes the Amazon desert. Oxygen levels fall, but profits rise for those who can provide it in bottles. An equatorial high pressure zone forms, forcing drought in central Africa and Brazil, the Nile dries up and the monsoons fail, Then inevitably, at some unlucky point in time, a major unexpected event occursa major volcanic
eruption, a sudden and dramatic shift in ocean circulation or a large asteroid impact ( those who think freakish accidents do not occur have paid little attention to life or mars), or a nuclear war that starts between Pakistan and India and escalates to involve China and RussiaSuddenly the

gradual climb in global temperatures goes on a mad excursion as the oceans warm and release large amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide from their lower depths into the atmosphere. Oxygen levels go down precipitously as oxygen replaces lost oceanic carbon dioxide. Asthma cases double and then double again. Now a third of the world fears breathing.. As the oceans dump carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect increases, which further warms, the oceans, causing them to dump even more carbon. Because of the heat, plants die and burn in enormous fires which release more carbon dioxide, and the oceans evaporate, adding more water vapor to the greenhouse. Soon, we are in what is termed a runaway greenhouse effect, as happened to Venus eons ago. The last two surviving scientist inevitably argue, one telling the other, See! I told you the missing sink was in the ocean!Earth, as we know it dies. After this Venusian excursion in temperatures, the
oxygen disappears into the soil, the oceans evaporate and are lost and the dead earth loses it ozone layer completely. Earth is too far from the sun for it to be the second Venus for long. Its atmosphere is slowly lost- as is its water- because of ultraviolet bombardment breaking up all the molecules apart from carbon dioxide. As the atmosphere becomes thin, the earth becomes colder. For a short while temperatures are nearly normal, but the ultraviolet sears and life that tries to make a comeback. The carbon dioxide thins out to form a think veneer with a few wispy clouds and dust devils. Earth becomes the second Mars- red, desolate, with perhaps a few hardy microbes surviving.

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1AC Sustainability Advantage [3/4]

Environmental collapse causes extinction Diner 94 ["The Army and the Endangered Species Act: Who's Endangering Whom" l/n] By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined effects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss. ([ ] = correction) Additionally, Conventional energy sources results in thousands of systemic deaths outweighs the one-shot risk of their disad Dr. Sovacool, 8 Senior Research Fellow for the Network for New Energy Choices in New York and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, VA (Benjamin K., also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, The Costs of Major Energy Accidents, 1907 to 2007, 4-29-2008, www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2008/04/The-Costs-of-Major-Energy-Accidents-1907-to-2007) Conventional energy technologies-- namely nuclear, coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric power generators-- may kill more people than you think. From 1907 to 2007, a new study finds that 279 major energy accidents in the coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear sectors have been responsible for $41 billion in damages and 182,156 deaths. The claim that humans are imperfect needs no further citation. It is unsurprising, then, that major energy accidents occur. But
what counts as an energy accident, especially a major one? The study attempted to answer this question by searching historical archives, newspaper and magazine articles, and press wire reports from 1907 to 2007. The words energy, electricity, oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewable, and hydroelectric were searched in the same sentence as the words accident, disaster, incident, failure, meltdown, explosion, spill, and leak. The study then narrowed results according to five criteria: The accident must have involved an energy system at the production/generation, transmission, and distribution phase. This means it must have occurred at an oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewable, or hydroelectric plant, its associated infrastructure, or within its fuel cycle (mine, refinery, pipeline, enrichment facility, etc.); It must have resulted in at least one death or property damage above $50,000 (in constant dollars that has not been normalized for growth in capital stock); It had to be unintentional and in the civilian sector, meaning that military accidents and events during war and conflict are not covered, nor are intentional attacks. The study only counted documented cases of accident and failure; It had to occur between August, 1907 and August, 2007; It had to be verified by a published source; The study adjusted all damagesincluding destruction of property, emergency response, environmental remediation, evacuation, lost product, fines, and court claimsto 2006 U.S. dollars using the Statistical Abstracts of the United States. Unsurprisingly, the data concerning major energy accidents is inhomogeneous. While responsible for less than 1 percent of total energy accidents, hydroelectric facilities claimed 94 percent of reported fatalities. Looking at the gathered data, the total results on fatalities are highly dominated one accident in which the Shimantan Dam failed in 1975 and 171,000 people perished. Only three of the listed 279 accidents resulted in more than 1,000 deaths, and each of these varied in almost every aspect. One involved the structural failure of a dam more than 30 years ago in China; one involved a nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine two decades ago; and one involved the rupture of a petroleum pipeline in Nigeria around ten years ago. The study found that only a small amount of accidents caused property damages greater than $1 billion, with most accidents below the $100 million mark. The second largest source of fatalities, nuclear reactors, is also the second most capital intense, supporting the notion that the larger a facility the more grave (albeit rare) the consequences of its failure. The inverse seems true for oil, natural gas, and coal systems: they fail far more frequently, but have comparatively fewer deaths and damage per each instance of failure. While hydroelectric plants were responsible for the most fatalities, nuclear plants rank first in terms of their economic cost, accounting for 41 percent of all property damage. Oil and hydroelectric come next at around 25 percent each, followed by natural gas at 9 percent and coal at 2 percent. By energy source, the most frequent energy system to fail is natural gas, followed by oil, nuclear, coal, and then hydroelectric. Ninety-one accidents occurred at natural gas facilities, accounting for 33 percent of the total; oil, 71 accidents at 25 percent; nuclear, 63 accidents at 23 percent; coal, 51 accidents at 18 percent; hydroelectric, 3 accidents at 1 percent. Therefore, energy accidents exact a significant toll on human health and welfare, the natural

environment, and society. Such accidents are now part of our daily routines, a somewhat intractable feature of our energy-intensive lifestyles.
They are an often-ignored negative externality associated with energy conversion and use. This conclusion may seem quite banal to some, given how fully integrated energy technologies are into modern society. Yet energy systems

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continue to fail despite drastic improvements in design, construction, operation, and maintenance, as well as the best of intentions among policymakers and operators. Perhaps one striking difference between energy accidents and other normal risks facing society concerns the involuntary aspects of energy accidents. Alcoholics, rock climbers, construction workers, soldiers, and gigolos all take a somewhat active
and voluntary role in their risky behavior. Those suffering from nuclear meltdowns, exploding gas clouds, and petroleum-contaminated water do not.

The death and destruction associated with large-scale energy technologies is significant. Tallied as a whole, the 182,156 energy-related deaths total more than twice the number that died in the Vietnam War. Indeed, if averaged out for each year, energy technologies have been responsible for the equivalent of a September 11, 2001 happening every 1.65 years, year after year. The fact that such deaths are systemic means that they can be predicted to occur, with certainty, well into the future. Therein also lies hope, for recurring events can be anticipated and responded to. Their high probability means that they can be more easily predicted, planned for, and minimized than unforeseen and catastrophic events.

And now is key, Russia, China and India are already on the space race Williams, 2007 (Mark, August 23, Mining the Moon Technology Review is an independent science
magazine owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19296/?a=f )//Abraha

At the 21st century's start, few would have predicted that by 2007, a second race for the moon would be under way. Yet the signs are that this is now the case. Furthermore, in today's moon race, unlike the one that took place between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s, a full roster of 21st-century global powers, including China and India, are competing. Even more surprising is that one reason for much of the

interest appears to be plans to mine helium-3--purportedly an ideal fuel for fusion reactors but almost unavailable on Earth--from the moon's surface. NASA's Vision for Space Exploration has U.S. astronauts scheduled to be back on the
moon in 2020 and permanently staffing a base there by 2024. While the U.S. space agency has neither announced nor denied any desire to mine helium3, it has nevertheless placed advocates of mining He3 in influential positions. For its part, Russia claims that the aim of any lunar program

of its own--for what it's worth, the rocket corporation Energia recently started blustering, Soviet-style, that it will build a permanent moon base by 2015-2020--will be extracting He3. The Chinese, too, apparently believe that helium-3 from the moon can enable fusion plants on Earth. This fall, the People's Republic expects to orbit a satellite around the moon and then land an unmanned vehicle there in 2011. Nor does India intend to be left out. (See "India's Space Ambitions Soar.") This past spring, its president, A.P.J. Kalam, and its prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made major speeches asserting that, besides constructing giant solar collectors in orbit and on the moon, the world's largest democracy likewise intends to mine He3 from the lunar surface. India's probe, Chandrayaan-1, will take off next year, and ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, is talking about sending Chandrayaan-2, a surface rover, in 2010 or 2011. Simultaneously, Japan and Germany are also making noises about launching their own moon missions at around that time, and talking up the possibility of mining He3 and bringing it back to fuel fusion-based nuclear
reactors on Earth.

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Advantage ____ is Nuclear detection Helium-3 is key to nuclear detection technology which stops proliferation and terrorism but supplies are at an all-time low, countries wont export and dwindling stockpiles HSNW 2/28(2011, Helium-3 shortage endangers nuclear detection capabilities Homeland Security News Wire is a leading e-information service, delivering daily digital reports, in-depth analysis and news on homeland security, http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/helium-3-shortage-endangers-nuclear-detectioncapabilities)//Abraha Demand for radiation detectors has surged as a result of increased efforts to stop nuclear proliferation and terrorism, but production of helium-3, a critical element in nuclear detection technology, has not kept pace and existing stockpiles are quickly dwindling; in 2010 demand for helium-3 was projected to be 76,000 liters per year; the United States only produces 8,000
liters of helum-3 a year; last year the U.S. stockpile of helium-3 was at less than 48,000 liters; alternatives are currently in the early stages of development and researchers have found several promising leads; when an alternative is found, current radiation detection equipment will have to be replaced with the new technology. Demand for radiation detectors has surged as a result of increased efforts to stop nuclear proliferation and terrorism, but production of helium-3, a critical element in nuclear detection technology, has not kept pace and existing stockpiles are quickly dwindling.Helium-3 is primarily used in security applications as it is highly sensitive to the neutrons that are emitted by plutonium. Roughly

1AC Nuclear detection Advantage [1/3]

80 percent of helium-3 supplies are used for national security. According to Wireds Danger Room,

helium-3 does not naturally occur in large quantities and it represents less than 0.0002 percent of all helium. Helium-3 is currently produced by harvesting tritium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen that is used to enhance the yield of nuclear weapons. Tritium has not been produced since 1988 and led to reduced helium-3 production levels. Helium-3 is now primarily obtained from dismantled or refurbished

nuclear weapons. Since 9/11 demand for radiation detectors increased sharply, however production failed to increase. In 2010 demand for helium-3 was projected to be 76,000 liters per year, but the United States only produces 8,000 liters of it a year. Moreover, last year the U.S. stockpile of helium-3 was at less than 48,000 liters. The United States has stopped exporting the gas and the International Atomic Energy Agency was informed that it must diversify its sources for helium-3. Other countries have also followed suit and reduced its exports. From 2004 to 2008, the United States imported roughly 25,000 liters of helium-3 each year from Russia, but in August of 2008 Russia declared that it was reserving its supplies for domestic use. He3 key to economic development and is only 30 years off but we must get it before China Hedman, 2006 (Eric R., January 16, Hedman is the chief technology officer of Logic Design Corporation and Kulcinski has spent the last two decades studying how to develop feasible fusion reactors using helium-3 part of the NASA Advisory Council. A fascinating hour with Gerald Kulcinski http://www.thespacereview.com/article/536/1)//Abraha
After our discussion on what it takes to inspire young people to enter technical fields our conversation drifted back to my original reason for wanting the interview, nuclear fusion using helium-3. Most nuclear fusion research is on reactors that use a deuterium-tritium fuel cycle. Helium-3 is not

used anywhere else because the supply on Earth is so very limited. The limited supply on Earth is what makes the connection
between Professor Kulcinski and NASA so very intriguing. Imagine a world thirty years from now. NASA has led the way to returning humans to the Moon and is in the final steps of preparing for human exploration and settlement of Mars. On Earth our environment is cleaner with reliable fusion reactors steadily replacing coal-fired plants and fission reactors. The fuel for these reactors is being mined from the surface of the Moon relegating the mercury, radium and carbon dioxide-laced exhaust from coal-fired plants to the ash heap of history. The growth of highly radioactive

waste from fission power plants is following coal into history. Dependency on highly volatile regions of our planet for energy supplies is steadily diminishing. Clean power is allowing economic development of the world to continue, lifting a higher and higher percentage of the population out of poverty. Is this a possible future for our country and the planet? Professor Kulcinski and his small team of researchers just might have the answer and NASA might provide access to the key enabling resource. The deuterium-tritium fuel cycle has some inherent problems that might be extremely
difficult to overcome. A deuterium-tritium fuel cycle releases eighty percent of its energy in a stream of high-energy neutrons. These neutrons are highly destructive to anything they strike, including the containment vessel. Tritium is a highly radioactive isotope of hydrogen that is hard to contain with the risk of release. Radiation damage to structures may weaken them and leave highly radioactive waste behind as components need to be replaced and when reactors are decommissioned. It wasnt long after the development of the atom bomb that development work on thermonuclear

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weaponsthe hydrogen bombwas started. Physicists

already knew that fusion as a power source was theoretically possible. It wasnt until the seventies, though, that scientists started trying to develop the technology to do it. A roadmap was laid out to try to get it to work. Thirty years later were still thirty years away from commercially-viable fusion reactors based on current development plans.

Proliferation leads to extinction Utgoff, 2 Deputy Director of Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of Institute for Defense Analysis [Victor A., Proliferation, Missile Defence
and American Ambitions, Survival, Summer, p. 87-90] Further, the large number of states that became capable of building nuclear weapons over the years, but chose not to, can be reasonably well explained by the fact that most were formally allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Both these superpowers had strong nuclear forces and put great pressure on their allies not to build nuclear weapons. Since the Cold War, the US has retained all its allies. In addition, NATO has extended its protection to some of the previous allies of the Soviet Union and plans on taking in more. Nuclear proliferation by India and Pakistan, and proliferation programmes by North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all involve states in the opposite situation: all judged that they faced serious military opposition and had little prospect of establishing a reliable supporting alliance with a suitably strong, nuclear-armed state. What would await the world if strong protectors, especially the United States, were [was] no longer seen as willing to protect states from nuclear-backed aggression? At least a few additional

states would begin to build their own nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to distant targets, and these initiatives would spur increasing numbers of the worlds capable states to follow suit. Restraint would seem ever less necessary and ever more
dangerous. Meanwhile, more states are becoming capable of building nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Many, perhaps most, of the worlds states are becoming sufficiently wealthy, and the technology for building nuclear forces continues to improve and spread. Finally, it seems highly likely that at some point, halting proliferation will come to be seen as a lost cause and the restraints on it will disappear. Once that happens, the transition

to a highly proliferated world would probably be very rapid. While some regions might be able to hold the line for a time, the threats posed by wildfire proliferation in most other areas could create pressures that would finally overcome all restraint. Many readers are probably willing to accept that nuclear proliferation is such a grave threat to world peace that every effort should be made
to avoid it. However, every effort has not been made in the past, and we are talking about much more substantial efforts now. For new and substantially more burdensome efforts to be made to slow or stop nuclear proliferation, it needs to be established that the highly proliferated nuclear world that would sooner or later evolve without such efforts is not going to be acceptable. And, for many reasons, it is not. First, the dynamics of getting to a highly proliferated world could be very dangerous. Proliferating states will feel great pressures to obtain nuclear weapons and delivery systems before any potential opponent does. Those who succeed in outracing an opponent may consider preemptive nuclear war before

the opponent becomes capable of nuclear retaliation. Those who lag behind might try to preempt their opponents nuclear
programme or defeat the opponent using conventional forces. And those who feel threatened but are incapable of building nuclear weapons may still be able to join in this arms race by building other types of weapons of mass destruction, such as biological weapons. [The article continues] The war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s led to the use of chemical weapons on both sides and exchanges of missiles against each others cities. And more recently, violence in the Middle East escalated in a few months from rocks and small arms to heavy weapons on one side, and from police actions to air strikes and armoured attacks on the other. Escalation of violence is also basic human nature. Once the violence starts,

retaliatory exchanges of violent acts can escalate to levels unimagined by the participants before hand. Intenseand blinding anger
is a common response to fear or humiliation or abuse. And such anger can lead us to impose on our opponents whatever levels of violence are readily accessible. In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we

shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild

West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.

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Terrorism leads to extinction Gordon 02 (Harvey, Visiting Lecturer, Forensic Psychiatry, Tel Aviv University, The Suicide Bomber: Is It a Psychiatric Phenomenon?
PSYCHIATRIC BULLETIN v. 26, 2002, pp. 285-287. Available from the Wrold Wide Web at: http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/26/8/285)

1AC Nuclear detection Advantage [3/3]

, the existence of weapons of mass destruction now renders terrorism a potential threat to the very existence of human life (Hoge & Rose, 2001). Such potential global destruction, or globicide as one might call it, supersedes even that of genocide in its lethality. Although religious factors are not the only determinant of suicide bombers, the revival of religious fundamentalism towards the end of the 20th century renders the phenomenon a major global threat. Even though religion can be a force for good, it can equally be abused as a force for evil. Ultimately, the parallel traits in human nature
Although terrorism throughout human history has been tragic, until relatively recently it has been more of an irritant than any major hazard. However

of good and evil may perhaps be the most durable of all the characteristics of the human species. There is no need to apply a psychiatric analysis to the suicide bomber because the phenomenon can be explained in political terms. Most participants in terrorism are not usually mentally disordered and their behaviour can be construed more in terms of group dynamics (Colvard, 2002). On the other hand, perhaps psychiatric terminology is as yet deficient in not having the depth to encompass the emotions and behaviour of groups of people whose levels of hate, low self-esteem, humiliation and alienation are such that it is felt that they can be remedied by the mass destruction of life, including their own.

Nuclear terrorism is an existential threatit escalates to nuclear war with Russia and China. Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the

there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these
nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors themselves.

But these two nuclear worldsa non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchangeare not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context,
todays and tomorrows terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem.

It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist
nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important some indication of where the nuclear material came from.41 Alternatively,

if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo?

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if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washingtons relations officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was
with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack?

Washingtons early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the
immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the countrys armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a

it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that
higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the Chechen insurgents long-standing interest in all things nuclear.42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to provide. There is also the question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, both Russia and China would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply underwhelming, (neither for us or against us) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway, and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability? If Washington decided to use, or decided to threaten the use of, nuclear weapons, the responses of Russia and China would be crucial to the chances of avoiding a more serious nuclear exchange. They might surmise, for example, that while the act of nuclear terrorism was especially heinous and demanded a strong response, the response simply had to remain below the nuclear threshold. It would be one thing for a non-state actor to have broken the nuclear use taboo, but an entirely different thing for a state actor, and indeed the leading state in the international system, to do so. If Russia and China felt sufficiently strongly about that prospect, there is then the question of what options would lie open to them to dissuade the United States from such action: and as has been seen over the last several decades, the central dissuader of the use of nuclear weapons by states has been the threat of nuclear retaliation. If some readers find this simply too fanciful, and perhaps even offensive to contemplate, it may be informative to reverse the tables. Russia, which possesses an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads and that has been one of the two most important trustees of the non-use taboo, is subjected to an attack of nuclear

Moscow places its nuclear forces very visibly on a higher state of alert and declares that it is considering the use of nuclear retaliation against the group and any of its state supporters. How would
terrorism. In response, Washington view such a possibility? Would it really be keen to support Russias use of nuclear weapons, including outside Russias traditional sphere of influence? And if not, which seems quite plausible, what options would Washington have to communicate that displeasure?

If China had been the victim of the nuclear terrorism and seemed likely to retaliate in kind, would the United
States and Russia be happy to sit back and let this occur? In the charged atmosphere immediately after a nuclear terrorist attack, how would the attacked

The phrase how dare they tell us what to do immediately springs to mind. Some might even go so far as to interpret this concern as a tacit form of sympathy or support for the terrorists.
country respond to pressure from other major nuclear powers not to respond in kind? This might not help the chances of nuclear restraint.

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[Dont read with sustainability advantage, this is just a longer version] Obtaining Helium 3 will require nuclear fusion reactors that are key to the nuclear industry, they need to be built to tradeoff with coal fired power plants Fred Bosselman (Professor of Law Emeritus, Chicago-Kent College of Law) 2007 The new power generation: environmental law and electricity innovation: colloquium article: the ecological advantages of nuclear power, New York University Environmental Law Journal, lexis
In 2005, there were 104 U.S. commercial nuclear generating units that were fully licensed to [*3] operate, and they provided about 20% of the Nation's electricity. But no new nuclear plants have been built in the United States for over twenty years. 2 Some policy

makers and designers of such plants believe that they can now build plants that avoid the mistakes of the past and produce power that is both safe and economical. 3 Although Wall Street remains doubtful about the economics of such
plants, the idea seems to be gaining momentum. 4 The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provided "Standby Support for Certain Nuclear Plant Delays," authorizing the Department of Energy to enter into up to six contracts with sponsors of new nuclear power plants under which the federal government will guarantee to pay certain costs incurred by the sponsors in case full power operation of the plant is delayed by litigation. 5 For individual projects, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consolidated its permitting processes and established an Early Site Permit (ESP) program to resolve in advance all on-site environmental issues associated with the licensing of a new reactor. 6 Although no company has [*4] definitely committed

to building a new plant, companies have filed applications for more than two dozen plants that are in various stages of the permit process. 7 The
NRC must take into account various issues when deciding whether to allow these applications to go forward. Although Congress and the Administration have made their support for new nuclear power plants clear, any decision to build a nuclear power plant requires the agreement of many entities, including: (1) a company prepared to build it; 8 (2) financial backers willing to invest in it; 9 (3) federal policymakers and regulators; 10 (4) state energy and environmental regulators; 11 and (5) a local community prepared to site it. 12 These entities will undoubtedly take into consideration a wide range of issues, including safety, efficiency, profitability, health, and security. 13 [*5] This article concentrates only on one issue related to that decision - an issue that often receives less attention than it deserves: How will the decision affect ecological processes and systems, both in the United States and globally? 14 The article makes three arguments: (1) if nuclear power plants are not built, the gap will be filled by more coal-

fired power plants; (2) the impact of coal-fired power plants on ecological processes and systems is likely to be increasingly disastrous; and (3) nuclear power's ecological impacts are likely to be neutral or even positive.

Additionally, plan solves for fossil fuel reliance

Popular Mechanics 2k4(December 7, Mining The Moon, science magazine, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283056)//Abraha
Small quantities of helium-3 previously discovered on Earth intrigued the scientific community. The unique atomic structure

of helium-3 promised to make it possible to use it as fuel for nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, to generate vast amounts of electrical power without creating the troublesome radioactive byproducts produced in conventional nuclear reactors. Extracting helium-3 from the moon and returning it to Earth would, of course, be difficult, but the potential rewards would be staggering for those who embarked upon this venture. Helium-3 could help free the United States--and the world--from dependence on fossil fuels.
Coal devastates the environment multiple internal links, and clean coal technologies dont solve Fred Bosselman (Professor of Law Emeritus, Chicago-Kent College of Law) 2007 The new power generation: environmental law and electricity innovation: colloquium article: the ecological advantages of nuclear power, New York University Environmental Law Journal, lexis Virtually all of the coal mined in the United States is used as boiler fuel to generate electricity, 122 and although few users of that electricity realize it, half of the nation's electric energy is provided by coal. 123 In his recent book, Big Coal, Jeff Goodell points out that in the United States, the mining

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and combustion of coal typically occur in such remote locations that most Americans have no idea "what our relationship with this black rock actually costs us." 124 This is particularly true with regard to public understanding of ecological systems that are being destroyed in remote places or through chains of causation that only experts understand. Coal is ecologically destructive through (1) mining, (2) air pollution, (3) greenhouse gas emissions, and (4) water pollution; and (5) while so-called "clean-coal" technology is a long-range hope, it is not likely to be common in the next decade. 1. Coal Mining Is Destroying Vast Amounts of Natural Landscape Originally, almost all coal mining took place through the construction of a network of shafts underground from which coal would be cut and brought to the surface. Such "underground" mining still takes place in the United States, 125 but each year a [*26] larger share of the mining is "surface" mining. 126 Both kinds of coal mining have an impact on the landscape both directly and indirectly. Underground mining typically brings to the surface large volumes of minerals, only some of which constitutes usable coal. The residue is known as "gob" or "culm" and residue piles from both existing and abandoned underground mines are common sights in older mining areas. 128 The rain penetrates the piles and leaches out the soluble material, creating sulfuric and other acids, which are supposed to be stored in impoundments on the mine site but often flow directly into local watersheds or potable aquifers, particularly if the mine has been abandoned. 129 This kind of acid mine drainage pollutes streams throughout older mining regions, often turning them bright orange, rendering the water non-potable and uninhabitable by wildlife, and changing the ecological processes on the riparian landscape far beyond the mine site. Underground mining also destroys landscapes through subsidence. If a mine shaft is not properly supported, its roof will collapse, which typically causes the surface of the earth over the mine to subside. In older mines, such
subsidence regularly happened only after a mineshaft was abandoned, but many newer mines use a system called "longwall" mining, which makes no attempt to support the roof over the area where coal is

can change drainage patterns on the surface in ways that may destroy existing ecosystems. Even more directly damaging to the natural landscape is surface mining, which now produces the majority of our coal. 132 The two most prominent examples of surface mining in the United States and the resulting ecological consequences
removed, resulting in intentional subsidence. Both intentional and unintentional subsidence

are in the Powder River Valley of Wyoming, and in a section of the Southern Appalachians that includes parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. 133 In both areas, surface mining is used extensively, but the differences in the terrain result in quite different impacts. 134 The Powder River Valley is relatively flat and dry rangeland, supporting cattle and, in the streams, trout. 135 The coal seams in this valley tend to be massive, and the parts that have been mined are relatively close to the surface. 136 The earth overlying the coal, [*28] known in the trade as "overburden," is blasted with explosives and then removed by massive machines built for the purpose. 137 The scale of the operations is so large that seventeen Wyoming surface mines supply over a third of U.S. coal consumption. 138 Despite the effects from the dust created in these operations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed to classify such dust as a non-pollutant. 139 In December 2005, the EPA issued proposed rules that would exempt mining operations in rural areas from dust emission regulations. 140 In the Southern Appalachians, surface mining is taking place in a forested landscape of rolling hills

The current mining method is known as "mountaintop mining," and involves blasting and scraping off the tops of mountains to obtain access to the coal underneath. In an earlier era, this coal would have been accessed by underground shafts, but today's massive machinery and cheap explosives makes it more economical to remove the mountaintop and use surface mining equipment to take out the coal. 142 The rubble that was once the top of the mountain is simply dumped into a valley adjacent to the mountain, creating what is euphemistically called "valley fill." The result is the destruction [*29] not only of the ecological characteristics of the mountain itself but also of the adjacent valley. 143 Although this destruction has been widely criticized, it continues to be supported by both federal and state regulating agencies. 144 Although reserves of coal in the United States remain plentiful, the quality and accessibility of the coal is likely to decline. 145 "A good percentage of the coal that's left is too dirty to be burned in conventional power plants, and much of it is buried in inconvenient places - under homes, schools, parks, highways, and historical landmarks." 146 A future shortage of good quality coal may add to the ecological destruction involved in coal mining by requiring more disruption to get at equivalent amounts of coal. 2. Coal Combustion Pollutes a Wide Range of Environments In their recent "Nutshell" book on energy law, Joseph Tomain and Richard Cudahy concisely summarize the primary types of air pollution caused by coal combustion: [*30] Coal combustion generates four main sources of pollution: sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter; all of which spoil land, water, and air. Sulfur oxide, which increases with the sulfur content of the coal, causes human health problems, crop damage, and acid rain. Nitrogen oxide contributes to the same problems and causes smog. Tons of particulate matter are emitted from coal burning facilities daily and cause property damage and health hazards. Finally, carbon dioxide causes what is known as the greenhouse effect, which is an increase in the temperature of the earth's surface. We have long known that air pollution from coal combustion damages crops and natural vegetation, in addition to its impact on human health. In the last thirty years, scientists have
and mountains with relatively moist conditions. 141

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learned that pollutants from coal-burning power plants travel long distances and create acid rain that significantly harms plants and animals. Scenario 1 is air pollution It terminally results in extinction Driesen 03 (David, Associate Professor, Syracuse University College of Law. J.D. Yale Law School, 1989, Fall/Spring, 10 Buff. Envt'l. L.J. 25, p. 26-8 Air pollution can make life unsustainable by harming the ecosystem upon which all life depends and harming the health of both future and present generations. "human beings. . . are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature", because they are "at the center of concerns for sustainable development." While the Rio Declaration refers to human health, its reference to life "in harmony with nature" also reflects a concern about the natural environment. Since air pollution damages both human health and the environment, air quality implicates both of these concerns.
The Rio Declaration articulates six key principles that are relevant to air pollution. These principles can also be understood as goals, because they describe a state of affairs that is worth achieving. Agenda 21, in turn, states a program of action for realizing those goals. Between them, they aid understanding of sustainable development's meaning for air quality. The first principle is that health and the environment well beyond urban boundaries. Yet, the health problems these pollutants present remain most acute in urban and suburban areas.

Lead, carbon monoxide, particulate, tropospheric ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides have historically threatened urban air quality in the United States. This review will focus upon tropospheric ozone, particulate, and carbon monoxide, because these pollutants present the most widespread of the remaining urban air problems, and did so at the time of the earth summit. 6 Tropospheric ozone refers to ozone fairly near to the ground, as opposed to stratospheric ozone high in the atmosphere. The stratospheric ozone layer protects human health and the environment from ultraviolet radiation, and its depletion causes problems. By contrast, tropospheric ozone damages human health and the environment. 8 In the United States, the pollutants causing "urban" air quality problems also affect human

Ozone, carbon monoxide, and particulate cause very

serious public health problems

that have been well recognized for a long time. Ozone forms in the atmosphere from a reaction between volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, and sunlight. Volatile organic compounds include a large number of hazardous air pollutants. Nitrogen oxides, as discussed below, also play a role in acidifying ecosystems. Ozone damages lung tissue. It plays a role in triggering asthma attacks, sending thousands to the hospital every summer. It effects young children and people engaged in heavy exercise especially severely. Particulate pollution, or soot, consists of combinations of a wide variety of pollutants. Nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide contribute to formation of fine particulate, which is associated with the most serious health problems. 13 Studies link particulate to tens of thousands of annual premature deaths in the United States. Like ozone it contributes to respiratory illness, but it also seems to play a [*29] role in triggering heart attacks among the elderly. The data suggest that fine particulate, which EPA did not regulate explicitly until recently, plays a major role in these problems. 16 Health researchers have

pollution problems causing current urban health problems also contribute to long lasting ecological problems
associated carbon monoxide with various types of neurological symptoms, such as visual impairment, reduced work capacity, reduced manual dexterity, poor learning ability, and difficulty in performing complex tasks. The same

. Ozone harms crops and trees. These harms affect ecosystems and

future generations. Similarly, particulate precursors, including nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, contribute to acid rain, which is not easily reversible. To address these problems, Agenda 21 recommends the adoption of national programs to reduce health risks from air pollution, including urban air pollution. These programs are to include development of "appropriate pollution control technology . . . for the introduction of environmentally sound production processes." It calls for this development "on the basis of risk assessment and epidemiological research." It also recommends development of "air pollution control capacities in large cities emphasizing enforcement programs using monitoring networks as appropriate." A second principle, the precautionary principle, provides support for the first. As stated in the Rio Declaration, the precautionary principle means that "lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation" when "there are threats of serious or irreversible damage." Thus, lack of complete certainty about the adverse environmental and human health effects of air pollutants does not, by itself, provide a

governments need to address air pollution on a precautionary basis to ensure that humans can live a healthy and productive life.
reason for tolerating them. Put differently,

Scenario 2 is water Continued contamination of our freshwater destroys any possibility for life on Earth. Robert B. Jackson and Steven W. Running Spring 2001 Water in a Changing World, Issues in Ecology, Ecological Society of America, http://www.biology.duke.edu/jackson/issues9.pdf Life on earth depends on the continuous flow of materials through the air, water, soil, and food webs of the biosphere. The movement of water through the hydrological cycle comprises the largest of these flows, delivering an estimated 110,000 cubic
kilometers (km3) of water to the land each year as snow and rainfall. Solar energy drives the hydrological cycle, vaporizing water from the surface of oceans, lakes, and rivers as well as from soils and plants (evapotranspiration). Water vapor rises into the atmosphere where it cools, condenses, and eventually rains down anew. This renewable freshwater supply sustains life on the land, in estuaries, and in the freshwater

ecosystems of the earth. Renewable fresh water provides many services essential to human health and well being, including water for drinking, industrial production, and irrigation, and the production of fish, waterfowl, and shellfish. Fresh water also provides
many benefits while it remains in its channels (nonextractive or instream benefits), including flood control, transportation, recreation, waste processing, hydroelectric power, and habitat for aquatic plants and animals. Some benefits, such as irrigation and hydroelectric power, can be achieved only by damming, diverting, or creating other major changes to natural water flows. Such changes often diminish or preclude other instream benefits of fresh water, such as providing habitat for aquatic life or maintaining suitable water quality for human use

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Scenario 3 is the biodiversity Environmental collapse causes extinction David N. Diner (Judge Advocate Generals Corps of US Army) 1994 Military Law Review, Lexis *This card has been gender modified* By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined effects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss. And that outweighs everything Richard Tobin, The expendable Future, 1990 p. 22 Norman Meyers observes, no other form of environmental degradation is anywhere so significant as the fallout of species. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is less modest in assessing the relative consequences of human caused extinctions. To Wilson, the worst thing that will happen to earth is not economic collapse, the depletion of energy supplies, or even nuclear war. As frightful as these events might be, Wilson reasons that they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoingthat will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by destruction of natural habitats. And we must act now their resiliency arguments are wrong, the environment cant take much more degradation Knight 10 .................(Matthew, Cites the GBO and CBD: The GBO-3 is a landmark study in what is the U.N.'s International Year of Biodiversity and will play a key role in guiding the negotiations between world governments at the U.N. Biodiversity Summit in Nagoya, Japan in October 2010. The CBD -- an international treaty designed to sustain diversity of life on Earth -- was set up at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, May 10, U.N. report: Eco-systems at 'tipping point', http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/10/biodiversity.loss.report/index.html? eref=igoogle_cnn) The world's eco-systems are at risk of "rapid degradation and collapse" according to a new United Nations report. The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) published by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) warns that unless "swift, radical and creative action" is taken "massive further loss is increasingly likely." Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the CBD said in a statement: "The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history." The U.N. warns several eco-systems including the Amazon rainforest, freshwater lakes and rivers and coral reefs are approaching a "tipping point" which, if reached, may see them never recover. The report says that no government has completely met biodiversity targets that were first set out in 2002 -- the year of the first GBO report. Executive Director of the U.N. Environmental Program Achim Steiner said there were key economic reasons why governments had failed in this task. "Many economies remain
blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning eco-systems," Steiner said in a statement. Although many countries are beginning to factor in "natural capital," Steiner said that this needs "rapid and sustained scaling-up." Despite increases in the size of protected land and coastal areas, biodiversity trends reported in the GBO-3 are almost entirely negative. Vertebrate species fell by nearly

one third

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between 1970 and 2006, natural habitats are in decline, genetic diversity of crops is falling and sixty breeds of livestock have become extinct since 2000. Nick Nuttall, a U.N. Environmental Program spokesman, said the cost of eco-systems degradation is huge. "In terms of land-use change, it's thought that the annual financial loss of services eco-systems provide -- water, storing carbon and soil stabilization -- is about &euro50 billion ($64 billion) a year," Nuttall told CNN. "If this continues we may well see by 2050 a cumulative loss of what you might call land-based natural capital of around &euro95 trillion ($121 trillion)," he said. Fossil fuel use is the biggest internal link to warming, and its not anthropogenic Vandenbergh and Steinemann 2007 (Michael P., Anne C., Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Regulatory Program at Vanderbilt University Law School, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Public Affairs at the University of Washington, New York University Law Review, December, p. 1680-1) Although much has been made of the state of the scientific debate regarding climate change, a recent assessment of relevant scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals between 1993 and 2003 concluded that none disagreed with the statement that the "earth's climate is being affected by human activities." n Furthermore, even the Bush Administration, which has declined to adopt mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions and has opposed state regulation of such emissions, has accepted the conclusions of the IPCC report. n In addition, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded in 2006 not only that the earth is warming but that human emissions of greenhouse gases are driving the warming. Warming causes extinction Tickell 8 (8/11/08, Oliver Tickell Climate Researcher, The Guardian, On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/climatechange) to Defra. But the We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser

idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction. The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die. Watson's call was supported by the government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, who warned that "if we get to a four-degree rise it is quite possible that we would begin to see a runaway increase". This is a remarkable understatement. The climate system is already
catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the permafrost is already under way. To

experiencing significant feedbacks, notably the summer melting of the Arctic sea ice. The more the ice melts, the more sunshine is absorbed by the sea, and the more the Arctic warms. And as the Arctic warms, the release of billions of tonnes of methane a greenhouse gas 70 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years captured under melting

see how far this process could go, look 55.5m years to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when a global temperature increase of 6C coincided with the release of about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, both as CO2 and as methane from bogs and seabed sediments. Lush subtropical forests grew in polar regions, and sea levels rose to 100m higher than today. It appears that an initial warming pulse triggered other warming processes. Many scientists warn that this historical event may be analogous to the present: the warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth.

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And, extinctions inevitable from climate, asteroids, and supernovas --- only Helium-3 solves Walker 2k2 (Bill, The Case Against Human Extinction, Bill Walker is a Research Associate at the UT Southwestern Medical Center, Free Republic, 7-31, http://www.freerepub...ws/725634/posts) The human species is not the source of ecological Original Sin. For any real "deep ecology" theory, the long-term survival of life requires an intelligent species to develop the necessary technologies. Contrary to myth, humans have benefited the ecosystem; already we may well have prevented the Final Ice Age. First of all, a reality check. All species up to this point have killed off other species. Nature (or the gods, if you prefer) gave them no choice, because they were all playing a zero-sum game. All life on Earth depended on two energy sources: the hydrogen fusion in the sun that powers photosynthesis in plants, and the radioactive decay energy that powers chemosynthetic bacteria in the deep-sea volcanic vents. All life is nuclear powered, but until recently no life form was making any new energy. From humble fern to mighty Tyrannosaurus, every life form had to displace another to take a share of the fixed amount of available energy. Winners lived, losers died. Reality check two: most everything is dead. The Solar System is not full of planets covered by sunlit glades and happy bunnies. The majority of the Sun's fusion energy that misses the
Earth heads out into dead vacuum; a little bounces off dead asteroids, the dead acid clouds of Venus and the frozen dead wastes of Mars. You can't blame this on Homo sapiens or any other species. Entropy kills. Asteroids

1AC Coal Advantage [6/7]

blast planets, supernovas irradiate systems light years away, planetary climates freeze and fry. We have only our intelligence to fight this ultimate enemy. The survival of other Earth species depends on how well we use the intelligence that grew out of our fight with other species over energy.
Entropy is the ultimate source of ecological evil.

Our Cro-Magnon ancestors played Nature's zero-sum gladiator game well. The woolly mammoth, the Maltese elephant, the North American ground sloth, and the carnivores that depended on them disappeared as humans took their energy. The process continued into historical times with the Dodo and the Moa, and continues today in the oceans as hunting humans with no concept of property rights race each other to the last fish. Once the convenient big game animals were gone, the descendants of the Cro-Magnons developed farming to take even more energy out of the ecosystem. Farmers take ALL the energy for themselves through their crops and herd animals. The early farming civilizations drove more species to extinction. As civilization developed in complexity, it demanded more and more energy. This energy came from the ecosystem in the form of firewood and the labor of agriculture-fed work animals. Just like flowering plants or dinosaurs, humans continued to displace earlier species and take their energy. But then, for the first time in two billion years, a new thing happened. Humans started to get energy from coal, oil, and natural gas. Energy that didn't come out of another currently living being (some of the gas was never in a living being). Some of this energy was converted to food energy; energy in nitrogen bonds in fertilizers, energy for tractors instead of draft animals and slaves. There could now be more humans without killing off other organisms to make room. In the 20th century United States, farms actually shrank and forests grew back.

The new human powers also defended Earth against the Cold Death that killed Mars.

In the time of the dinosaurs, perhaps the peak of biodiversity and ecological exuberance, there was a lot of carbon. The atmosphere was around 1% carbon dioxide. But as the radioactive energy that powers volcanoes runs down, carbon keeps getting trapped in dead organisms and covered by sediments, leaving the biosphere. During the last Ice Age the CO2 level fell below .02%. This is a serious problem for an ecosystem based on photosynthetic plants. Someone (perhaps his third grade teacher) should have told Al Gore; when the CO2 concentration is too low everything photosynthetic dies. In the 1800s, CO2 levels were measured at .028%. Human use of fossil fuels has raised that to .037%; still far below optimum for plant growth, but better. The slight increase in greenhouse effect also gives the Earth a little more protection against ending up like Mars, with our CO2 lying frozen on the ground. (It is, however, a VERY slight increase in greenhouse effect. Most of Earth's greenhouse effect comes from atmospheric water.) The dinosaur eras were 10 degrees warmer than today, and the ecosystem liked that just fine. It's been less than 15,000 years since the last Ice Age. Anyone concerned about the ecology as a whole must worry far more about Ice Age than about greenhouse effect. Of course at some point there will be enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to ensure against an asteroid hit or episode of volcano activity darkening the skies and triggering the next Ice Age.

Fossil fuels can't be used forever, and they don't produce enough energy for a real technical civilization anyway. Burning coal may be good for the ecosystem as a whole, but it isn't good for individual humans. Just the radioactive pollution from coal burning is hundreds of times worse per watt than from even the current crop of early fission reactors. This radioactive pollution is miniscule compared to the natural background, but the chemical pollution from coal could be significant for long-lived, cancer-prone species like humans. Fortunately humans learned to tap nuclear energy directly. All life is nuclear-powered, but now humans can get their nuclear fuel from places denied to other life forms.
Now, if they choose, humans can leave most of the solar energy that reached the Earth's surface for the use of other species. Life is no longer a zero-sum game. There is room for wolves, deer.... and woolly mammoths, with the new life-giving powers of biotechnology. Humans can not only live without exterminating, they can resurrect the long dead. Humans can even carry life to places that it has never been. Bacteria have probably journeyed between planets as well, but

nuclear-powered humans can actually change the dead planets to make

them support life.

Or, if they choose, humans can continue the old genocidal ways. Unfortunately there are humans, like the Unabomber and Al Gore, that don't want to leave Earth's meager solar power for our cousin species. They want to darken the world with solar collectors and leave nothing alive underneath. Now, this could be done, given some optimistic engineering assumptions and a total disregard for environmental cost. Department of Energy report #:DOE/EIA-0484(2002) from March 26, 2002 estimates that the total human energy use in 2005 will be 439 quadrillion BTU, or 129 trillion kilowatt-hours. Solar energy reaches the Earth's orbit at the intensity of about 1.4 kilowatts per square meter. However, the Earth's surface receives only part of this due to clouds, dust, night, etc. So even a reasonable good location for solar power only gets an average of 200 watts per square meter. Assuming an unrealistically good solar-cell conversion efficiency of 20% cuts this to 40 watts per square meter. This energy has to be stored for use at night; an unrealistically good storage efficiency of 80% and now we're down to 32 watts per square meter. Ignoring transmission losses completely (this energy does have to get to Seattle and Sweden somehow), we find that we can produce this much energy while smothering all the life on only 176, 583 square miles. Of course the energy-storage system will cover up yet more area (especially considering that the only practical utility-size storage systems are hydroelectric dams.) So a static, impoverished, (this energy isn't going to be cheap) lower-technology human civilization could be powered at current levels by destroying all life in an area about the size of

any civilization that turns inward and away from space is doomed to be blasted one of the many Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids anyway.
Texas. If humans do this, then they do deserve to be extinct... and they will be, because

But, if I were arguing before a jury of other species, I would ask them to withhold their judgment. It is likely that a few more of these destructive solar power plants will be built. But economic reality will check their spread. Eventually, the only solar power plants will be over other human structures, not over forest. In general, humans who use energy from outside the ecosystem will do better than those who try to live

parasitically on the ecosystem. Within a few centuries almost all the original energy in Earth's biosphere will be returned to the use of other species because it will be cheaper to use other, more concentrated sources. Nuclear fusion from helium-3 extracted from the gas giants (or

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will power a human civilization that protects the Earth's ecosystem from Ice Age and brings new ecosystems into being on other planets.
some other, more advanced nuclear energy source)

Additionally, Conventional energy sources results in thousands of systemic deaths outweighs the one-shot risk of their disad Dr. Sovacool, 8 Senior Research Fellow for the Network for New Energy Choices in New York and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Virginia
Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, VA (Benjamin K., also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, The Costs of Major Energy Accidents, 1907 to 2007, 4-29-2008, www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2008/04/The-Costs-of-Major-Energy-Accidents-1907-to-2007)

coal, oil, gas, and hydroelectric power generators-- may kill more people than you think. From 1907 to 2007, a new study finds that 279 major energy accidents in the coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear sectors have been responsible for $41 billion in damages and 182,156 deaths. The claim that
Conventional energy technologies-- namely nuclear,

humans are imperfect needs no further citation. It is unsurprising, then, that major energy accidents occur. But what counts as an energy accident, especially a major one? The study attempted to answer this question by searching historical archives, newspaper and magazine articles, and press wire reports from 1907 to 2007. The words energy, electricity, oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewable, and hydroelectric were searched in the same sentence as the words accident, disaster, incident, failure, meltdown, explosion, spill, and leak. The study then narrowed results according to five criteria: The accident must have involved an energy system at the production/generation, transmission, and distribution phase. This means it must have occurred at an oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewable, or hydroelectric plant, its associated infrastructure, or within its fuel cycle (mine, refinery, pipeline, enrichment facility, etc.); It must have resulted in at least one death or property damage above $50,000 (in constant dollars that has not been normalized for growth in capital stock); It had to be unintentional and in the civilian sector, meaning that military accidents and events during war and conflict are not covered, nor are intentional attacks. The study only counted documented cases of accident and failure; It had to occur between August, 1907 and August, 2007; It had to be verified by a published source; The study adjusted all damagesincluding destruction of property, emergency response, environmental remediation, evacuation, lost product, fines, and court claimsto 2006 U.S. dollars using the Statistical Abstracts of the United States. Unsurprisingly, the data concerning major energy accidents is inhomogeneous. While responsible for less than 1 percent of total energy accidents, hydroelectric facilities claimed 94 percent of reported fatalities. Looking at the gathered data, the total results on fatalities are highly dominated one accident in which the Shimantan Dam failed in 1975 and 171,000 people perished. Only three of the listed 279 accidents resulted in more than 1,000 deaths, and each of these varied in almost every aspect. One involved the structural failure of a dam more than 30 years ago in China; one involved a nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine two decades ago; and one involved the rupture of a petroleum pipeline in Nigeria around ten years ago. The study found that only a small amount of accidents caused property damages greater than $1 billion, with most accidents below the $100 million mark. The second largest source of fatalities, nuclear reactors, is also the second most capital intense, supporting the notion that the larger a facility the more grave (albeit rare) the consequences of its failure. The inverse seems true for oil, natural gas, and coal systems: they fail far more frequently, but have comparatively fewer deaths and damage per each instance of failure. While hydroelectric plants were responsible for the most fatalities, nuclear plants rank first in terms of their economic cost, accounting for 41 percent of all property damage. Oil and hydroelectric come next at around 25 percent each, followed by natural gas at 9 percent and coal at 2 percent. By energy source, the most frequent energy system to fail is natural gas, followed by oil, nuclear, coal, and then hydroelectric. Ninety-one accidents occurred at natural gas facilities, accounting for

energy accidents exact a significant toll on human health and welfare, the natural environment, and society. Such accidents are now part
33 percent of the total; oil, 71 accidents at 25 percent; nuclear, 63 accidents at 23 percent; coal, 51 accidents at 18 percent; hydroelectric, 3 accidents at 1 percent. Therefore,

of our daily routines, a somewhat intractable feature of our energy-intensive lifestyles. They are an often-ignored negative externality associated with energy conversion and use. This conclusion may seem quite banal to some, given how fully integrated energy technologies are into modern society. Yet

energy systems continue to fail despite drastic improvements in design, construction, operation, and maintenance, as well as the best of intentions among policymakers and operators. Perhaps one striking difference between energy accidents and other normal risks facing society concerns the involuntary aspects of energy accidents. Alcoholics, rock climbers, construction workers, soldiers, and gigolos all take a somewhat active
and voluntary role in their risky behavior. Those suffering from nuclear meltdowns, exploding gas clouds, and petroleum-contaminated water do not.

The death and destruction associated with large-scale energy technologies is significant. Tallied as a whole, the 182,156 energy-related deaths total more than twice the number that died in the Vietnam War. Indeed, if averaged out for each year, energy technologies have been responsible for the equivalent of a September 11, 2001 happening every 1.65 years, year after year. The fact that such deaths are systemic means that they can be predicted to occur, with certainty, well into the future. Therein also lies hope, for recurring events can be anticipated and responded to. Their high probability means that they can be more easily predicted, planned for, and minimized than unforeseen and catastrophic events.

And now is key, Russia, China and India are already on the space race Williams, 2007 (Mark, August 23, Mining the Moon Technology Review is an independent science
magazine owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19296/?a=f )//Abraha

At the 21st century's start, few would have predicted that by 2007, a second race for the moon would be under way. Yet the signs are that this is now the case. Furthermore, in today's moon race, unlike the one that took place between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s, a full roster of 21st-century global powers, including China and India, are competing. Even more surprising is that one reason for much of the

interest appears to be plans to mine helium-3--purportedly an ideal fuel for fusion reactors but almost unavailable on Earth--from the moon's surface. NASA's Vision for Space Exploration has U.S. astronauts scheduled to be back on the
moon in 2020 and permanently staffing a base there by 2024. While the U.S. space agency has neither announced nor denied any desire to mine helium-

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3, it has nevertheless placed advocates of mining He3 in influential positions. For its part, Russia

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claims that the aim of any lunar program of its own--for what it's worth, the rocket corporation Energia recently started blustering, Soviet-style, that it will build a permanent moon base by 2015-2020--will be extracting He3. The Chinese, too, apparently believe that helium-3 from the moon can enable fusion plants on Earth. This fall, the People's Republic expects to orbit a satellite around the moon and then land an unmanned vehicle there in 2011. Nor does India intend to be left out. (See "India's Space Ambitions Soar.") This past spring, its president, A.P.J. Kalam, and its prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made major speeches asserting that, besides constructing giant solar collectors in orbit and on the moon, the world's largest democracy likewise intends to mine He3 from the lunar surface. India's probe, Chandrayaan-1, will take off next year, and ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, is talking about sending Chandrayaan-2, a surface rover, in 2010 or 2011. Simultaneously, Japan and Germany are also making noises about launching their own moon missions at around that time, and talking up the possibility of mining He3 and bringing it back to fuel fusion-based nuclear
reactors on Earth.

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Cancelling moon missions has crushed space leadership
NFR 2k10 (Niagara Falls Review (Ontario), February 25, p. A4) HEADLINE: The United States is losing its way in space For the past 50 years, the space program has been a big part of American lives, providing prestige, pride, purpose, excitement and incredible additions to everyday lives from space spinoffs. Now all that is ending. Cancelling NASA's proposed revisit to the moon with its Constellation program, using the Ares-1 rocket and Orion spacecraft, has left NASA bereft, with no ambitious program and little on the horizon, except lost jobs and bittersweet memories.
NASA is a victim of the U.S.'s record $3.8-trillion budget and its massive $l. 6-trillion deficit. Earlier this month, the last series of the shuttle was launched to the International Space Station, orbiting some 320 kilometres above Earth. The Endeavour was launched at 4:14 a.m. -- the last night launch, to be followed by four more trips to the space station, ending in September. Then zap. Kaput. It's over. No moon exploration. No money. The plan is to trust future trips in space to the private sector, with commercial space contracts to carry cargo and astronauts aloft to the space station. Presumably it's to save money. But nothing much has been done. It hasn't yet sunk in to the American psyche yet that when future astronauts are shuttled to the space station, they will initially pay the Russians to ferry them back and forth. The Russian tortoise outlasted the American hare and won the race. America's near 50-year dominance of space exploration and research now seems over. U.S. President Barack Obama doesn't have an emotional tie to the U.S. space program, which one could argue has meant so much to Americans and the world of better living. When it was a two superpower race with the Russians, who were first to orbit the Earth and send a man into space (Yuri Gagarin, 1961), America rose to the challenge and performed near miracles. Apart from the knowledge gained, the pride felt, the expertise developed, spinoffs from space research and development today is scattered through daily life. The microchip is only a start in what's overlapped into everyday life. Things like the TV satellite dish originated with the space program. Other things, such as medical imaging, ear thermometers, smoke detectors, fail-safe flashlights, advanced plastics, fire-resistant suits for fire departments, protected lenses, cordless tools, computerized car designs, thermal gloves and boots, ski boots, improved protective helmets, joy stick computer games and invisible braces for teeth are a few of the off-shoots from the space program. What happens to the scientists and experts who called NASA home? On Florida's Space Coast where the Kennedy Space Centre is located, there's talk of 7,000 jobs at risk. Can the future commercial space transportation absorb them all? Of course not. A new rocket called Falcon 9 is in the process of being tested at Cape Canaveral by the commercial company, SpaceX, which will eventually take over from the shuttle. It has yet to put anything into orbit, but it is hoped that the commercial takeover will reduce costs by some 80% from previous shuttle costs. There is skepticism and heartache with NASA being ordered to end sending humans into space, but that's the way it is. If the commercial flights don't work out, or accidents happen, it will be President Obama who takes the heat. Again. Meanwhile, American astronauts now depend on Russians for space travel.

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Other countries will seize space
Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) News Release, Congressional Documents and Publications, February 25, 2010 Roughly 40 years later, President Barack Obama has proposed a NASA budget that would end our efforts to get back to the moon, cancel the replacement for the space shuttle, cripple our capabilities in space and hurt our national security. This "one small

budget step" would be a giant leap backward for American leadership in space and security. For years, we've known the space shuttle would be phased out. The replacement, which has already been through extensive research, development and testing, is the Ares rocket, part of the Constellation program. The Ares, named by Time magazine as the No. 1 invention of 2009, was successfully test-launched less than four months ago. NASA itself called it a "spectacular launch." Everything seemed on-course for America to retain a safe and reliable vehicle for space travel and maintain leadership in space -- until Obama released his proposed budget this month. The Obama budget would cancel the Constellation program, cancel the Ares I rocket for manned space travel, cancel the Ares V rocket for cargo and cancel the Orion manned space capsule. The only apparent replacement for all of this is some nebulous funding for grants to commercialize our space exploration with no tested or proven alternative. It would be one thing if gutting the space program was an attempt to save money. But it isn't. In fact, the Obama plan does not eliminate wasteful spending. It actually adds an additional $1.5 billion to the NASA budget, but spends it in the wrong places. The president's proposals for NASA will, however, destroy U.S. leadership in space exploration. Russia and China will control space. Instead of sending 40 or so American astronauts to space each year, we will end up sending four or five. And they will essentially be trying to hitch a ride on a Russian or Chinese rocket. The Obama plan will also destroy 20,000 private sector jobs, if not more. By my estimation, we stand to lose around 2,000 jobs right here in Utah -- a complete contradiction to an administration that say jobs are the priority. And these aren't minimum wage jobs. They are high-skilled jobs in science, math and engineering. This seems hypocritical from an administration that says it wants to encourage kids to take science, math and engineering classes.

Ceding leadership in space cedes global leadership

SpaceTalk Now, February 6, 2010, New Space Policy Cedes Moon To China, Space Station To Russia, And Liberty To The Ages Histories of nations tell us that an aggressive program to return Americans permanently to deep space must form an essential component of national policy. Americans would find it unacceptable, as well as devastating to liberty, if we abandon leadership in space to the Chinese, Europe, or any other nation or group of nations. Potentially equally devastating to billions of people would be loss of freedoms access to the energy resources of the Moon as fossil fuels diminish and populations and demand increase. In that harsh light of history, it is frightening to contemplate the long-term, totally adverse consequences to the standing of the United States in modern civilization if the current Administrations decision to abandon deep space holds. Even a commitment to maintain the International Space Station using commercial launch assets constitutes a dead-end for Americans in space. At some point, now set at the end of this decade, the $150 billion Station becomes a dead-end and would be abandoned to the Russians or just destroyed, ending Americas human space activities entirely.

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Additionally, advanced nuclear Helium 3 power solves energy security, tech leadership and growth Jack Fuller, former CEO at GE, 12/7/2010. Expanded Use of Nuclear Energy Will Advance U.S. Energy Security, Technology Leadership and Exports, http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101207006474/en/Expanded-Nuclear-Energy-Advance-U.S.Energy-Security America and the world can benefit from advanced U.S. nuclear power technology but only if government levels the playing field for U.S. companies. A nuclear energy policy partnership, led by Sens. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Tom Carper, D-Del., will help drive policy decisions that will launch renewed expansion of nuclear power in the United States and, if done right, the reemergence of America as a nuclear energy technology export powerhouse. The economic and national security benefits of a robust domestic civilian nuclear power industry cannot be overstated. In order for the United States to lead the conversation on non-proliferation, it is critical that the domestic nuclear industry is strong and that it is selling into the countries that are moving forward with new plants. It behooves the U.S. government to adopt policies that strengthen the ability of U.S. companies to compete internationallyand thereby contribute to economic growth and job creation here at home.
The partnership, which includes experts from Wall Street, also can potentially help create a new financing model to support reactor construction. The cost of electricity from nuclear energy is among the lowest from any fuel source, but the initial capital investments required are daunting. Loan guarantees and other tools that lower the financial barriers to plant construction are investments in the future that will yield dividends for decades to come in the form of economical and reliable low-carbon energy for Americas homes and factories. In the global race for energy

technology leadership, America is still a leading innovator of nuclear energy technology, but with other nations modernizing their power infrastructure at a more rapid pace, we need to quicken ours to continue a leadership role. Lets take stock as we have many inherent advantages. U.S. prowess in nuclear engineering, technology development
and plant management is still the best in the world. The newly elected 112th Congress has a golden opportunity to set America on a new course. With the right policies in place, America can capitalize on her advantages, build new power plants here in the United Statesthe surest route to greater U.S. energy securityand start exporting high value-added energy technology to the rest of the world. This weeks summit will begin charting a roadmap for renewal in the U.S. power sector. Thats something policy makers in both parties can agree on.

The impact is global war and extinction

Ulrich Becker et al, professor of physics at MIT, 2008. MIT Faculty Newsletter, Vol. XXI No. 2, http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/212/milner.html The reliable and affordable availability of energy is the lifeblood of human civilization in the twenty-first century. It is essential to the quality and security of everyday life of the citizens in the United States. For example, the sudden loss of electrical power invariably reduces living conditions of the most technologically advanced society to a primitive state. The protracted loss of electric power would lead to chaos in the United States, with resultant instability worldwide. Recently, it has become clear that the future energy security of the United States is at serious risk from two different sources. Most of the energy used in buildings, industry, and transportation arises from the chemical burning of fossil fuels. The waste produced in the burning process includes greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane) which for the last 200 years have
accumulated in the Earths atmosphere. The present concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earths atmosphere is estimated as 385 ppm, which substantially exceeds the estimated values over the last 500,000 years. Basic scientific arguments tell us that the increased carbon dioxide levels should result in heating of the Earths surface. Measurements indicate that the average temperature at the Earths surface has

significantly risen over the last 100 years. If humanity wishes to preserve the planet on which human civilization developed, significant changes in the way we produce energy are urgently required. This is a global security challenge where the U.S. must play a leadership role. Secondly, the energy supply of the United States relies to a great degree on the reliable and affordable availability of oil. For example, transportation (road, rail, sea, air)

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depends almost completely on oil. The worlds supply of oil is limited and it is located in many regions of the world which are politically unstable and unfriendly to the United States. In addition to this, it is possible that the total world oil supply
may have already peaked. In the last two decades, the U.S. has been involved in two wars in the Middle East where the worlds major source of oil is located. Until the U.S. dependence on foreign oil is significantly reduced, there is every expectation that increasing amounts of precious

U.S. blood and treasure will have to be expended in widening conflicts in the cause of energy security.

It is widely accepted that the U.S. must find a way to wean itself from its addiction to oil. In ground transportation, which is a major oil consumer, significant progress is being made with batteries and fuel cells to replace gasoline with electricity, which can be generated in alternative ways. Strongly motivated by these two considerations, the development of new technologies to increase energy efficiency and to produce reliable

and affordable energy with minimal greenhouse gas emission to the Earths atmosphere is a high priority in the U.S. and in many other countries. It is essential that these efforts be encouraged and enhanced. However, the probability of success and the timescale for realization of these technologies is highly uncertain. The economic
stability and national security of the United States over the coming decades cannot be secured by assuming optimistically that these new technologies will succeed in time to avoid a major discontinuity in the supply of oil and gas from foreign and potentially hostile sources. Further, it is not acceptable, nor is it possible, that the U.S. continues to burn fossil fuels indefinitely at present levels, thereby putting in clear jeopardy the planet on which we have evolved. Nuclear Power is Carbon-free, Technologically Feasible, Scalable, and Economical

Energy leadership is the key internal link to primacy without it great power war is inevitable
Louis Klarevas, Professor, Center for Global Affairs, New York University, 2009. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/louis-klarevas/securing-american-primacy_b_393223.html
As national leaders from around the world are gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the time is ripe to re-assess America's current energy policies - but within the larger framework of how a new approach on the environment will stave off global warming and shore up American primacy.

By not addressing climate change more aggressively and creatively, the United States is squandering an opportunity to secure its global primacy for the next few generations to come. To do this, though, the U.S. must rely on innovation to help the world escape the coming environmental meltdown. Developing the key technologies that will save the planet from global warming will allow the U.S. to outmaneuver potential great power rivals seeking to replace it as the international system's hegemon. But the greening of American strategy
must occur soon. The U.S., however, seems to be stuck in time, unable to move beyond oil-centric geo-politics in any meaningful way. Often, the gridlock is portrayed as a partisan difference, with Republicans resisting action and Democrats pleading for action. This, though, is an unfair characterization as there are numerous proactive Republicans and quite a few reticent Democrats. The real divide is instead one between realists and liberals. Students of realpolitik, which still heavily guides American foreign policy, largely discount environmental issues as they are not seen as advancing national interests in a way that generates relative power advantages vis--vis the other major powers in the system: Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Union. Liberals, on the other hand, have recognized that global warming might very well become the greatest challenge ever faced by mankind. As such, their thinking often eschews narrowly defined national interests for the greater global good. This, though, ruffles elected officials whose sworn obligation is, above all, to protect and promote American national interests. What both sides need to understand is that by becoming a lean, mean, green fighting machine, the U.S. can actually bring together liberals and realists to advance a collective interest which benefits every nation, while at the same time, securing America's global primacy well into the future. To do so,

the U.S. must re-invent itself as

not just your traditional hegemon, but as history's first ever green hegemon.

Hegemons are countries that dominate the international system - bailing out other countries in times of global crisis, establishing and maintaining the most important international institutions, and covering the costs that result from free-riding and cheating global obligations. Since 1945, that role has been the purview of the United States. Immediately after World War II, Europe and Asia laid in ruin, the global economy required resuscitation, the countries of the free world needed security guarantees, and the entire system longed for a multilateral forum where global concerns could be addressed. The U.S., emerging the least scathed by the systemic crisis of fascism's rise, stepped up to the challenge and established the postwar (and current) liberal order. But don't let the world "liberal" fool you. While many nations benefited from America's new-found hegemony, the U.S. was driven largely by "realist" selfish national interests. The liberal order first and foremost benefited the U.S. With the U.S. becoming bogged down in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, running a record national debt, and failing to shore up the dollar, the future of American hegemony now seems to be facing a serious contest: potential rivals - acting like sharks smelling blood in the water - wish to challenge the U.S. on a variety of fronts. This has led numerous commentators to forecast the U.S.'s imminent fall from grace. Not all hope is lost however. With the impending systemic crisis of global warming on the horizon, the U.S. again finds itself in a position to address

the competition for oil is fueling animosities between the major powers. The geopolitics of oil has already emboldened Russia in its 'near abroad' and China in far-off places like Africa and Latin America. As oil is a limited natural resource, a nasty zero-sum contest could be looming on the horizon for the U.S. and its major power rivals - a contest which threatens American primacy and global stability.
a transnational problem in a way that will benefit both the international community collectively and the U.S. selfishly. The current problem is two-fold. First,

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And US primacy key to de-escalate conflict and prevent great power war solves every internal link to war Bradley A. Thayer, November/December, 2006 In Defense of Primacy, NATIONAL INTEREST Issue 86 THROUGHOUT HISTORY, peace and stability have been great benefits of an era where there was a dominant power--Rome, Britain or the United States today. Scholars and statesmen have long recognized the irenic effect of power on the anarchic world of international politics. Everything we think of when we consider the current international order--free trade, a robust monetary regime, increasing respect for human rights, growing democratization--is directly linked to U.S. power. Retrenchment proponents seem to think that the current system can be maintained without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they are dead wrong and need to be reminded of one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things happen when international orders collapse. The Dark Ages followed Rome's collapse. Hitler succeeded the order established at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the liberal order created by the United States will end just as assuredly. As
country and western great Ral Donner sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)." Consequently, it is important to note what those good things are. In addition to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies, American primacy within the international system causes many positive outcomes for Washington and the world. The first has been a more peaceful world. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership reduced friction

American primacy helps keep a number of complicated relationships aligned--between Greece and Turkey, Israel and Egypt, South Korea and Japan, India and Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia. This is not to say it fulfills Woodrow Wilson's vision of ending all war. Wars still occur where Washington's interests are not seriously threatened, such as in Darfur, but a Pax Americana does reduce war's likelihood, particularly war's worst form: great power wars. Second, American power gives the United States the ability to spread democracy and
among many states that were historical antagonists, most notably France and West Germany. Today,

other elements of its ideology of liberalism: Doing so is a source of much good for the countries concerned as well as the United States because, as John Owen noted on these pages in the Spring 2006 issue, liberal democracies are more likely to align with the United States and be sympathetic to the American worldview.( n3) So, spreading democracy helps maintain U.S. primacy. In addition, once states are governed democratically, the likelihood of any type of

conflict is significantly reduced. This is not because democracies do not have clashing interests. Indeed they do. Rather, it is because they are more open, more transparent and more likely to want to resolve things amicably in concurrence with U.S. leadership. And so, in general, democratic states are good for their citizens as well as for advancing the interests of the United States. Critics have faulted the Bush Administration for attempting to spread
democracy in the Middle East, labeling such aft effort a modern form of tilting at windmills. It is the obligation of Bush's critics to explain why :democracy is good enough for Western states but not for the rest, and, one gathers from the argument, should not even be attempted. Of course, whether democracy in the Middle East will have a peaceful or stabilizing influence on America's interests in the short run is open to question. Perhaps democratic Arab states would be more opposed to Israel, but nonetheless, their people would be better off. The United States has brought democracy to Afghanistan, where 8.5 million Afghans, 40 percent of them women, voted in a critical October 2004 election, even though remnant Taliban forces threatened them. The first free elections were held in Iraq in January 2005. It was the military power of the United States that put Iraq on the path to democracy. Washington fostered democratic governments in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Caucasus. Now even the Middle East is increasingly democratic. They may not yet look like Western-style democracies,

By all accounts, the march of democracy has been impressive. Third, along with the growth in the number of democratic states around the world has been the growth of the global economy. With its allies, the United States has labored to create an economically liberal worldwide network characterized by free trade and commerce, respect for international property rights, and mobility of capital and labor markets. The economic stability and prosperity that stems from this economic order is a global public good from which all states benefit, particularly the poorest states in the Third World. The
but democratic progress has been made in Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt. United States created this network not out of altruism but for the benefit and the economic well-being of America. This economic order forces American industries to be competitive, maximizes efficiencies and growth, and

Economic spin-offs foster the development of military technology, helping to ensure military prowess. Perhaps the greatest testament to the benefits of the economic network comes from Deepak Lal, a former Indian foreign service
benefits defense as well because the size of the economy makes the defense burden manageable. diplomat and researcher at the World Bank, who started his career confident in the socialist ideology of post-independence India. Abandoning the positions of his youth, Lal now recognizes that the only way to bring relief to desperately poor countries of the Third World is through the adoption of free market economic policies and globalization, which are facilitated through American primacy.( n4) As a witness to the failed alternative economic systems, Lal is one of the strongest academic proponents of American primacy due to the economic prosperity it provides. Fourth and finally, the United States, in seeking primacy, has been willing to use its power not only

The United States is the earth's leading source of positive externalities for the world. The U.S. military has participated in over fifty operations since the end of the Cold War--and most of those missions have been humanitarian in nature. Indeed, the U.S. military is the earth's "911 force"--it serves, de facto, as the world's police, the global paramedic and the planet's fire department. Whenever there is a natural disaster, earthquake, flood, drought, volcanic eruption, typhoon or tsunami, the United States assists the countries in need. On the day after Christmas in 2004, a
to advance its interests but to promote the welfare of people all over the globe.

tremendous earthquake and tsunami occurred in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra, killing some 300,000 people. The United States was the first to respond with aid. Washington followed up with a large contribution of aid and deployed the U.S. military to South and Southeast Asia for many months to help with the aftermath of the disaster. About 20,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines responded by providing water, food, medical aid, disease treatment and prevention as well as forensic assistance to help identify the bodies of those killed. Only the U.S. military could have accomplished this Herculean effort. No other force possesses the

communications capabilities or global logistical reach of the U.S. military. In fact, UN

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peacekeeping operations depend on the United States to supply UN forces. American

generosity has done more to help the United States fight the War on Terror than almost any other measure. Before the tsunami, 80 percent of Indonesian public opinion was opposed to the United States; after it, 80
percent had a favorable opinion of America. Two years after the disaster, and in poll after poll, Indonesians still have overwhelmingly positive views of the United States. In October 2005, an enormous earthquake struck Kashmir, killing about 74 000 people and leaving three million homeless. The U.S. military responded immediately, diverting helicopters fighting the War on Terror in nearby Afghanistan to bring relief as soon as possible To help those in need, the United States also provided financial aid to Pakistan; and, as one might expect from those witnessing the munificence of the United States, it left a lasting impression about America. For the first time since 9/11, polls of Pakistani opinion have found that more people are favorable toward the United States than unfavorable, while support for Al-Qaeda dropped to its lowest level. Whether in Indonesia or Kashmir, the money was well-spent because it helped people in the wake of disasters, but it also had a real impact on the War on Terror. When people in the Muslim world witness the U.S. military conducting a humanitarian mission,

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As the War on Terror is a war of ideas and opinion as much as military action, for the United States humanitarian missions are the equivalent of a blitzkrieg.
there is a clearly positive impact on Muslim opinion of the United States.

None of their Nuclear power bad turns apply Helium 3 is uniquely different DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha He-3 is a heavy isotope of noble gas helium and is present everywhere in the universe in varying amounts. The Earths supply of He-3 is negligible, but the mineral was found in abundant quantities in soil samples taken from the lunar regolith in 1972 in the exploratory mission, Apollo 17, led by NASA. Since then, there has been considerable interest among physicists, geologists, social scientists and economists in extracting and using the He-3 available in the Moon. The major arguments for the exploration of He-3 are as follows: firstly, it has a high energy density when combined with deuterium in a fusion reaction, hence only small amounts of He-3 are required to supply the same amount of energy as large volumes of oil. Secondly, the low radioactive waste emission and the safety of a He-3 fusion reaction are very attractive attributes when compared to the high safety risks inherent in fission reactors used in nuclear power plants today. Furthermore, He-3 provides us with the opportunity of exploring and settling a permanent base on the Moon, which would give us a solid base for further space exploration. Even if they did, other countries make the impact inevitable Steve Everly, Kansas City Star, 3/20/2011. http://www.kansascity.com/2011/03/19/2739268/new-designsfor-nuclear-power.html Today only one nuclear plant is being built in the country by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Four to six more might be built over the next decade. China, which heavily subsidizes its nuclear plants, is building 27. That means the United States cant avoid the nuclear question even if growth in nuclear energy remains sluggish here. Well still be vulnerable to nuclear accidents elsewhere.

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***2AC Add ons***

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He3 key to Cryogenics Shea and Morgan 2k10 (Dana A., Daniel, December 22, Specialist in Science and Technology Policy, CRS Report for Congress-The Helium-3 Shortage: Supply, Demand, and Options for Congress) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41419.pdf )//Abraha Finally, helium-3 has unique cryogenic properties. Low-temperature physicists use a mixture of helium-3 and helium-4 to achieve temperatures just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (millikelvins). At temperatures below 2.5 millikelvin, helium-3 becomes a superfluid. Cryogenics key to immortality and preventing extinction
Perry 1989 (Further Thoughts On The Probability That Cryonics Will Succeed Mike May, has a Ph.D. in computer science, specializing in mathematical methods, http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/WillCryonicsWork.html FYI**Suspended animation is the slowing of life processes by external means without termination. Breathing, heartbeat, and other involuntary functions may still occur, but they can only be detected by artificial means**)//Abraha
Is there any reasonable ground for thinking the social outlook might improve according to one or the other of the above scenarios? I believe there is. The most significant event in this process, I think, would be the development of reversible suspended animation of brains. This now

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possible through vitrification. If successful, it would demonstrate, once and for all, that a human life can be held in suspension indefinitely. Once that point became incontestable, it could be used with devastating force against those who would oppose cryonics or the goal it aims for, the elimination of biological death. Burial and cremation, to survive as
seems choices, would have to be treated as acceptable forms of euthanasia. The arguments for why such human sacrifice would be better than cryonic preservation could be attacked from many directions. Even cryonics patients frozen before the advent of vitrification would benefit. If some patients could not be thawed without committing murder, it would become untenable to thaw any patients without first ascertaining, beyond a reasonable doubt, that there was no chance of ever bringing them back. Cryonicists could easily enforce their own standards in deciding whether there was "reasonable doubt."It is possible that a catastrophic social upheaval would follow if society could no longer deny that the conquest of death was possible. We, as cryonicists, need to be prepared for the day when others will need a new set of values for a future different from what they were conditioned for. Such values would recognize that it is the destiny of the human race to throw off the yoke of mortality, and that the

preservation and protection of a human life must take precedence over other endeavors that would interfere with or prevent it. What we must seek then is a philosophical transformation, to alter the ages-old deathist orientation to an outlook that recognizes that current limitations on lifespan are cruel and unnecessary, and that a more open-ended existence will be a more rewarding one.

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failure to begin transitioning away from coal guarantees global economic collapse Richard Heinberg, Core Faculty member of New College of California and a Fellow of the Post Carbon
Institute, widely regarded as one of the world's foremost Peak Oil educators. Peak coal: sooner than you think, Energy Bulletin, May 21 2007 http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29919
Evidence that coal resource limits may constrain CO2 emissions would seem to be good news for climate protection advocates.
However, the latter may be wary that industry-led opponents of emissions-reduction policies will seize on this new data to argue that governments needn't do anything about emissions, since rates of coal extraction will decline in any case. Nevertheless it makes more sense for climate activists to embrace the news and use it to advantage, rather than to deny or marginalise it. They can argue that, even if society finds steep voluntary cuts in the use of coal to be economically onerous, there is really no alternative: declines in production will happen anyway, so it is better to cut consumption proactively than wait and be faced with shortages and price volatility later. The findings of the 2005 USDoE-funded Hirsch report (PDF 1.17MB) (Peak of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management) regarding society's vulnerability to peak oil apply also to

peak coal: time will be needed in order for society to adapt proactively to a resource-constrained environment. A failure to begin now to reduce reliance on coal will mean much greater economic hardship when the peak arrives. The new information about coal tells us that even if the economic price for carbon reduction is high, we have no choice but to proceed. There is no "business-as-usual" option, even ignoring environmental impacts, given the resource constraints. Nations that are currently dependent on coal - China and the US especially - would be wise to begin reducing consumption now, not only in the interests of climate protection, but also to reduce societal vulnerability arising from dependence on a resource that will soon become more scarce and expensive. The reports' findings are not uniformly encouraging for climate matters, though. The IFE authors suggest that price increases for coal may discourage deployment of technologies to capture and bury carbon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: in poorer countries, "producing cheap and affordable electricity is more important than producing environmentally friendly electricity". A wake-up call on coal Taken together, the
EWG and IFE reports deliver a shocking message. For a world already concerned about future oil supplies, uncertainties about coal undercut one of the primary strategies - turning supposedly abundant coal into a liquid fuel - that is being touted for maintaining global transport networks. The sustainability of China's

economic growth, which has largely been based on a rapid surge in coal consumption, is thrown into question. And the ability of the US to maintain its coal-powered electricity grids in coming decades is also cast into doubt. In summary, we now have two authoritative studies reaching largely consistent conclusions with devastating implications for the global economy. Surely these studies deserve follow-up reviews of the data by the International Energy Agency. If the EWG and IFE conclusions hold, the world will need to respond quickly with an enormous shift in the directions of energy conservation and development of renewable sources of electricity. Climate concerns
are already drawing some nations in these directions; however, even nations leading the efforts may not be proceeding fast enough. For China and the United States, the world's two most coal-dependent countries, the message could not be clearer: whether or not global climate concerns are taken seriously, it is time to fundamentally revise the current energy paradigm.

Economic collapse causes nuclear war Walter Russell Mead, a great American citizen, 2/4/2009, Only Makes You Stronger, The New Republic, p.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=571cbbb9-2887-4d81-8542-92e83915f5f8&p=2 None of which means that we can just sit back and enjoy the recession. History may suggest that financial crises actually help capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring messages as well. If financial crises have been a normal part of life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war. The wars of the League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of wars is almost as long as the list of financial crises. Bad economic times can breed wars. Europe was a pretty peaceful place in 1928, but the Depression poisoned German public opinion and helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. If the current crisis turns into a depression, what rough beasts might start slouching toward Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, or New Delhi to be born? The United States may not, yet, decline, but, if we can't get the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.

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No its not Evans-Pritchard 10

---A2: Econ resilient

[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, No defence left against double-dip recession, says Nouriel Roubini, Telegraph UK, 9-5-2010] The US has run out of bullets, said Nouriel Roubini, professor at New York University, and one of a caste of luminaries with grim forecasts at the annual Ambrosetti conference on Lake Como. More

quantitative easing (bond purchases) by the Federal Reserve is not going to make any difference. Treasury yields are already down to 2.5pc yet credit spreads are widening again. Monetary policy can boost liquidity but it cant deal with solvency problems, he told Europes policy elite. Dr Roubini said the US growth rate was likely to fall below 1pc in the second half of the year, despite the biggest stimulus in history: a cut in interest rates from 5pc to zero, a budget deficit of 10pc of GDP, and $3 trillion to shore up the financial system. The anaemic pace compares with rates of 4pc-6pc at this stage of recovery in normal post-war recoveries. We have reached stall speed. Any shock at this point can tip you back into recession. With interbank spreads rising, you can get a vicious circle like 2008-2009, he said, describing a self-feeding process as the real economy and the credit system hurt each other. There is a 40pc chance of double-dip recession in the US, and worse in Japan. Even if it is not technically a recession it will feel like it, he added. Hans-Werner Sinn, head of Germanys IFO Institute, said the US would have to purge its debt excesses the hard way. The bitter truth is that there is no way out of this with monetary and fiscal policy. They will just have to see
their living standards go down. I see a decade of difficulties for the US, he said.

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Alt energy sources are key to sustaining the chemical industry PBT 7 [Pittsburg Business Times, Kim Lyons, Chemical summit to address rail, natural gas price concerns, 11-2-7, http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2007/11/05/story13.html] Energy supply is a another big concern. Greg Wilkinson, vice president of public and government affairs for NOVA Chemicals, said the rising price of natural gas, a feedstock for chemical companies, has hit the industry hard. The government has encouraged natural gas use without increasing supply, he said. "It's caused problems for us because we turn it into products like plastics," Wilkinson said. "We add value to natural gas for end-use products." Schmidt said exploring alternative energy supplies like wind, solar and nuclear power is one goal."Every dollar increase in natural gas prices costs PPG Industries $60 million," she said. But even as they wrestle with these issues, several of the chemical companies that will be involved in the summit have seen big earnings increases in recent months. Chemical industry is key to solving everything from disease to environmental collapse prevents extinction Baum 99 editor-in-chief of the American Chemical Society's Chemical and Engineering News [Rudy M. Baum, C&E News, Millennium Special Report, 12-6-99, http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/991206/ 7749spintro2.html] The pace of change in today's world is truly incomprehensible. Science is advancing on all fronts, particularly chemistry and biology working together as they never have before to understand life in general and human beings in particular at a breathtaking pace. Technology ranging from computers and the Internet to medical devices to genetic engineering to nanotechnology is transforming our world and
our existence in it. It is, in fact, a fool's mission to predict where science and technology will take us in the coming decade, let alone the coming century. We can say with finality only this: We don't know. We do know, however, that we of world population estimates and projections, the

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face enormous challenges, we 6 billion humans who now inhabit Earth. In its 1998 revision United Nations anticipates a world population in 2050 of 7.3 billion to 10.7

billion, with a "medium-fertility projection," considered the most likely, indicating a world population of 8.9 billion people in 2050. According to the UN, fertility now

stands at 2.7 births per woman, down from 5 births per woman in the early 1950s. And fertility rates are declining in all regions of the world. That's good news. But people are living a lot longer. That is certainly good news for the individuals who are living longer, but it also poses challenges for health care and social services the world over. The 1998 UN report estimates for the first time the number of octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians living today and projected for 2050. The numbers are startling. In 1998, 66 million people were aged 80 or older, about one of every 100 persons. That number is expected to increase sixfold by 2050 to reach 370 million people, or one in every 24

Here is the fundamental challenge we face: The world's growing and aging population must be fed and clothed and housed and transported in ways that do not perpetuate the environmental devastation wrought by the first waves of industrialization of the 19th and 20th centuries. As
persons. By 2050, more than 2.2 million people will be 100 years old or older!

we increase our output of goods and services, as we increase our consumption of energy, as we meet the imperative of raising the standard of living for the poorest among us, we must learn to carry out our economic activities sustainably. There are optimists out there, C&EN readers among them, who believe that the history of civilization is a long string of technological triumphs of humans over the limits of nature. In this view, the idea of a "carrying capacity" for Eartha limit to the number of humans Earth's resources can supportis a fiction because technological advances will continuously obviate previously perceived limits. This view has historical merit. Dire predictions made in the 1960s about the exhaustion of resources ranging from petroleum to chromium to fresh water by the end of the 1980s or 1990s have proven utterly wrong. While I do not count myself as one of the technological pessimists who see technology as a mixed blessing at best and an unmitigated evil at worst, I do not count myself among the technological optimists either. There

are environmental challenges of transcendent complexity that I fear may overcome us and our Earth before technological progress can come to our rescue. Global climate change, the accelerating destruction of terrestrial and oceanic habitats, the catastrophic loss of species across the plant and animal kingdomsthese are problems that are not obviously amenable to straightforward technological solutions. But I know this, too: Science and technology have brought us to where we are, and only science and technology, coupled with innovative social and economic thinking, can take us to where we need to be in the coming millennium. Chemists, chemistry, and the chemical industrywhat we at C&EN call the chemical enterprisewill play central roles in addressing these challenges. The first section of this Special Report is a series called "Millennial Musings" in which a wide variety of representatives from the chemical enterprise share their thoughts about the future of our science and industry. The five essays that follow explore the contributions the chemical enterprise is making right now to

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ensure that we will successfully meet the challenges of the 21st century. The essays do not attempt to predict the future. Taken as a
Marc S. Reisch, is a case study of the chemical industry's ongoing transformation to sustainable production. Although it is not well known to the general public, the whole, they do not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of the efforts of our science and our industry to tackle the challenges I've outlined above. Rather, they paint, in broad brush strokes, a portrait of scientists, engineers, and business managers struggling to make a vital contribution to humanity's future. The first essay, by Senior Editor

chemical industry is at the forefront of corporate efforts to reduce waste from production streams to zero. Industry
giants DuPont and Dow Chemical are taking major strides worldwide to manufacture chemicals while minimizing the environmental "footprint" of their facilities. This is an ethic that starts at the top of corporate structure. Indeed, Reisch quotes Dow President and Chief Executive Officer William S. Stavropolous: "We must integrate elements that historically have been seen as at odds with one another: the triple bottom line of sustainabilityeconomic and social and environmental needs." DuPont Chairman and CEO Charles (Chad) O. Holliday envisions a future in which "biological processes use renewable resources as feedstocks, use solar energy to drive growth, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, use low-temperature and low-pressure processes, and produce waste that is less toxic." But sustainability is more than just a philosophy at these two chemical companies. Reisch describes ongoing Dow and DuPont initiatives that are making sustainability a reality at Dow facilities in Michigan and Germany and at DuPont's massive plant site near Richmond, Va.

Another manifestation of the chemical industry's evolution is its embrace of life sciences. Genetic engineering is a revolutionary technology. In the 1970s, research advances fundamentally shifted our perception of DNA. While it had always been clear
the molecular level. It

that deoxyribonucleic acid was a chemical, it was not a chemical that could be manipulated like other chemicalsclipped precisely, altered, stitched back together again into a functioning molecule. Recombinant DNA techniques began the transformation of DNA into just such a chemical, and the reverberations of that change are likely to be felt well into the next century. Genetic engineering has entered the fabric of modern science and technology. It is one of the basic tools chemists and biologists use to understand life at

provides new avenues to pharmaceuticals and new approaches to treat disease. It expands enormously agronomists' ability to introduce traits into crops, a capability seized on by numerous chemical companies. There is no doubt that this powerful new tool will play a major role in feeding the world's population in the coming century, but its adoption has hit some

bumps in the road. In the second essay, Editor-at-Large Michael Heylin examines how the promise of agricultural biotechnology has gotten tangled up in real public fear of genetic manipulation and corporate control over food.

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Plan is key to cancer therapy and detecting toxic wastes DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha He-3 also has long term and short term benefits for society. In the near term applications, it can help in medical research. A useful product of He-3 fusion reactions is the production of isotopes that are very useful in the biomedical field. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is one such field. This process uses the isotopes from He-3 fusion reaction like He-4 in its working. He-4 has a much longer half-life and it can be stored for a much longer periods of time compared to other isotopes. By using He-3 isotopes we can 75reduce the radioactive exposure to patients compared to the regular isotopes that are used in PET that emit radioactive waves (Hurtack, 2004). It can also be used for environmental restoration, detection of chemical and radioactive wastes, cancer therapy and defense. For intermediate term applications, it can be used for the destruction of toxic fissile materials, to harness space power and to supply energy to remote energy stations. In the long term it can
have applications in propulsion technology, hydrogen production, synthetic fuel applications, base load electrical power plants and small electrical power plants (Kulcinski, 2001). The advantage of initially using He-3 fusion for non-energy applications is that the cost base is different for specialized applications and He-3 can be competitive in the short run. This would then open the ground for further cost reduction and prepare He-3 fusion to enter the energy marketplace at competitive prices.

Cancer is unimaginably dehumanizing

Biber`99(JEFF, producer at WETA-TV, the public television station serving the Washington area, CANCER IN FILMS; Hitting Home,
January 24, 1999 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE3D61030F937A15752C0A96F958260)

Last August my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. She is now undergoing chemotherapy. During this experience, I had to come up with a topic for a public television series I produce, ''Straight Talk,'' a program that allows for a taped ''package'' and studio discussion. With a ready-made vehicle at my disposal, I decided to tackle a topic I had become intimately familiar with. Yet producing a television program and packaging cancer into a neat segment, followed by talking heads, became hard to do. This task wasn't like any of my other programs, like a series
on health care in which I documented a struggle to save the life of a premature baby. Although I could not help but get caught up in the emotion of that moment, I tried to maintain my distance, to follow the ''characters'' -- to tell the story. In the editing room, everything becomes surreal. We

watch a child die over and over; we watch a mother cry one, two, three, four times before we get the edit right.

The same was true for the AIDS patient who wanted to kill himself, or for the 15-year-old boy in a hospital bed with a bullet in his head. All became great subjects for television. But great subjects, like fictional characters in the movies, sometimes cease to be real people when we in the media are caught up in the ''story.'' The people in the screen become sound bites and L-cuts in addition to powerful stories that need to be brought to the public's attention. But film, whether made for movies or for television, is a great buffer, distancing even the producers and directors charged with showing the real deal.

When I was faced with the task of illuminating an issue that had become all too personal and had overwhelmed my own family, the video buffer ceased to exist. Mr. Lidz is absolutely right. Cancer is debilitating, dehumanizing and degrading. Cancer is not noble. One can learn from this experience. I will never look through a lens at a person suffering in the same way again. One can never understand cancer or any other life threatening disease until he lives with it. It is not like the movies or a good documentary. You don't know what it's like until you touch it
every day.

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That outweighs everything Berube 1997(David, professor of communications at South Carolina, June/July, NanoTechnology Magazine, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side, http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/faculty/berube/prolong.htm) This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matsons treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoos next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man...
(Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual

benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evils most powerful weapon.

[If time read-] And Toxic Waste Threatens the Survival Of The Planet Katz 1998 (Deborah, activist, Toxic Waste Threatens Communities, www.resistinc.org/newsletter/issues/1998/01/art1.html, accessed 1/5/05.) Toxic contamination of the planet threatens human survival. In our time, we will determine whether there is clean air to breath, water to drink and places to live for our children and theirs. Industrial technology-with its shadow of pollution-overwhelms us and threatens the democratic structures on which we depend. The scientific
community and the nuclear industry undermine citizens' confidence in their ability to understand nuclear power and its effects. Many people have withdrawn from the process, potentially allowing vital decisions to be dictated outside of democratic safeguards. This "meltdown of democracy" is exemplified in the atomic power industry.

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Global warming threatens the Amazon rainforest German Advisory Council on Global Change, 2008, CLIMATE CHANGE AS A SECURITY RISK, http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_jg2007_engl.pdf Impacts of climate change on the biosphere and human society The Amazon rainforest is the largest contiguous expanse of tropical forest in the world, harbouring a significant proportion of all terrestrial plant and animal species
(IPCC, 2007b). The Amazon basin extends over eight Latin American countries; around 60 per cent of the basin lies in Brazil, while the remaining 40 per cent is divided among Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Suriname and Guyana. Around 50 per cent of precipitation in the Amazon region is generated by evapotranspiration in the region (Schubart, 1983; Salati, 1987). The most major problem in the Amazon region is continuing deforestation. If present trends continue, 30 per cent of the Amazonian forest could have disappeared by 2050. The resulting regional climatic changes could lead to savannization, particularly of the eastern Amazon area; this will be significantly amplified by global climate change. The transformation of

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tropical rainforest into dry grassland savannah would lead to the extinction of a significant number of species (IPCC, 2007b). For the Amazonas region of northern Brazil, regional climate projections based on the A1B scenario predict
a rise in temperature by 2100 of 2.6 3.7 C against a 1990 baseline; such a level of warming is 30 per cent above the global mean (IPCC, 2007a). These model projections are robust and accord well with the warming already recorded in the 20th century. The seasonal change in temperature distribution shows a trend towards more marked warming in the months of June to August compared to the months of December to February, thus reducing the annual temperature range (IPCC, 2007a). Changes in the regional distribution of precipitation are always hard to predict, and in the Amazon region the difficulty is increased by the very important interactions between vegetation and climate, and by the effect of the high but narrow mountain range of the Andes. Both factors are poorly depicted in current models. A further factor contributing to the level of uncertainty is the future trend of the El Nio phenomenon, which leads to significant droughts in the Amazon region. At present, therefore, it is impossible to make any statement about future changes in mean precipitation (IPCC, 2007a). However, droughts will occur in future as a result of the significant

warming of the Atlantic and the associated changes in atmospheric circulation, irrespective of the El Nio phenomenon. In the Amazon region, the year 2005 was notable for its extraordinary dryness. This unusual event could be a herald of the drought years that, according to climate projections, will occur ever more frequently in the region. According to model calculations of the Hadley Centre (HadCM3), from 2050 onwards
the Amazon region will be able to absorb less and less carbon from the atmosphere. Higher air temperatures combined with increasing dryness will reduce carbon fixing by the rainforest; the effect will be amplified by a further decrease in the area of the rainforest. In the models of Cox et al. (2000), this reduction of carbon storage in the Amazon region results in the terrestrial biosphere becoming a global source of carbon in future. More recent predictions assume that, in the extreme case, 65 per cent of the Amazon forest area will disappear by 2090 as a result of increasing incidence of droughts (Cox et al., 2004; Hutyra et al., 2005). The transformation of the Amazon basin into a savannah landscape (IPCC, 2007a) would release additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which would in turn accelerate climate change (Section 5.3.4). 7 Hotspots of climate change 155 Clearing of the Amazon rainforest (Nepstad et al., 1999) reduces air humidity because there is less transpiration from vegetation; there is then less precipitation. The air over the deforested areas heats up more markedly than that over the forest, which in turn influences the local climate and thus the neighbouring vegetation. Moreover, the complete removal of biomass after clearing (including the burning of roots and vegetation remaining after harvesting) releases a noticeably larger quantity of CO2 than is taken up by subsequent field crops (Morton et al., 2006). In addition, clearance results in

considerable fragmentation of ecosystems and within a very short time leads to increased erosion and to soil degradation. Rising temperatures, increasing droughts and soil degradation have serious consequences for agriculture. In tropical regions it is generally assumed that warming of as little as 12 C has a
negative impact on grain production. As further warming takes place, all crops in tropical countries will be affected by falling harvests (IPCC, 2007b).

In the case of the Amazon region, it is calculated that even moderate warming will reduce yields of wheat and maize by around 30 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively, as a result in particular of heat stress and water shortage. In the case of typical market crops, simulations of the effects of moderate
warming predict varying results: while the areas suitable for growing coffee are likely to shrink considerably in extent, soya yields are forecast to rise at least temporarily by around 25 per cent (IPCC, 2007b). Inland fishing would also be affected. This would have negative consequences for the rural population, because fish is their primary source of animal protein (Waichman et al., 2002). Fish stocks are already under threat

as a result of overfishing. With increasing dryness and rising temperatures, the natural habitat of many fish species dwindles. The drying up of channels linking inland lakes and rivers interrupts the cycles of reproductive
migration; unable to migrate, an excessive number remain in the lakes, where they suffocate as water levels fall. In drought years the reproduction rate therefore falls drastically. In addition, the low water level can cause agricultural pesticide residues to become concentrated in rivers and lakes to toxic levels. A further aspect is disruption of transport routes. The water level in the rivers may sink dramatically, with the water turning to mud; in many areas the result is that the only transport routes become impassable. Forest and bush fires occur frequently in drought years, often affecting large areas and severing important land transport routes. The negative consequences affect not only the transport of goods but also the medical care of the population. The effects of sea-level rise on the Amazon delta have not yet been studied. 7.10.2 Political and economic situation in the region Brazil is the most important country for the development of the Amazon region. In the governments view, the region functions as a hinterland that has yet to be opened up. Although the

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Amazon region constitutes 58 per cent of the land area of Brazil, it is home to only 8 per cent of the population and contributes only 5 per cent of GDP (IBGE, 2007). The Amazon regions resources play an important role in the expansion strategies of private and public stakeholders. Resource use is already an issue with major potential for conflict in the region. The Amazon region was opened up in the 1960s through the construction of cross-country highways. Site development was financed by public funds and served the economic valorization of the areas productive resources (Mahar, 1988). The land was first offered to large businesses for cattle-rearing; then the rural population from the north-east, an area plagued by drought, was to be settled there. Since the 1970s, ore deposits have been mined, large hydropower plants have been built and the settling of small farmers has been extended. The result has been a growth in population and a 17 per cent reduction in the area of forest (INPE, 2007). Since the 1990s, the deforestation dynamic has developed independently of public investment. Cross-country highways are increasingly being built by financially powerful sawmill owners, cattle rearers and soya farmers. Cattle rearers and soya farmers have an eye on major export markets, because Brazilian meat and soya exports have increased substantially in the wake of the BSE crisis in Europe. Brazil has the largest cattle herd in the world (200 million head in 2003; IBGE, 2007) and is the worlds second-largest soya producer (52 million t in 2006); whereas the Amazon region currently remains marginal as a production location for exports. The savannahs in the south of the Amazon region have

already been opened up for soya cultivation through soil improvements, and large areas in the dry region around Santarm in the central Amazon region are now being cleared. The vast expansion in production of bioethanol from sugar cane in the south and southeast of the country is in part replacing the cultivation of soya in the Amazon region. The Amazon region is also being
considered for the production of fuel from biomass. In terms of GDP, Brazil is one of the leading 13 economies in the world. Between 1995 and 2005 Amazon region 7.9 156 GDP grew on average by 2.1 per cent annually. Real growth was particularly strong in agriculture, where it was driven primarily by animal production. Economic growth has improved the income situation of all population groups; nevertheless, income disparities in Brazil are among the largest in the world (UNDP, 2005b). Poverty in Brazil is concentrated regionally in the dry north-east and the Amazon area (Brazil, 2004). The situation is worst for the indigenous population. The expansion of large cattle and soya farms has led to a noticeable increase in violent conflict and in expulsions of small farmers in the Amazon region (CPT, 2007). But also the majority of large landowners have no title to the land. Clearance is usually carried out without regard to statutory requirements, but the majority of these offences go unpunished. These conflicts over land and resources may increase as farmland is further expanded and as a result of the effects of climate change. Tensions are also to be expected in the Andean countries, because significant migration from the mountain regions to the Amazonian lowlands is taking place, bringing with it the familiar consequences of deforestation, minoritization and displacement of indigenous peoples. This migration is directly or indirectly encouraged by governments, for example by stripping protected areas retrospectively of their status in order to develop them for economic use. Since the source areas of the most important Amazonian rivers lie in the Andes, the destruction of the forest in this part of the Amazon region has particularly drastic consequences, influencing as it does the water supply of the entire area, including the Brazilian lowlands. While the measures taken by the Brazilian government to protect the Amazon region from over-exploitation of natural resources have improved, there are still conflicts of goals between environmental plans (protected areas) and plans for the energy and transport sectors (building of hydropower plants, gas pipelines, roads). After the deforestation rate rose very sharply in 2002 and 2003, special measures for tackling deforestation were agreed. However, only the monitoring measures of the environment ministry have so far been implemented. Improvements in the awarding of land titles and in environmental impact assessment have not yet been achieved. The range and effectiveness of the governments measures is significantly compromised by general governance weaknesses in the areas of rule of law and control of corruption (World Bank, 2005b). However, the government has for some years been attempting to strengthen the states monopoly on the use of force and improve adherence to the law in the region. With the publication of the IPCCs Fourth Assessment Report, climate change has become an internal political issue. Brazil participated proactively and constructively in international climate negotiations, and the environment ministry subsequently took up the issue with great resolve. Brazil is also involved in regional cooperation on environmental policy and is the strongest member of OTCA (Organizao do Tratado de Cooperao Amaznica), which focuses on cooperation to ensure the sustainable development of the Amazon region. With the transfer of the permanent secretariat to Brasilia in 2003, Brazil has assumed responsibility for the further development of this organization. 7.10.3 Conclusions If the changes anticipated for the Amazon region as a result of global warming occur,

life in the region will become more and more difficult, not only for small farmers. It will no longer be possible to use the Amazon region as a location for expansion of largescale agriculture or as a destination area for povertyinduced migration. At the same time yields in the traditional, better developed agricultural
regions in the south, the centre and the south-east of Brazil will fall as a result of the reduced availability of water and higher temperatures. This may lead to a crisis situation developing in the agricultural sector, because soya and coffee are the third and fifth most important export goods respectively.

In consequence, struggles over the allocation of land could intensify and the already high potential for violence could increase further. Scope for conserving biodiversity in the Amazon region would narrow even more. In addition, the role of Brazil as a stabilizing factor and leading regional economy in Latin America could be weakened. Brazil is one of the few countries that perceives itself as a democracy and, despite internal tensions, it can ensure a relatively high degree of political stability. It is an important partner of the OECD in developing global solutions to problems
and driving forward global regimes. If the country is taken unawares by the effects of climate change, it will have significantly less capacity for attending to projects of regional and global governance in addition to dealing with internal crises. This is particularly important because other Latin American countries will also be significantly affected by climate change and might turn to Brazil with requests for support (Section 6.9). If Brazil were to give lower priority to the needs of the Amazon region and world climate policy than to short-term national trade and energy interests, this would have a negative impact on its ability to prevent or handle crises in the Amazon area.

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COLLAPSE OF THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST CAUSES EXTINCTION David Takacs, THE IDEA OF DIVERSITY: PHILOSOPHIES OF PARADISE, 1996, p. 200-1. So biodiversity keeps the world running. It has value and of itself, as well as for us. Raven, Erwin, and Wilson oblige us to think about the value of biodiversity for our own lives. The Ehrlichs rivet-popper trope makes this same point; by eliminating rivets, we play Russian roulette with global ecology and human futures: It is likely that destruction of the rich complex of species in the Amazon basin could trigger rapid changes in global climate patterns. Agriculture remains heavily dependent on stable climate, and human beings remain heavily dependent on food. By the end of the century the extinction of perhaps a million species in the Amazon basin could have entrained famines in which a billion human beings perished. And if our species is very unlucky, the famines could lead to a thermonuclear war, which could extinguish civilization. Elsewhere Ehrlich uses different particulars with no less drama: What then will happen if the current decimation of organic diversity continues? Crop yields will be more difficult to maintain in the face of climatic change, soil erosion, loss of dependable water supplies, decline of pollinators, and ever more serious assaults by pests. Conversion of productive land to wasteland will accelerate; deserts will continue their seemingly inexorable expansion. Air pollution will increase, and local climates will become harsher. Humanity will have to forgo many of the direct economic benefits it might have withdrawn from Earth's wellstocked genetic library. It might, for example, miss out on a cure for cancer; but that will make little difference. As ecosystem services falter, mortality from respiratory and epidemic disease, natural disasters, and especially famine will lower life expectancies to the point where cancer (largely a disease of the elderly) will be unimportant. Humanity will bring upon itself consequences depressingly similar to those expected from a nuclear winter. Barring a nuclear conflict, it appears that civilization will disappear some time before the end of the next century - not with a bang but a whimper.

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Moon mining key to space tourism and cleaning space debris Stone 2009 (William, June, William Stone is an aerospace engineer and explorer. He serves as the chairman of Shackleton Energy Co., How the extraction of lunar hydrogen or ice could fuel humanity's expansion into space http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/mining-the-moon)//Abraha that the moons polar craters may hold billions of tons of hydrogen, perhaps even in the form of evidence returned by the Lunar Prospector and the Clementine probes support this idea. . Discovering rich concentrations of hydrogen on the moon would open up a universe of possibilitiesliterally. , people would be able to begin new ventures, including space tourism, space-debris cleanup, satellite refueling, and interplanetary voyages
Planetary geologists speculate

Space Debris/Tourism Add on

water ice.

Intriguing

in the 1990s seemed to

The latest raft of lunar missions, including Chandrayaan-1 and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, may confirm it. In situ prospecting could then determine the quantity, quality, and accessibility of the hydrogen

Rocket fuels and consumables that now cost an average of US $10 000 per kilogram to loft

could instead be produced on the moon much more cheaply. For the first time, access to space would be truly economical. At last

. Discovering rich concentrations of hydrogen on the moon would open up a universe of

possibilitiesliterally. Rocket fuels and consumables that now cost an average of US $10 000 per kilogram to loft could instead be produced on the moon much more cheaply. For the first time, access to space would be truly economical. At last, people would be able to begin new ventures, including space tourism, space-debris cleanup, satellite refueling, and interplanetary voyages. Lunar prospecting will cost a lot of moneyperhaps $20 billion over a decade. Rovers would have to descend into the polar craters to sample the deposits and test for ice, and then move on to other spots to form an overall map, much as wildcatters do every day in oil fields. At the moment, no country seems eager to foot the bill. But where governments fail to act on a vitally important opportunity, the private sector can and should step in. Two years ago, I and a group of like-minded businessmen, expeditionary explorers, and space-systems managers and engineers formed the Shackleton Energy Co. in Del Valle, Texas, to conduct lunar prospecting. Should we find significant reserves of ice, we would then establish a network of refueling service stations in low Earth orbit and on the moon to process and provide fuel and consumables. Like modern highway service stations, these celestial stations would be able to refuel space vehicles of all kinds and would be positioned at key transportation nodes; an obvious spot would be near the International Space Station. Such stations would radically change the way nearly every space system is designed. No longer would you have to carry your fuel and water into orbit with you. Entirely new classes of space vehicles would become possible, ones that operate only at and beyond low Earth orbit, such as vehicles for orbital transfer and satellite repair. Today launch systems must be designed to withstand the punishing effects of high-speed atmospheric drag, pressure, vibration, and heating that occur on the way to space. Protecting the rocket and its payload adds enormously to launch costs. But a vehicle that is designed from the start to operate only in spacesay, between low Earth

We would also be able to clear up the ever-growing space debris problem. Thered be plenty of fuel for maneuvering satellites and other spacecraft to avoid debris, and you could also deploy cleanup vehicles to remove obsolete materials from orbit. Within a decade or two, we would soon see the dawn of a new age of space exploration, space tourism, and space business ventures.
orbit and the moonis not bound by the same design rules.

Only space tourism can prevent inevitable extinction. It would be hell on earth in the interim from resource wars, environmental destruction, diseases, and cosmic events Collins & Autino 10 Professor of Life & Environmental Science @ Azabu University & Systems Engineer @

Andromeda Inc., Italy [Patrick Collins (Expert in the economics of energy supply from space) & Adriano Autino, What the growth of a space tourism industry could contribute to employment, economic growth, environmental protection, education, culture and world peace, Acta Astronautica 66 (2010) 15531562]
High Return in Safety from Extra-terrestrial Settlement

Investment in orbital access and other space infrastructure will facilitate the establishment of settlements on the Moon,

Mars, asteroids and in man-made space structures. In the first phase, development of new regulatory infrastructure in various Earth orbits, including property/usufruct rights, real estate, mortgage financing and insurance, traffic management, piloting, policing and other services will enable the population living in Earth orbits to grow very large. Such activities aimed at making near-Earth space habitable are the logical extension of humans' historical spread over the surface of the Earth. As trade spreads through near-Earth space, settlements are sure to follow, of which the inhabitants will add to the wealth of different cultures which humans have created in the many different environments in which they live.

The success of such extra-terrestrial settlements will have the additional benefit of reducing the danger of human extinction due to planet-wide or cosmic accidents [20, 26]. These horrors include both man-made disasters such as nuclear war, plagues or climate change, and natural disasters such as super-volcanoes or asteroid impact. It is hard to think of any objective that is more important than preserving peace. Weapons developed in recent decades are so

destructive, and have such horrific, long-term side-effects that their use should be discouraged as strongly as possible by the international community. Hence, reducing the incentive to use weapons by rapidly developing the ability to use space-based resources on a large scale is surely equally important [15, 20, 28]. The achievement of this depends on the low space travel costs which, at the present

time, appear to be achievable only through the development of a vigorous space tourism industry.

SUMMARY As discussed above, if space travel services had started during the 1950s when they first could, the space industry would be enormously more developed than it is today. Hence the failure to develop passenger space travel has seriously distorted the path taken by humans' technological and economic development since WW2, away from the path which would have been followed if capitalism and democracy operated as intended. Technological knowhow which could have been used to supply services which are known to be very popular with a large proportion of the general public has not been used for that purpose, while suffering due to the unemployment and environmental damage caused by the resulting lack of new industries have increased. In response, policies should be implemented urgently to correct this error, and to catch up with the possibilities for industrial and economic growth that have been ignored for so long. This policy renewal is urgent because of the growing danger of unemployment, economic stagnation, climate change, educational and cultural decline, resource wars and loss of civil liberties which face civilisation today. In order to achieve the necessary progress there is a particular need for collaboration between those working in the two fields of civil aviation and civil space. Although the word "aerospace" is widely used, it is largely a misnomer since these two fields are in practice quite separate. True "aerospace" collaboration to realise passenger space travel will develop the wonderful profusion of possibilities outlined above. Humans' Urgent Choice: Heaven or Hell on Earth?

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As discussed above, the claim that resources are running out can be used to justify wars which may never end: present-day rhetoric about "the long war" or "100 years war" in Iraq are current examples. If political leaders do not change their viewpoint, the recent aggression by the rich, "Anglo-Saxon" countries and their cutting back of traditional civil liberties are ominous for the future. However, this "hellish" vision of endless war is based on an assumption about a single number the future cost of travel to orbit about which a different assumption leads to a literally "heavenly" vision of peace and ever-rising living standards for everyone forever. If this cost stays above 10,000 Euros/kg, where it has been unchanged for nearly 50 years, the prospects for humanity are bleak. But if humans make the necessary effort, and use the tiny amount of resources needed to develop passenger space vehicles, then this cost will fall to 100 Euros/kg, the use of extra-terrestrial resources will become economic, and arguments for resource wars will evaporate entirely. This is not a decision for the far future or the 22nd Century. It has to be made very soon if humans are to have a reasonable future. The main reason why this step has not been taken yet seems to be lack of understanding by investors and policy-makers of the myriad opportunities that space travel will create. Now that the potential to catch up half a centurys delay in the growth of space travel is becoming understood, continuing to spend 20 billion Euro equivalents/year on government space activities while continuing to invest nothing in developing passenger space travel would be a gross failure of economic policy, and strongly contrary to the economic and social interests of the public. As this policy error is corrected, and investment in profitable space projects grows rapidly in coming years, we can look forward to a growing world-wide boom. Viewed as a whole, humans' industrial growth has been seriously underperforming for decades, due to the failure to exploit these immensely promising fields of activity. The tens of thousands of unemployed space engineers in Russia, America and Europe alone are a huge waste. The millions of disappointed young people who have been taught that they cannot travel in space are another enormous wasted resource

Space debris causes US-Russian war will likely coincide with early-warning false alarms ensures immediate escalation Lewis, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Advanced Methods of Cooperative Study Program, 4 Jeffrey, Worked In the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Center for Defense Information, What if Space Were Weaponized? July, http://www.cdi.org/PDFs/scenarios.pdf The officer in charge of the command center that monitored data from the early-warning satellites refused to pass the alert to his superiors. He reportedly explained his caution by saying: When people start a war, they dont start it with only ve missiles. You can do little damage with just ve missiles. 45 In January 1995, Norwegian scientists launched a sounding rocket on a trajectory similar to one that a U.S. Trident missile might take if it were launched to blind Russian radars with a high altitude nuclear detonation. The incident was apparently serious enough that, the next day, Russian President Boris Yeltsin stated that he had activated his nuclear football a device that allows the Russian president to communicate with his military advisors and review his options for launching his arsenal. In this case, the Russian early-warning satellites could clearly see that no attack was under way and the crisis passed without incident. 46 In both cases, Russian observers were condent that what appeared to be a small attack was not a fragmentary picture of a much larger one. In the case of the Norwegian sounding rocket, space-based sensors played a crucial role in assuring the Russian leadership that it was not under attack. The Russian command system, however, is no longer able to provide such reliable, early warning. The dissolution of the Soviet Union cost Moscow several radar stations in newly independent states, creating attack corridors through which Moscow could not see an attack launched by U.S. nuclear submarines. 47 Further, Russias constellation of early-warning satellites has been allowed to decline only one or two of the six satellites remain operational, leaving Russia with early warning for only six hours a day. Russia is attempting to reconstitute its constellation of early-warning satellites, with several launches planned in the next few years. But Russia will still have limited warning and will depend heavily on its spacebased systems to provide warning of an American attack. 48 As the previous section explained, the Pentagon is contemplating military missions in space that will improve U.S. ability to cripple Russian nuclear forces in a crisis before they can execute an attack on the United States. Anti-satellite weapons, in this scenario, would blind Russian reconnaissance and warning satellites and knock out communications satellites. Such strikes might be the prelude to a full-scale attack, or a limited effort, as attempted in a war game at Schriever Air Force Base, to conduct early deterrence strikes to signal U.S. resolve and control escalation. 49 By 2010, the United States may, in fact, have an arsenal of ASATs (perhaps even on orbit 24/7) ready to conduct these kinds of missions to coerce opponents and, if necessary, support preemptive attacks. Moscow would certainly have to worry that these ASATs could be used in conjunction with other space-enabled systems for example, longrange strike systems that could attack targets in less than 90 minutes to disable Russias nuclear deterrent before the Russian leadership understood what was going on. What would happen if a piece of space debris

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were to disable a Russian early-warning satellite under these conditions? Could the Russian military distinguish between an accident in space and the rst phase of a U.S. attack? Most Russian early-warning satellites are in elliptical Molniya orbits (a few are in GEO) and thus difcult to attack from the ground or air. At a minimum, Moscow would probably have some tactical warning of such a suspicious launch, but given the sorry state of Russias warning, optical imaging and signals intelligence satellites there is reason to ask the question. Further, the advent of U.S. on-orbit ASATs, as now envisioned 50 could make both the more difcult orbital plane and any warning systems moot. The unpleasant truth is that the Russians likely would have to make a judgment call. No state has the ability to denitively determine the cause of the satellites failure. Even the United States does not maintain (nor is it likely to have in place by 2010) a sophisticated space surveillance system that would allow it to distinguish between a satellite malfunction, a debris strike or a deliberate attack and Russian space surveillance capabilities are much more limited by comparison. Even the risk assessments for collision with debris are speculative, particularly for the unique orbits in which Russian early-warning satellites operate. During peacetime, it is easy to imagine that the Russians would conclude that the loss of a satellite was either a malfunction or a debris strike. But how condent could U.S. planners be that the Russians would be so calm if the accident in space occurred in tandem with a second false alarm, or occurred during the middle of a crisis? What might happen if the debris strike occurred shortly after a false alarm showing a missile launch? False alarms are appallingly common according to information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) experienced 1,172 moderately serious false alarms between 1977 and 1983 an average of almost three false alarms per week. Comparable information is not available about the Russian system, but there is no reason to believe that it is any more reliable. 51 Assessing the likelihood of these sorts of coincidences is difficult because Russia has never provided data about the frequency or duration of false alarms; nor indicated how seriously early warning data is taken by Russian leaders. Moreover, there is no reliable estimate of the debris risk for Russian satellites in highly elliptical orbits. 52 The important point, however, is that such a coincidence would only appear suspicious if the United States were in the business of disabling satellites in other words, there is much less risk if Washington does not develop ASATs. The loss of an early-warning satellite could look rather ominous if it occurred during a period of major tension in the relationship. While NATO no longer sees Russia as much of a threat, the same cannot be said of the converse. Despite the warm talk, Russian leaders remain wary of NATO expansion, particularly the effect expansion may have on the Baltic port of Kaliningrad. Although part of Russia, Kaliningrad is separated from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Poland. Russia has already complained about its decreasing lack of access to the port, particularly the uncooperative attitude of the Lithuanian government. 53 News reports suggest that an edgy Russia may have moved tactical nuclear weapons into the enclave. 54 If the Lithuanian government were to close access to Kaliningrad in a t of pique, this would trigger a major crisis between NATO and Russia. Under these circumstances, the loss of an earlywarning satellite would be extremely suspicious. It is any militarys nature during a crisis to interpret events in their worst-case light. For example, consider the coincidences that occurred in early September 1956, during the extraordinarily tense period in international relations marked by the Suez Crisis and Hungarian uprising. 55 On one evening the White House received messages indicating: 1. the Turkish Air Force had gone on alert in response to unidentied aircraft penetrating its airspace; 2. one hundred Soviet MiG-15s were ying over Syria; 3. a British Canberra bomber had been shot down over Syria, most likely by a MiG; and 4. The Russian eet was moving through the Dardanelles.Gen. Andrew Goodpaster was reported to have worried that the conuence of events might trigger off the NATO operations plan that called for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Yet, all of these reports were false.The jets over Turkey were a ock of swans; the Soviet MiGs over Syria were a smaller, routine escort returning the president from a state visit to Moscow; the bomber crashed due to mechanical difficulties; and the Soviet eet was beginning long-scheduled exercises. In an important sense, these were not coincidences but rather different manifestations of a common failure human error resulting from extreme tension of an international crisis. As one author noted, The detection and misinterpretation of these events, against the context of world tensions from Hungary and Suez, was the rst major example of how the size and complexity of worldwide electronic warning systems could, at certain critical times, create momentum of its own.Perhaps most worrisome, the United States might be blithely

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unaware of the degree to which the Russians were concerned about its actions and inadvertently escalate a crisis. During the early 1980s, the Soviet Union suffered a major war scare during which time its leadership concluded that bilateral relations were rapidly declining. T his war scare was driven in part by the rhetoric of the Reagan administration, fortied by the selective reading of intelligence. During this period, NATO conducted a major command post exercise, Able Archer, that caused some elements of the Soviet military to raise their alert status. American ofcials were stunned to learn, after the fact, that the Kremlin had been acutely nervous about an American rst strike during this period. 56 All of these incidents have a common theme that condence is often the difference between war and peace. In times of crisis, false alarms can have a momentum of their own. As in the second scenario in this monograph, the lesson is that commanders rely on the steady ow of reliable information. When that information ow is disrupted whether by a deliberate attack or an accident condence collapses and the result is panic and escalation. Introducing ASAT weapons into this mix is all the more dangerous, because such weapons target the elements of the command system that keep leaders aware, informed and in control. As a result, the mere presence of such weapons is corrosive to the condence that allows national nuclear forces to operate safely.

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Plan solves energy security Kulcinski 2006 (Gerald, February 17, PhD Nuclear Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, NASA Advisory Council, Fellow at the American Nuclear Society, HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha The impact here is huge. He-3 could potentially eliminate the energy crisis altogether. Only 10 tons of He-3 can replace of the energy that other energy sources provide for the United States. 40 tons would be sufficient to supply 100% of the USs annual energy requirement. Of course, this is not desirable because you dont want to have all the eggs in one basket. If you take a look at the volume of He-3 on the Moon, which runs in the order of 100,000 to millions of tons, the energy crisis could be removed altogether. It completely removes the issue of running out of clean energy. Now if there is a way of carrying out the He-3- He-3 at a reasonable cost, then we would have neutron less energy, which is completely clean. If you then need fluid energy to
operate, you could use a combination of fusion and hydrogen.

Energy Security add on [1/1]

That prevents extinction Ulrich Becker et al, professor of physics at MIT, 2008. MIT Faculty Newsletter, Vol. XXI No. 2, http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/212/milner.html The reliable and affordable availability of energy is the lifeblood of human civilization in the twenty-first century. It is essential to the quality and security of everyday life of the citizens in the United States. For example, the sudden loss of electrical power invariably reduces living conditions of the most technologically advanced society to a primitive state. The protracted loss of electric power would lead to chaos in the United States, with resultant instability worldwide. Recently, it has become clear that the future energy security of the United States is at serious risk from two different sources. Most of the energy used in buildings, industry, and transportation arises from the chemical burning of fossil fuels. The waste produced in the burning process includes greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane) which for the last 200 years have
accumulated in the Earths atmosphere. The present concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earths atmosphere is estimated as 385 ppm, which substantially exceeds the estimated values over the last 500,000 years. Basic scientific arguments tell us that the increased carbon dioxide levels should result in heating of the Earths surface. Measurements indicate that the average temperature at the Earths surface has

significantly risen over the last 100 years. If humanity wishes to preserve the planet on which human civilization developed, significant changes in the way we produce energy are urgently required. This is a global security challenge where the U.S. must play a leadership role. Secondly, the energy supply of the United States relies to a great degree on the reliable and affordable availability of oil. For example, transportation (road, rail, sea, air) depends almost completely on oil. The worlds supply of oil is limited and it is located in many regions of the world which are politically unstable and unfriendly to the United States. In addition to this, it is possible that the total world
oil supply may have already peaked. In the last two decades, the U.S. has been involved in two wars in the Middle East where the worlds major source of oil is located. Until the U.S. dependence on foreign oil is significantly reduced, there is every expectation that increasing

amounts of precious U.S. blood and treasure will have to be expended in widening conflicts in the cause of energy security. It is widely accepted that the U.S. must find a way to wean itself from its addiction to oil. In ground transportation, which is a
major oil consumer, significant progress is being made with batteries and fuel cells to replace gasoline with electricity, which can be generated in alternative ways. Strongly motivated by these two considerations, the development of new technologies to increase energy

efficiency and to produce reliable and affordable energy with minimal greenhouse gas emission to the Earths atmosphere is a high priority in the U.S. and in many other countries. It is essential that these efforts be encouraged and enhanced. However, the probability of success and the timescale for realization of these technologies is highly uncertain. The economic stability and national security of the United States over the coming decades cannot be
secured by assuming optimistically that these new technologies will succeed in time to avoid a major discontinuity in the supply of oil and gas from foreign and potentially hostile sources. Further, it is not acceptable, nor is it possible, that the U.S. continues to burn fossil fuels indefinitely at present levels, thereby putting in clear jeopardy the planet on which we have evolved. Nuclear Power is Carbon-free, Technologically Feasible, Scalable, and Economical

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Asteroids Add on [1/1]

Plan saves earth from inevitable asteroid that would causes extinction DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha NASAs interest in developing lunar colonies and further advancing lunar exploration faded, to the frustration of many space enthusiasts. The Apollo missions were abandoned and space
After the initial zeal that characterized lunar exploration in the 1960s and 1970s, took place at the National Academy of Sciences. The focus of this conference was how to establish a permanent base on the Moon.

exploration directed its focus elsewhere. It was not until the 1980s that NASA expressed interest in the Moon once more. In 1984 a conference on Lunar bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century

Lowman, a prominent geologist at NASA, reported that the feasibility of establishing a lunar base was scientifically verified based on the reports from the Apollo
missions; however, he made clear, that did not imply that the feasibility of an autonomous lunar colony was proven. The reasons for establishing a lunar base can be follow two main trends. One advocates

a lunar base would serve as a stepping stone for further exploration into outer space. The other perceives a lunar colony as a haven to save our civilization from mass extinction if a meteor were to strike Earth.
that

Asteroid collision causes extinction by 2014 CNN 2003(September 2, Giant asteroid could hit Earth in 2014 http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/09/02/asteroid.reut/index.html)//Abraha Asteroid "2003 QQ47" will be closely monitored over the next two months. Its potential strike date is March 21, 2014, but astronomers say that any risk of impact is likely to decrease as further data is gathered. On impact, it could have the effect of 20 million Hiroshima atomic bombs, a spokesman for the British government's Near Earth Object Information Centre told BBC radio. The Centre issued the warning about the asteroid after the giant rock was first observed in New Mexico by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Program."The Near Earth Object will be observable from Earth for the next two months and astronomers will continue to track it over this period," said Dr Alan Fitzsimmons, one of the expert team advising the Centre. Asteroids such as 2003 QQ47 are chunks of rock left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Most are kept at a safe distance from the Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But the gravitational influence of giant planets such as Jupiter can nudge asteroids out of these safe orbits and send them plunging towards Earth.

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--A2: no asteroid
Very high chance of asteroid collision by 2036 and extinction Jha 2005 (Alok December 7, The Guardian,It's called Apophis. It's 390m wide. And it could hit Earth in 31 years' time http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/dec/07/spaceexploration.research)//Abraha A fitting name, astronomers reasoned, for a menace now hurtling towards Earth from outerspace. Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it. Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere. And, scientists insist, there is actually very little time left to decide. At a recent meeting of experts in near-Earth objects (NEOs) in London, scientists said it could take decades to design, test and build the required technology to deflect the asteroid. Monica Grady, an expert in meteorites at the Open University, said: "It's a question of when, not if, a near Earth object collides with Earth. Many of the smaller objects break up when they reach the Earth's atmosphere and have no impact. However, a NEO larger than 1km [wide] will collide with Earth every few hundred thousand years and a NEO larger than 6km, which could cause mass extinction, will collide with Earth every hundred million years. We are overdue for a big one." Apophis had been intermittently tracked since its discovery in June last year but, in December, it started causing serious concern. Projecting the orbit of the asteroid into the future, astronomers had calculated that the odds of it hitting the Earth in 2029 were alarming. As more observations came in, the odds got higher. Having more
than 20 years warning of potential impact might seem plenty of time. But, at last week's meeting, Andrea Carusi, president of the Spaceguard Foundation, said that the time for governments to make decisions on what to do was now, to give scientists time to prepare mitigation missions. At the peak of concern, Apophis asteroid was placed at four out of 10 on the Torino scale - a measure of

the threat posed by an NEO where 10 is a certain collision which could cause a global catastrophe. This was the highest of any asteroid in recorded history and it had a 1 in 37 chance of hitting the Earth. The threat of a collision in 2029 was eventually ruled out at the
end of last year.

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Innovation Add on
He3 mining key to innovation DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha The Apollo missions have already had tremendous effects on science and technology and these were limited in extent and duration. The technical infrastructure that needs to be developed for a permanent mining mission is astounding and will result in a number of new jobs in the technical field. The offer and demand dynamics will respond to a shift in interest of young people to more scientifically oriented careers, especially in those countries with active resources dedicated to space exploration. However, we may also expect a renaissance of philosophy and the humanities, which would bloom as a response to the new horizons that space exploration opens. The questions of what is our role in the universe and what the limits to humanity are will be more relevant than ever before. The question then becomes: how does exploring space change life on Earth? The answer is most probably in more ways than we can foresee. The palpable is, of course, the technological drive that will accompany space missions. The new scientific horizons will open branches of science that are either unknown or that had remained practically stagnant for the last couple of decades. Fusion technology will revive quantum electrodynamics, for example, and space flight will appeal again to classical mechanics in a powerful way. Innovation is key to prevent extinction

Barker 2k
(BRENT is manager of corporate communications, having earlier served as manager of strategic and executive communications and for12 years as the Journal's editor-in-chief, Technology and the Quest for Sustainability, EPRI Journal, pg nexis) Sustainability has been the subject of much discussion and a steady stream of policy forums since the World
Commission on Environment and Development, headed by Dr. Gro Brundtland, put it on the world stage in 1987. The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as growth that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Assuch, sustainability carries with it the distinct feeling of a modern problem. But it is not. We have been on a seemingly unsustainable course for hundreds of years, but the rules, stakes, and speed of the game keep changing, in large part because of our ability to use technology to extend limits and to magnify human capabilities. As long as the population continues to consume a finite store of resources, we must continue to change our course or fail.

If, with the global population approaching 9-10 billion people by midcentury, we were to lock in current technologies and development patterns, we would likely find ourselves heading toward environmental disaster or worse. Our best hope--perhaps our only hope--is to evolve rapidly enough, using our ingenuity, our technology, and our growing ethical
framework of inclusiveness and respect for the diversity of life, to stay ahead of the proverbial wolf. Despite the environmental pessimism of the current age, there are a handful of signs that suggest we are struggling in fits and starts in the right direction, possibly even gaining more ground than we are losing. Farm

productivity is one of the most significant of the great reversals in human fortune that have occurred in recent times, reversals that offer both hope and strategic guidance. Largely as a result of crop yields growing at 1-2% per year, the
millenniaold pattern of clearing forests and grassland for farms and pastures has begun to be reversed in some regions of the world. According to one of the world's leading scholars on technological change, Arnulf Grubler of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, some 18 million hectares (45 million acres) of cropland in Europe and North America have been reconverted to forest and grassland between 1950 and 2000, while agricultural output in those regions has continued to grow. Great reversals are also beginning to occur

in areas as diverse as population, resource utilization, energy, and transportation. Fertility rates continue to drop below the replacement level
(2.1 children per woman) in affluent nations. First evident in France more than a century ago, the preference for smaller families is spreading throughout the world as economic development expands. As a result, roughly 90% of the population growth in the next 50 years will occur in today'spoorest nations. Overall, we are looking at a new demographic dynamic in which population is exploding in some parts of the world while imploding in others. Nevertheless, it is significant that year after year the United Nations continues to crank down its projection of global population in the twenty-first

Although the consumption of resources continues to grow with population and economic prosperity in all parts of the world, there are some intriguing counter-trends. Technology continues to expands [sic] the
century, suggesting greater certainty that the population is leveling off.

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menu of material resources--for example, alloys, composites, and ceramics--as well as to increase the efficiency with which we use them. Both trends help keep resource depletion at bay Moreover, usage
patterns are now rapidly shifting, at least in the developed nations, toward lighter materials (aluminum, plastics, paper) and toward the recycling of heavier materials (steel, copper, zinc) and of manufactured components. Perhaps most important for the future, however, is the trend toward the "immaterial." The information age is rapidly knitting together a new economy based on immaterial, knowledge-based assets, electronic commerce, and virtual transportation--an economy that is growing much faster than the old economy. We can barely glimpse the networkedworld of the future, but we

can assume it will be much less dependent on natural resources. The reversal in energy use is more clearcut. Energy is in the middle of a 300-year trend away from fossil fuels. After more than 100,000 years of wood use, the global energy system began in the nineteenthcentury to move toward progressively cleaner, less carbon-intensive fuels (shifting from wood to coal to oil to gas). In fact,

global energy system has been systematically proceeding at an average rate of 0.3% per year for the last 150 years, whilethe
economic productivity of energy use has been improving at a rateof about 1% per year. The combined result (1.3% per year) is a healthy rate of reduction in the carbon used (and emitted) in producing a dollar of goods and services around the world. Even though the energyproductivity improvements have thus far been eclipsed by the growth in energy consumption (as more people engage in more economic activity), the trend is telling. The eventual result may be the same as in agriculture, with productivity improvements overtaking aggreg ate demand. In terms of decarbonizing

the decarbonization of the

the energy system, the transition is likely to be complete sometime in the next 75-150 years, depending on how fast we push the innovation process toward a clean, electricity- and hydrogen-based system. We would
eventually get there even without a rigorous push, but as we will see later, the urgency of the climatechange issue may force us to speed up the historical trend by a factor of 2 or 3. The power of technology

These historical trends in agriculture, land use, resource consumption, and energy use point to some profound opportunities for the future. There are at least four major ways in which technology has great potential for helping us achieve a sustainable balance in the twenty-first century The first area of opportunity for technology is in the acceleration of productivity growth. In agriculture, for example, corn yields inthe world today average only about 4 tons per hectare, while the United
States averages 7 tons per hectare and the best Iowa farmer can get 17 tons. Simply

bringing the world as a whole up to today's best practices in the United States would boost farm productivity to unprecedented heights, even without considering what the biological and genetic revolutions may hold in store for
agriculture in the next century As for the overall productivity growth rate in industry and business, we are finally starting to register an increase after nearly 30 years of subpar performance at around 1% growth per year. Computerization appears to be taking hold in the economy in new and fundamental ways, not just in speeding up traditional practices but in altering the economic structure itself. One historical analogy would be the introduction of electric unit drives just after World War I, setting in motion a complete reorganization of the manufacturing Floor and leading to a surge

In the twenty-first century, industrial processes will be revolutionized by new electrotechnologies, including lasers, plasmas, microwaves, and electron beams for materials processing, as well as electrochemical synthesis and electroseparation for chemical processing. Manufacturing will be revolutionized by a host of emerging technology platforms--for example, nanotechnology, biotechnology, biomimetics, high-temperature superconductivity, and network technology including the
in industrial productivity during the 1920s. combining of advanced sensors with information technology to create adaptive, intelligent systems and processes. Future industrial facilities using advanced network technologies will be operated in new ways to simultaneously optimize productivity energy use, materials consumption, and plant emissions. Optimization will extend beyond the immediate facility to webs of facilities supporting industrial and urban ecology with the waste of one stream becoming the feedstock of the next. In the aggregate, the penetration of all the emerging tech nologiesinto the global economy should make it possible to sustain industrial productivity growth rates above 2% per year for many decades.

The same technology platforms will be used to improve the efficiency of land, energy and water use, For example, distributed sensors and controls that enable precision farming can improve crop yields and reduce land and water use. And doubling or even tripling global energy efficiency in the next century is well within our means. Given the
inefficiencies that now exist at every stage in the process--from mining and drilling for fuel through the use of energy in automobiles, appliances, and processes--the overall efficiency of the energy chain is only about 5%. From a social standpoint, accelerating

productivity is not an option but rather an imperative for the future. It is necessary in order to provide the wealth for environmental sustainability, to support anaging population in the industrialized world, and to provide an economic ladder for developing nations. The second area of opportunity for technology lies in its potential to help stabilize global population at 10-12 billion sometime in the twenty-first century, possibly as early as 2075. The key is economics. Global communications, from television to movies to the Internet,have brought an image of the comfortable life of the developed worldinto the homes of the poorest people, firing their own aspirations for a better quality of life, either through economic development in their own country or through emigration to other countries. If we in the developed world can make the basic tools of prosperity--infrastructure, health care, education, and law--more

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accessible and affordable, recent history suggests that the cultural drivers for producing large families will be tempered, relatively quickly and without coercion. But the task is enormous. The physical prerequisites for prosperity in the
global economy are electricity and communications. Today, there are more than 2 billion people living without electricity, or commercial energy in any form, in the very countries where some 5 billion people will be added in the next 50 years. If for no other reason than our enlightened self-interest, we should strive for universal access to electricity, communications, and educational opportunity. We have little choice, because the fate of the developed world is inextricably bound up in the economic and demographic fate of the developingworld. A third, related

opportunity for

technology is in decoupling population growth from land use and, more broadly, decoupling economic growth from natural resource consumption through recycling, end-use efficiency, and industrial ecology. Decoupling population from land use is well under way. According to Grubler, from 1700 to 1850 nearly 2 hectares of land (5 acres) were
needed to support every child born in North America, while in the more crowded and cultivated regions of Europe and Asia only 0.5 hectare (1.2 acres) and 0.2 hectare (0.5 acre) were needed, respectively. During the past century, the amount of land needed per additional child has been dropping in all areas of the world, with Europe and North America experiencing the fastest decreases. Both crossed the "zero threshold" in the past few decades, meaningthat no additional land is needed to support additional children andthat land requirements will continue to decrease in the future. One can postulate that the pattern of returning land to nature will continue to spread throughout the world, eventually stemming and then reversing the current

onslaught on the great rain forests. Time is critical if vast tracts are to be saved from being laid bare, and success will largely depend on how rapidly economic opportunities expand for those now trapped in subsistence and frontier farming. In concept, the potential for returning land to nature is enormous. Futurist and scholar Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University calculates that if farmers could lift average grain yields around the world just to the level of today's average U.S. corn grower, one-half of current global cropland--an area the size of the Amazon basin-could be spared. If agriculture is a leading indicator, then the continuous drive to produce more from less will prevail in other parts of the economy Certainly with shrinking agricultural land requirements, water distribution and use around the world can be greatly altered, since nearly two-thirds of water now goes for irrigation.

lighter, and drier"--that is, more efficient and less

Overall, the technologies of the future will, in the words of Ausubel, be "cleaner, leaner,

wasteful of materials and water. They will be much more tightly integrated through microprocessor-based control and will therefore use human and

Energy intensity, land intensity, and water intensity (and, to a lesser extent, materials intensity) for both manufacturing and agriculture are already heading downward. Only in agriculture are they falling fast enough to offset the surge in population, but, optimistically, advances in science and technology should accelerate the downward trends in other sectors, helping to decouple economic development fromenvironmental impact in the coming century. One positive sign is thefact that recycling
natural resources much more efficiently and productively. rates in North America are now approaching 65% for steel, lead, and copper and 30% for aluminum and paper. A second sign is that economic output is shifting away from resource-intensive products toward knowledge-based, immaterial goods and services. As a result, although the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increased 200-fold (in real dollars) in the twentieth century, the physical weight of our annual output remains the same as it was in 1900. If anything,this trend will be accelerating. As Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wiredmagazine, noted, "The creations most in demand from the United States [as exports] have lost 50% of their physical weight per dollar of value in only six years.... Within a generation, two at most, the number of people working in honest-to-goodness manufacturing jobs will beno more than the number of farmers on the land--less than a few percent. Far more than we realize, the network economy is pulling us all in." Even pollution shows clear signs of being decoupled from population and economic growth. Economist Paul Portney notes that, with the exception of greenhouse gases, "in the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries, the favorable experience [with pollution control] has been a triumph of technology That is, the ratio of pollution per unit of GDP has fallen fast enough in the developed world to offset the increase in both GDP per capita and the growing number of 'capitas' themselves." The fourth opportunity

for science and technology stems from their enormous potential to unlock resources not now available, to reduce human limitations, to create new options for policymakers and businesspeople alike, and to give us new levels of insight into future challenges. Technically resources have little value if we cannot unlock them for practical use. With technology, we are able to bring dormant resources to life.

For example, it was only with the development of anelectrolytic process late in the nineteenth century that aluminum--the most abundant metal on earth--became commercially available and useful. Chemistry unlocked hydrocarbons. And engineering allowed us to extract and put to diverse use untapped petroleum and gas fields. Over the course of history, technology has made the inaccessible accessible, and resource depletion has been more of a catalyst for change than a longstanding problem. Technology provides us with last-ditch methods (what economists would call substitutions) that allow us to circumvent or leapfrog over crises of our own making. Agricultural technology solved the food crisis of the first half of the

nineteenth century. The English "steam crisis" of the 1860s, triggered by the rapid rise of coal-burning steam engines and locomotives,

was averted by mechanized mining and the discovery and use of petroleum. The U.S. "timber crisis" that Teddy Roosevelt publicly worried about was circumvented by the use of chemicals that enabled a billion or so railroad ties to last for decades instead of years. The great "manure crisis" of the same era was solved by the automobile, which in a few decades replaced some 25 million horses and freed up 40 million hectares (100 million acres) of farmland,not to mention improving the sanitation and smell of inner cities. Oil discoveries in Texas and then in the Middle East pushed the pending oil crisis of the 1920s into the future. And the energy cr isis of the 1970s stimulated the development of new sensing and drilling technology, sparked the advance of non--fossil fuel alternatives, and deepened the penetration of electricity with its fuel flexibility into the global economy Thanks to

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underground imaging technology, today's known gas resources are an order of magnitude greater than the resources known 20 years ago, and new reserves continue to be discovered.

Technology has also greatly extended human limits. It has given each of us a productive capability greater than that of 150 workers in 1800, for example, and has conveniently put the power of hundreds of horses in our garages. In recent decades, it has extended our voice and our reach, allowing us to easily send our words, ideas, images, and money around the world at the speed of light. But global sustainability is not inevitable. In spite of the tremendous promise that technology holds for a sustainable future, there is the potential for all of this to backfire before the job can be done. There are disturbing indications that people sometimes turn in fear and anger on technologies,
industries, and institutions that openlyfoster an ever-faster pace of change. The current opposition to nuclear power genetically altered food, the globalization of the economy and the spread of American culture should give us pause. Technology has always presented a two-edged sword, serving as both cause and effect, solving one problem while creating another that was unintended and often unforeseen. We solved the manure crisis, but automotive smog,congestion, and urban sprawl took its place. We cleaned and transformed the cities with all-electric buildings rising thousands of feet into the sky. But while urban pollution was thereby dramatically reduced, a portion of the pollution was shifted to someone else's sky. Breaking limits

"Limits to growth" was a popular theme in the 1970s, and a best-selling book of that name predicted dire consequences for the human race by
the end of the century. In fact, we have done much better than those predictions, largely because of a factor the book missed--the potential of new technology to break limits.

Repeatedly, human societies have approached seemingly insurmountable barriers only to find the means and tools to break through. This ability has now become a source of optimism, an article of faith, in many parts of the world. Today's perceived limits, however, look and feel different. They are global in nature, multicultural, and larger in scale and complexity than ever before. Nearly 2 billion people in the world are without adequate sanitation, and nearly as many are without access to clean drinking water. AIDS is spreading rapidly in the regions of the world least able to fight it. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are more than 30% greater than preindustrial levels and are climbing steadily. Petroleum reserves, expected to be tapped by over a billion automobiles worldwide by 2015, may last only another 50-100 years.And without careful preservation efforts, the biodiversity of the planet could become as threatened in this coming century as it was at the end of the last ice age, when
more than 70% of the species of large mammals and other vertebrates in North America disappeared (along with 29% in Europe and 86% in Australia). All these perceived limits require innovation of a scope and intensity surpassing human kind's current commitment. The list of real-world problems that could thwart global sustainability is long and sobering. It includes war, disease, famine,

political and religious turmoil, despotism, entrenched poverty, illiteracy, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. Technology can help resolve some of these issues--poverty and disease, resource depletion, and environmental impact, for example--but it offers little recourse
for the passions and politics that divide the world. The likelihood is that we will not catch up and overtake the moving target of global sustainability in the coming century, but given the prospects fortechnology, which have never been brighter, we may come surprisinglyclose. We should put our technology to work,

striving to lift more than 5 billion people out of poverty while preventing irreversible damage to the biosphere and irreversible loss of the earth's natural resources. We cannot see the future of technology any more clearly than our forebears did--and for much the same reason. We are approaching the threshold of profound change, moving at great speed across a wide spectrum of technology, ranging
today from the Internet to the Human Genome project. Technology in the twenty-first century will be turning toward biological and ecological analogs, toward microminiature machines, toward the construction of materials atom by atom, and toward the dispersion of microprocessor intelligence into everyday objects subsequently linked into neural networks. Computing power continues to double every 18 months, as postulated in Moore's law, promising to enableus to create much more powerful tools for everyday tasks, optimize business services and processes along new lines, understand complex natural phenomena like the weather and climate, and design technical systems that are self-diagnostic, self-healing, and self-learning. The networked, digital society of the future should be capable o f exponential progress more in tune with biological models of growth than with the incremental progress of industrial societies. If history tells us anything, it is that in the long term we are much more likely to underestimate technology than to overestimate it. We are not unlike the excited crowds that in 1909 tried to imagine the future of flight as they watched Wilbur Wright loop his biplane twice around the Statue of Liberty and head back to Manhattan at the record-breaking speed of 30 miles per hour. As wild as one's imaginationand enthusiasm might have been, it would have been inconceivable that exactly 60 years later humans would fly to the moon and back.

Electricity lies at the heart of the global quest for sustainability for several reasons. It is the prerequisite for the networked world of the future. It will be the enabling foundation of new digital technology and the
Electricity's unique role vehicle on which most future productivity gains in industry, business, and commerce will depend. And to the surprise of many, it will remain the best pathway to resource efficiency, quality of life, and pollution control. In fact, the National Academy of Engineering just voted the "vast network of

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electrification" the single greatest engineering achievement of the twentieth century by virtue of its ability to improve people's quality of life. It came out ahead of the automobile, the airplane, the computer, and even health care in its impact on society. The electricity grids of North America, Europe, and Japan are said to be the most complex machines ever built. Although they are not yet full networks--that is, not every node is connected to every other node--these networks have been sufficiently interconnected to become the central enabling technology of the global economy. They will have to be even more interconnected and complex to keep pace with the microprocessors and digital networks they power. In the developed world, electricity has become almost a transparent technology lost in the excitement surrounding its latest progeny--electronics, computers, the Internet, and so forth. Still, its role should be as profound in this century as it was in the last. "How and in what form global electrification goes forward in the next 50 years will determine, as much as anything, how we resolve the global 'trilemma' posed by population, poverty and pollution," says Kurt Yeager, president and CEO of EPRI. "This trilemma is destined to become a defining issue of the twenty-first century" Chauncey Starr, EPRI's founder, has captured the strong historicalcorrelation between access to electricity economic prosperity and social choices. A large majority of the world's population is now trapped at a low economic level, where the focus of everyday life is on survival and on acquiring the basics now taken for granted in developednations. As Starr shows, only after electricity consumption reaches a threshold of approximately 1000 kWh per capita do people turn theirattention from the basics of immediate survival to the level of "amenities," including education, the environment, and intergenerational investment. Given the chicken-and-egg nature of the process of socialadvancement, it is not possible to point to electricity as the initial spark, but it is fair to say that economic development does not happen today without electricity. Electricity has been extended to more than 1.3 billion people overthe past 25 years, with leveraged economic impact. In South Africa, for example, 10 to 20 new businesses are started for every 100 homes that are electrified. Electricity frees up human labor--reducing the time people spend in such marginal daily tasks as carrying water and wood--and provides light in the evening for reading and studying. These simple basics can become the stepping stones to a better life and a doorway to the global economy. Because electricity can be effectively produced from a wide variety of local energy sources and because it is so precise at the point of use, it is the ideal energy carrier for economic and social development. Distributed electricity generation can be used to achieve basic rural electrification goals in the developing world, thereby helping to counteract the trend toward massiveurbanization. People in rural areas and villages need to have accessto the opportunities and jobs that are now attainable only by migrating to large cities. Electrification should also help with efforts to improve deteriorating urban air quality in the growing megacities of the world. Mortality from respiratory infections may be as much as five times higher in developing countries than in developed countries. The health costs can be debilitating; it is estimated, for example, that the total health cost of air emissions in Cairo alone now exceeds $1 billion per year. How global electrification proceeds--on a large or a small scale, with clean or dirty technology--will influence the planet socially economically and environmentally for centuries. Ultimately our success or failure in this endeavor will bear heavily on whether we can effectively handle the issues of the habitability and biodiversity of the planet. Ironically, electricity may also become the focal point for growing animosity in the coming century, for the simple reason that it is taking on more and more responsibility for society's energy-related pollution. Electricity accounted for only about 25% of the world's energy consumption in 1970. Today in the developed countries, its share of energy consumption is nearly 40%, and by 2050 that figure may reach60-70%. If transportation is fully electrified through fuel cells, hybrids, and the like, electricity's energy share could climb even higher. This growth accentuates the need to ensure that future electricity generation and use are as clean and efficient as possible and thatbest practices and technologies are available to developing countries as well as affluent ones. Fortunately for the world, electricity has the greatest potential of all the energy forms to deliver in the area of environmental stewardship. Roadmap's call to action The Electricity Technology Roadmap Initiative, which was launched by EPRI in 1998, began by bringing representatives of more than 150 diverse organizations together in a series of workshops and meetings to explore ways to enhance the future value of electricity to society.They staked out some ambitious destinations through time, leading tothe ultimate destination of "managing global sustainability." They also established some specific goals to ensure that the tools will be in hand by 2025 to reach various sustainability targets, including universal global electrification, by midcentury. Among these goals are the acceleration of electricity-based innovation and R&D and the benchmarking of our progress toward sustainability. Universal global electrification means bringing everyone in the world to at least the "amenities" level defined by Starr. At this level, it becomes more likely that the rich and poor nations will find common ground for pursuing sustainability policies. The roadmap stakeholders are calling for a bare minimum of 1000 kWh per person per year to be available by 2050. This would raise the average in today's developing countries to around 3000 kWh per person per year in 2050, just above the level in the United States a century earlier, around 1950. Moreover, projections suggest that it will be possible to reduce the energy intensity of economic growth by at least 50% over the next 50 years through universal electrification, with about half the reduction resulting from end-use efficiency improvements. Consequently, the 3000 kWh of 2050 will go much further in powering applications-lighting, space conditioning, industrial processes, computing, communications, and the like--than an equivalent amount of electric energy used in the United States in 1950. Already, for example, the manufacturing and widespread application of compact fluorescent lightbulbs has become a priority in China for reasons of both energy efficiency and export potential. Even with the large efficiency improvements that are anticipated in electricity generation and end use, building enough capacity to supply 9-10 billion people with power will be an enormous challenge. Total global generating capacity requirements for 2050 could reach a daunting 10,000 GW--the equivalent of bringing on-line a 1000-MW power plant somewhere in the world

This is a tall order, and achieving it affordably and with minimal environmental impacts will require an unusual degree of dedicated R&D, supported through public and private collaboration, to accelerate the current pace of technological development. According to the
every two days for the next 50 years.

roadmap stakeholders, reaching the destinations that they have defined calls for at least an additional $4 billion peryear in electricity-related R&D by the United States alone. One of the key destinations, resolution of the energy-environment conflict, would in itself require an additional $2 billion per year in U.S. R&D over the next 10 years to speed up the development of clean power generation. This is more than double the nation's current level of funding in this area from both the public and private sectors. The rate of innovation is especially critical to sustainability. The roadmap participants have concluded that a "2% solution" is neededto support a sustainable future. By this, they mean that productivity improvements in a range of

areas--including global industrial processes, energy intensity, resource utilization, agricultural yield, emissions reduction, and water consumption--have to occur at a pace of 2% or more per year over the next century. If the advances are distributed on a global basis, this pace should be sufficient to keep the world ahead of growing social and environmental threats. It will also generate the global wealth necessary to progressively
eliminate the root cause of these threats and will provide the means to cope with theinevitable surprises that will arise. For example, a 2% annual

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increase in global electricity supply, if made broadly available in developing countries, would meet the goal of providing 1000 kWh per year toevery person in the world in 2050. This means extending the benefitsof electricity to 100 million new users every year. Maintaining

a 2% pace in productivity improvements for a century will be formidable. It is in line with the cumulative advancement in the United States during the twentieth century, but at least twice theworld average over that period. The
disparity has been particularly great in the past 25 years, as population growth has outstripped economic development in many parts of the world. The result has been massive borrowing to maintain or enhance short-term standards of living. Staying ahead of population-related challenges is now in the enlightened self-interest of all the world's peoples, and the 2% solution offers a benchmark for success. Sustaining efficiency gains of 2% per year throughout the twenty-first century would allow essential global economic development to continue while sparing the planet.

example, should help stabilize world population (to the extent that wealth is a primary determinant of population growth), limit atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases to below agreed-upon strat egic limits, provide sufficient food for the bulk of the world's people (as well as the wherewithal to buy it), and return significant amounts of land and water to their natural states. Roadmap participants envision technology

This pace, for

and the spread of liberal capitalism as powerful agents for the 2% solution in that they can stimulate global development and foster worldwide participation in market economies. However, the participants have also

expressed some concern and caution about unbridled globalization overrunning local cultures and societies and creating instability, unrest, and conflict. Atits worst, globalization could lock weaker nations into commodity-production dependencies, leading to a survival-of-the-fittest global economy in which the rich get richer and most of the poor stay poor. Establishing greater dialogue and cooperation among developed and developing nations is therefore considered critical to ensuring that globalization delivers on its promise to be a vehicle of worldwide progress that honors the diversity of nations and peoples. Targets of sustainability There is no single measure of sustainability; rather, it will require continued progress in a wide variety of areas that reflect the growing efficiency of resource utilization, broad improvements in the quality of life for today's impoverished people, and acceleration of the historical shift away from resource-intensive economic activity. The roadmap's sustainability R&D targets provide a first-order approximation of what will be required. In many cases, the targets representa significant stretch beyond today's levels, but they are all technologically achievable. The roadmap sets an optimistic course, certain that

with accelerated R&D and a much stronger technological foundation in hand by 2025, the world could be well on a path to economic and environmental sustainability by midcentury. The goals for sustainability are simply too farreaching to be achieved solely through governmental directives or policy. Rather, they will be reached most readilyvia a healthy, robust global economy in which accelerated technological innovation in the private sector is strongly encouraged and supported by public policy. The challenges of bringing the world to a state of economic and environmental
sustainability in the coming century are immense but not insurmountable. Technology is on the threshold of profound change, quite likely to be broader, faster, and more dramatic in its impact than that which we experienced in the twentieth century. Fortunately, the impact appears to be heading in the

of the leading-edge technology is environmentally friendly and, from today's vantage point, is likely to lead to a global economy that is cleaner, leaner, lighter, and drier; many times more efficient, productive, and abundant; and altogether less invasive and less destructive of the natural world. History teaches us that technology can be a liberating force for humanity, allowing us to break through our own self-made limits as well as those posed by the natural world. The
right direction. Much

next steps will be to extend the benefits of innovation to the billions of people without access and, in the words of Jesse Ausubel, to begin "liberating the environment itself." This entails meeting our needs with far fewer resources by developing a "hydrogen economy, landless agriculture, and industrial ecosystems in which waste virtually disappears....and by broadening our notions of democracy, as well as our view of the ethical standing of trees, owls, and mountains." In many ways, the material abundance and extended human capabilities generated through hundreds of years of technology development have led us to a new understanding and heightened respect for the underlying "technologies of life." Offering four billion years of experience, nature will become one of our best teachers in the new century; we are likely to see new tech nology progressively taking on the character and attributes of living systems. Technology may even begin to disappear into the landscape as microminiaturization and biological design ensue. Still,

though technology is heading in the right direction, what remains principally in question is whether the pace of innovation is adequate to stay ahead of the curve of global problems and whether newadvances in technology can be quickly brought down in cost and readily distributed throughout the world. Can we achieve the 2% solution of progressive improvement in economic productivity, land
and water use, recycling, emissions reduction, and agricultural yield, year afteryear, decade after decade, in nation after nation? It's a formidable

The challenge will be met by making the basic building blocks of innovation--education, R&D, infrastructure, and law--available in full measure to future generations everywhere in the world.
challenge, but with better tools we just might be able to pull it off, If so, the key to success will not be found in one small corner ofthe world.

Thatfuture begins now.

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DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha Another palpable effect of He-3 on Earth would be the political change that the end of the oil monopoly over energy production will bring about. The present tension between Middle Eastern, oil rich nations and western nations might subside once the exclusive power that Middle Eastern countries exert in determining oil production quotas and prices is no longer as critical for global energy production. It is the view of many political analysts today that the Intifadas and the fundamentalist movement that we are experiencing today is in part fueled by the economic boom that oil producing nations are undergoing as a result of high oil prices (Rifkin, 2002). Whether this view holds or not, the situation in the Middle East is prone to change dramatically at the end of the oil age. For once, economies that depend on oil revenue will be forced to diversify their income sources. Such change will bring about revolutionary movements that may very well change the structure of society. Will this result in an even more unequal distribution of power and resources between developing nations and developed nations? Again the answer to this question resides largely upon which nations will have cheap access to energy sources and which are dependent upon others for their energy income. It is here 96 that adherence to the UN treaty prescribing that all space resources should be used for the advancement of mankind is critical. A possible scenario that might follow from this principle would be that a few nations would directly harvest, transport and exploit He-3. For the mining privileges on the Moon, which is noted as belonging to all of mankind, these nations would be obliged to pay either royalties to all nations, or distribute electricity to other nations as a form of payment. This is a positive yet not ideal scenario. It is positive in that under-developed nations would obtain electricity directly and from it could develop industry. Nonetheless, industrialization and economic growth necessitates much more than electricity. It needs international investment and commitment, which might or might not be linked to He-3 or other alternative energy sources.

Middle East relations add on

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Exploration add on
He3 mining catalyzes space exploration preventing extinction DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha
The impalpable effects of He-3 are difficult to anticipate, but they are most likely concerned with the dramatic change in perspective that access to space might bestow upon humans. For the entire history of mankind, the cosmos has always been the source of many romantic visions. In fact the very beginning of science fiction focused much of its interest on space exploration and human expansion into space. The 21st century promises to be the time when these dreams and idealizations will cease to be just that, dreams. Instead, the 21st century might just be the century when humans dive irreversibly

the most powerful reason to explore the stars is to prevent humanitys extinction. The quest for Helium-3 in addition to precious metals for fuel cells can be the catalyst for expansion. A change in energy regime has never been
into outer space. Many claim that

deliberate; instead, changes in energy regime have come about as a result of desperate need for energy sources when the dominating source is rapidly waning. Well, the present 97energy crisis can prove to be the necessary crisis to spark change not only in energy

regime, but most prominently, a change in the history of mankind.

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He3 key to achieving the low temperatures necessary for cryogenics Halperin 2010 (W.P. April 22, Scientist @ Northwestern University, The House Committee on Science & Technology Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight http://gop.science.house.gov/Media/hearings/oversight10/apr22/Halperin.pdf)//Abraha Scientific research at low temperatures is the signature example of an area in which helium-three is irreplaceable. Without adequate supplies, such research will cease entirely. To put the importance of such research in context, I note parenthetically that twelve Nobel Laureates in physics in the past 25 years owe their accomplishments in some important measure to the availability of helium-three. Cases in which
substitutes might be found for helium-three include neutron detection at facilities such as at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, oil and gas well evaluation, building construction technology and the improvement of lasers.

Internal Link: Cryogenics

Halperin 2010 (W.P. April 22, Scientist @ Northwestern University, The House Committee on Science & Technology Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight http://gop.science.house.gov/Media/hearings/oversight10/apr22/Halperin.pdf)//Abraha The rare isotope of helium, 3He, has critical strategic importance. One of its applications is to achieve low temperatures through refrigeration and measuring devices, mostly in the pursuit of fundamental knowledge, providing the essential building blocks for engineering and technology for our future. Cryogenic use of 3He is critical in that there is no alternative to reaching a range of more than 4 orders of magnitude of temperature from 1 K to as low as 10-4 K. Here basic scientific investigations require 3He for the study of quantum systems, including information technology, magnetism, and superconductivity. Its recent short supply and extraordinary high price has posed serious problems for the scientific community. The purpose of this survey was to document as accurately as possible world-wide use of 3He in the past ten years as a
framework for future cryogenic allocations and to evaluate the impact of research that uses 3He.

Cryogenics is impossible without Helium 3 Hecht 2k10(April 19, Jeff Nuclear security push bleeding cryogenic science dry http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18789-nuclear-security-push-bleeding-cryogenic-sciencedry.html)//Abraha
The decay of tritium, the radioactive heavy-hydrogen isotope used in nuclear weapons, long produced more helium-3 than could be used. But the US stopped making new tritium in 1988, and so the remaining supply has been dwindling as it decays. Around a decade ago, the stockpiles of tritium and helium-3 seemed adequate, with only about 10,000 litres used each year, largely in neutron detection and cryogenics. Yet that changed with the deployment of neutron detectors in security systems searching for illicit plutonium and other nuclear materials. Nearly 60,000 litres of helium-3 were used per year in 2007 and 2008, about 80 per cent for neutron detection. "Everyone who uses helium-3 is getting pinched," says William Halperin of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He hadn't realised there was a shortage until 2008, when

he could find no gas for his cryogenics lab. Fridges on ice "Without helium-3 we will not have a means for refrigeration to do scientific research below 1 kelvin. It's absolutely necessary," Halperin says. Existing refrigerators will continue working, but new ones can't be built, which is preventing the study of quantum computing and other fields that require extreme cold.

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Internal Link: Terrorism

He-3 is necessary for detection technology and stopping terrorism Hagan 2k10 (William K, April 22, Acting Director of Domestic Nuclear Detection Office in the Department of
Homeland Security "Caught by Surprise: Causes and Consequences of the Helium-3 Supply Crisis http://gop.science.house.gov/Media/hearings/oversight10/apr22/Hagan.pdf)//Abraha
The United States supply of He-3 has traditionally come from the decay of tritium, which the nation previously produced in large quantities as part of the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise. The

suspension of U.S. production of tritium in the late 1980s, however, resulted in a reduction in the amount of He-3 available for harvest. Currently, a significant portion of He-3 is used for neutron detection to aid in the prevention of nuclear terrorism. He-3 has become the overwhelmingly predominant technology used for this purpose; the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense (DoD), and Energy (DOE) each have nuclear detection programs that use He-3-based sensors. Additionally, 2 He-3 is finding increasingly widespread use in areas beyond homeland security, including scientific research, medical, and industrial applications. Some of these applications may require relatively large volumes of He-3 for which there may be no known alternative. In the past, He-3 was a relatively low-cost commodity, and its use increased particularly with the advent of large radiation portal monitors both domestically and abroad. The limited supply of He-3, which is based on the nations current stores of tritium, has been overwhelmed by this increase in demand. The current and future He-3 supply will fail to satisfy the demand of interagency partners and the
commercial sector. Only approximately one tenth of the current demand for He-3 will be available from DOE/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for the foreseeable future, and

neutron detectors using He-3 are already becoming difficult to procure.

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Plan key to prevent smuggling of bombs Hedman 2006 (Eric R., January 16, Hedman is the chief technology officer of Logic Design Corporation and Kulcinski has spent the last two decades studying how to develop feasible fusion reactors using helium-3 part of the NASA Advisory Council. A fascinating hour with Gerald Kulcinski http://www.thespacereview.com/article/536/1)//Abraha
We discussed what it would take to collect power out of the reactor and to advance it where it produced more power than it consumes. The fusion reaction happens when two helium-3 nuclei collide and fuse. Each has two protons and one neutron. The result is one helium-4 nucleus (or alpha particle) and two highly energetic protons. Since a protonunlike neutrons produced by deuterium-tritium reactionshas a charge, it can be captured by a reverse particle accelerator inducing a current directly converting the power to electricity, avoiding the need for a heated working fluid to spin a turbine connected to a generator. One of Professor Kulcinskis graduate assistants is working on a solid-state device to capture the protons and convert the energy in them directly to electricity in a process not too different than a solar cell. We also discussed the potential for small helium-3

Internal Link: Prolif

reactors producing the isotope oxygen-15 for medical imaging (PET scans), and as a production source for neutrons for detection of explosive or fissionable materials (delayed neutron emission) to prevent nuclear proliferation. Relatively portable neutron sources can be used to detect landmines and bombs in suitcases. He3 prevents prolif Shea and Morgan 2k10 (Dana A., Daniel, December 22, Specialist in Science and Technology Policy, CRS Report for Congress-The Helium-3 Shortage: Supply, Demand, and Options for Congress) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41419.pdf )//Abraha Helium-3 has properties that currently make it in high demand. Like all helium, helium-3 is nontoxic. Helium3 also absorbs neutrons. This property has resulted in its widespread use for neutron detection. Neutron detection is a key component of applications in national and homeland security, industry, and science. For example, the federal government uses radiation portal monitors and other neutron detectors at the U.S. border to prevent smuggling of nuclear and radiological material, and the oil and gas industry uses neutron detectors for well logging.

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Internal Link: Fossil Fuel reliance [A2: no he3 on moon]

Radyuhin 2004 (Vladimir, Jan 26, Moon plan to give U.S. control over energy sources http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/26/stories/2004012600601500.htm)//Abraha MOSCOW, JAN. 25. The United States is planning to use the Moon as a source of energy fuel that should help it establish ultimate supremacy on the Earth, a Russian newspaper said. An ambitious programme to build a manned base on the Moon by 2020 unveiled by the U.S. President, George W. Bush, earlier this month was not a re-election gimmick as American and international media described it, but a strategic economically project, the authoritative Izvestianewspaper said. A lunar base will enable the U.S. to bring back to Earth shiploads of Helium-3, a valuable fuel for thermonuclear reactors, which is abundant on the Moon but practically absent on the Earth. The newspaper quoted academician, Erick Galimov, as saying that a couple of shuttle spacecraft can bring to Earth enough liquified Helium-3 to meet all global energy needs for 12 months. "If we had a thermonuclear reactor technology, it would be economically more efficient to deliver Helium-3 from the Moon today than generate power from fossil fuels or uranium," said Mr. Galimov, who heads the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "Using Helium-3 in thermonuclear synthesis may prove the best way to meet global energy needs." The paper draws attention to the fact that the 2020 deadline Mr. Bush set for building a lunar base coincides with the expected construction of a thermonuclear reactor and a global energy crisis. With energy consumption in industrially developed countries growing at a rate of 10 per cent a year, thermonuclear power stations may be the only way to overcome an impending energy crux. "Helium is ideal ecologically-safe fuel for thermonuclear technology," Mr. Galimov said. "The cost of bringing Helium from the Moon will be a fraction of the price of electric power generated today at nuclear plants." The Moon has an estimated 500 million tonnes of Helium-3 trapped in the upper layers of the lunar rock, whereas the Earth may have no more than a few hundred kg of the isotope, which is moreover embedded deep inside our planet. The Moon colonisation plan announced by Mr. Bush will "enable the U.S. to establish its control of the global energy market 20 years from now and put the rest of the world on its knees as hydrocarbons run out," the daily said. He3 solves energy, theres a million tons of it on the moon Wakefield 2k (Julie, June 30, Moons Helium 3 could power the earth http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/pdf/space_com063000.pdf)//Abraha Researchers and space enthusiasts see helium 3 as the perfect fuel source: extremely potent, nonpolluting, with virtually no radioactive by-product. Proponents claim its the fuel of the 21st century. The trouble is, hardly any of it is found on Earth. But there is plenty of it on the moon. Society is straining to keep pace with energy demands, expected to increase eightfold by 2050 as the world population swells toward 12 billion. The moon just may be the answer. Helium 3 fusion energy may be the key to future space exploration and settlement, said Gerald Kulcinski, Director of the fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Scientists estimate there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States energy needs for a year, according to Apollo17 astronaut and FTI researcher Harrison Schmitt. Cash crop of the moon When the solar wind, the rapid stream of charged particles emitted by the sun, strikes the moon, helium 3 is deposited in the powdery soil. Over billions of years that adds up. Meteorite bombardment disperse the particles throughout the top several meters of the lunar surface.

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Helium 3 could be the cash crop of the moon, said Kulcinski, a longtime advocate and leading pioneer in the field, who envisions the moon becoming the Hudson bay of Store of Earth. Today helium 3 would have a cash value of $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil, he estimates. When the moon becomes an independent country, it will have something to trade. Aff solves and its on the moon Irvine 2006 (Dean, December 18, Mining the moon for a nuclear future http://articles.cnn.com/2006-12-18/tech/fs.moonmining_1_helium-3-moon-base-nuclear-fusion? _s=PM:TECH)//Abraha The race to return to the moon is on. Earlier this month NASA unveiled its mission statement to revisit earth's satellite and create a
permanent base there. While it may become the jumping off point for further exploration of our solar system and beyond, there are more earthly prizes in sight, with some scientists believing that it has the potential to solve the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

Mining the moon for fuel used in nuclear fusion reactors is among NASA's 200-plus set of mission goals and could precipitate another reason for other countries and private investors to join future lunar exploration. The substance that has such large potential is an isotope called helium-3, a form of helium but with only one neutron instead of two.
It is extremely rare on earth as it is created during very active nuclear reactions, most commonly found on the surface of the sun, but here can only be found as a by-product of the maintenance of nuclear weapons. Experts have estimated that the moon is a rich depository of the

isotope with possible reserves that stretch meters down into the lunar soil that have been carried there by solar winds. What makes helium-3 so attractive as an alternative future fuel source is its environmentally friendly credentials, as it does not produce radioactive waste. However, while mining helium-3 from the moon will be one challenge,
extracting energy from it is another, as it relies on nuclear fusion, rather than fission used in today's nuclear reactors. Scientists have been working to prove nuclear fusion works but much of it still remains theoretical. It is thought to be at least 50 years from being proven to work on a large scale. The potential, though, is enormous. It has been estimated that about 25 tons of helium-3, equal to just one payload of a space shuttle, would

provide enough energy for the U.S. for a year at current consumption levels. While NASA aim to have a moon base by 2025
other space agencies and companies have expressed an interest in the moon and its potential energy reserves. "We are planning to build a permanent base on the moon by 2015 and by 2020 we can begin the industrial-scale delivery... of the rare isotope helium-3," said Nikolai Sevastianov, head of Russian space vehicle manufacturer Energia, at a seminar in Moscow in January. His bold statement might have been more of a publicity drive for Energia rather than a clear commitment to a program, but China, which has committed itself to a space program to land men on the moon by 2017 has also stated its interest in helium-3. "China's lunar project can incorporate the mining of helium-3 (HE-3) as a new, clean, efficient, safe and

cheap nuclear fusion fuel. The foreign sales and internal uses of HE-3 will help offset the high price of maintaining a lunar base," wrote Stacey
Solomone from the University of Hawaii in an article in Futures Research Quarterly.

Plan is key Blomfield 2007(Adrian, 01 May, Russia sees moon plot in NASA plans http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1550246/Russia-sees-moon-plot-in-Nasa-plans.html)//Abraha the United States is seeking to deny Russia access to an isotope in abundance under the moon's surface that many believe could replace fossil fuels and even end the threat of global warming.
The claim comes amid suspicion in Moscow that A new era of international co-operation in space supposedly dawned after the United States, Russia and other powers declared their intention to send humans to the moon for the first time since 1972. But while Nasa has lobbied for support from Britain and the European Space Agency, Russia claims its offers have been rebuffed. Yesterday Anatoly Perminov, the head of Russia's Federal Space Agency Roscosmos, said: "We are ready to co-operate but for some reason the United States has announced that it will carry out the programme itself. Strange as it is, the United States is short of experts to implement the programme." Nasa announced in December that it was planning to build an international base camp on one of the Moon's poles, permanently staffing it by 2024. Russia's space rocket manufacturer Energia revealed an even more ambitious programme last August, saying it would build a permanent Moon base by 2015. While the Americans have either been coy or dismissive on the subject, Russia openly says the main purpose of its lunar programme is the industrial extraction of helium-3. Dismissed by critics as a 21st-century equivalent of the medieval alchemist's fruitless quest to turn lead into gold, some scientists say helium-3

could be the answer to the world's energy woes. A non-radioactive isotope of helium, helium-3 is a proven and potent fuel for nuclear fusion - so potent that just six metric tons would supply Britain with enough energy for a year.

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As helium-3 is non-polluting and is so effective in such tiny quantities, many countries are taking it very seriously. Germany, India and China, which will launch a lunar probe to research extraction techniques in September, are all studying ways to mine the isotope. "Whoever conquers the moon first will be the first to benefit," said Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist of China's lunar programme.
Energia says it will start "industrial scale delivery" of helium-3, transported by cargo space ships via the International Space Station, no later than 2020. Gazprom, the state-owned energy giant directly controlled by the Kremlin, is said to be strongly supportive of the project. The United States has appeared much more cautious, not least because scientists are yet to discover the secrets of large scale nuclear fusion. Commercial fusion reactors look unlikely to come on line before the second half of this century. But many officials in Moscow's space programme believe Washington's lunar agenda is driven by a desire to monopolise helium-3 mining. They allege that President Bush has moved helium-3 experts into key positions on Nasa's advisory council. The plot, says Erik Galimov, an academic with the Russian Academy of Sciences, would "enable the US to establish its control of the

energy market 20 years from now and put the rest of the world on its knees as hydrocarbons run out." Its on the moon, its safe, and solves energy DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha He-3 is a heavy isotope of noble gas helium and is present everywhere in the universe in varying amounts. The Earths supply of He-3 is negligible, but the mineral was found in abundant quantities in soil samples taken from the lunar regolith in 1972 in the exploratory mission, Apollo 17, led by NASA. Since then, there has been considerable interest among physicists, geologists, social scientists and economists in extracting and using the He-3 available in the Moon. The major arguments for the exploration of He-3 are as follows: firstly, it has a high energy density when combined with deuterium in a fusion reaction, hence only small amounts of He-3 are required to supply the same amount of energy as large volumes of oil. Secondly, the low radioactive waste emission and the safety of a He-3 fusion reaction are very attractive attributes when compared to the high safety risks inherent in fission reactors used in nuclear power plants today. Furthermore, He-3 provides us with the opportunity of exploring and settling a permanent base on the Moon, which would give us a solid base for further space exploration.

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Theres enough He3 on the moon to power the United States for over a millennium Associated Press 2004 (January 20, US: UW scientists want to mine moon energy http://www.energybulletin.net/node/192) Two University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists believe moon rocks contain all the energy the United States needs for the next millennium. The moons surface is full of the energy source helium-3, said Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineering professor and director of the
MADISON Fusion Technology Institute at UW.

If we could land the space shuttle on the moon, fill the cargo with canisters of helium-3 mined from the surface and bring the shuttle back to Earth, that cargo would supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year, he said.
President Bushs plan to create a permanent lunar base brings Kulcinski and others at the institute hope for their idea. Kulcinski said he does not know of any other institution that is working on helium-3 fusion. John Santarius, a professor at the Fusion Technology Institute, said helium-3 provides one million times more energy per pound

than a ton of coal. Fusion of helium-3 does not produce greenhouse emissions, and mining it would do little environmental harm,
Kulcinski said.

The moon doesnt have air or water. So, there wont be any of that kind of pollution, he said. Helium-3 is found in the top few feet of lunar soil. To access it, miners would shovel up the surface, bake it and isolate the gas, Santarius said.
Since 1985, Kulcinski, Santarius and others at UW have thought about the possibility of harnessing the energy of helium-3 through fusion, which combines atoms to create energy. Fission, which is the process used in nuclear reactors, splits atoms. We came at it from an energy standpoint, Kulcinski said. We were looking for a long-term economical and safe form of

energy.

The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in. The team estimates the moon probably holds more than 1 million metric tons of helium-3

on its surface, more than

enough energy to provide the nation with more than 1,000 years of electricity.

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The use of He3 has skyrocketed and theres hardly any left on Earth Shea and Morgan 2k10 (Dana A., Daniel, December 22, Specialist in Science and Technology Policy, CRS Report for Congress-The Helium-3 Shortage: Supply, Demand, and Options for Congress) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41419.pdf )//Abraha The world is experiencing a shortage of helium-3, a rare isotope of helium with applications in homeland security, national security, medicine, industry, and science. For many years the supply of helium-3 from the nuclear weapons program outstripped the demand for helium-3. The demand was small enough that a substantial stockpile of helium-3 accumulated. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal government began deploying neutron detectors at the U.S. border to help secure the nation against smuggled nuclear and radiological material. The deployment of this equipment created new demand for helium-3. Use of the polarized helium-3 medical imaging technique also increased. As a result, the size of the stockpile shrank. After several years of demand exceeding supply, a call for large quantities of helium-3 spurred federal officials to realize that insufficient helium-3 was available to meet the likely future demand. As a matter of fact, itll all be gone in 2 years AAAS 2011(February 19, American Association for the Advancement of Science http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2011/webprogram/Session2838.html)//Abraha Helium-3 (He-3) is a rare helium isotope with unique properties that have led to uses in nuclear medicine, ultra-cold refrigeration, detecting smuggled fissile materials, safeguarding nuclear weapons and power plants, oil and gas exploration, and, potentially, nuclear fusion. He-3 is a decay product of tritium, a key component in advanced U.S. nuclear weapons. The production of tritium was halted in 1988 and only restarted in 2007, at a much lower rate. Within 2 years, He-3 stocks will essentially be depleted, and its anticipated annual production rate will fill only one-tenth of its recent demand. This has been a significant hardship for several of the fields that use He-3, since there is simply no suitable replacement. In other fields, such as neutron detection, significant

Low He3 supply

progress has been made over the last 1218 months in identifying, commercializing, and deploying new technologies. This symposium will examine how the U.S. government has restructured how He-3 is allocated, what new technologies are available as He-3 replacements, what the U.S. government is doing to increase supplies, and how affected industries have adapted to this crisis. We will also explore how this shortage may have been a boon to science by forcing the development of new technologies and techniques and how international consumers of He-3, largely dependent on U.S. supplies of the gas, have responded to the supply crunch.

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He3 ends dependency

Plan solves for oil and middle east dependency DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha Energy is the most important driving force for powering industrial nations. In fact, a measure of a countrys industrialization
is its annual energy consumption. Fossil fuels like coal, petroleum and natural gas are the chief means by which most nations get their energy. Because of the worlds increasing standards of living and its increased dependence on oil, fossil fuel amounts might not last longer than a few

decades. Also with the worlds population expanding to almost 12 billion by the year 2050, our oil demand will also increase drastically. Oil has become a key issue in the political and economic affairs of many nations especially after the United States second war with Iraq. In such cases of crisis, the development of He-3 will alleviate the dependency on crude oil. Fossil fuels also release a lot of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that have detrimental effects on the atmosphere, whereas the usage of He-3 fusion technology will be a great substitute to the fossil fuels as it doesnt release any harmful byproducts. In addition to the non- polluting properties of He-3 fusion on Earth, the mining of He-3 from the Moon will not contaminate the Moon as the gases that are released during the extraction process (water and oxygen) arent harmful, and instead could be used for sustaining a lunar colony as outlined in the technical section. The United States leads the research in He-3. In 2004, President Bush released his

new vision of space exploration. He wants to complete the International Space Station by the year 2010. The completion of this project will greatly increase the working research on the lunar mining of He3 as the astronauts can experiment on different techniques to extract He-3 from the Moons regolith. The International Space stations could be used a trade center for the distribution of He-3 for world wide distribution. Another goal of the current White House administration is that NASA returns to the Moon by 2015 and to have a permanent living settlement for astronauts by 2020. President Bush has allocated 12 million dollars to the Moon Development Initiative. This initiative would help tremendously in the progress in the He-3 research if a permanent colony is established on the Moon (Hurtack,

The developed world would no longer have to depend on the Middle East , where the most of the worlds fossil fuel reserves are located, for its energy supply. American scientists have already declared that the Moon could be the Persian Gulf of the present century. Two liters of He-3 would do the work of more than 1,000 tons of coal (Chowdhuri, 2004).
2004).

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A2: Alt causes/cant solve [air pollution]

They say _____, but they concede a couple of arguments, the A) our 1AC PM 04 evidence is responsive to these claims, the mining of Helium 3 would not only solve for reliance on fossil fuels, but also lead the world in clean technology B) Even if we dont solve for all of air pollution around the globe we control the biggest internal link to solving, the US is responsible for a quarter of all CO2 Woolf and brown 2k5 (Marie Woolf in London and Colin Brown in Moscow June 13, 2005 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0613-02.htm)//Abraha The United States constitutes 4 per cent of the world population. It is responsible for a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions - an average of 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide is released by each US citizen every year - the highest of any country in the world, and more than China, India and Japan combined. And, fossil fuel uses in the US are the largest source of air pollution that kills 70,000 each year, its the largest source of air pollution in the world, and only we solve Dr. Sovacool, & Cooper,2k 7 *Senior Research Fellow for the Network for New Energy Choices in New York and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, VA and ** Executive Director of the Network for New Energy Choices (Benjamin K. Sovacool, also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Christopher Cooper, Renewing America: The Case for Federal Leadership on a National Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), Network for New Energy Choices Report No. 01-07, June, 2007, http://www.newenergychoices.org/dev/uploads/RPS%20Report_Cooper_Sovacool_FINAL_HILL.pdf) C. Air Quality Conventional electricity generation is by far the largest source of air pollutants that harm human health and contribute to global warming. In 2003, for example, fossil fuel use (for all energy sectors, not just electricity) was responsible for 99 percent of the countrys carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, 93 percent of its sulfur dioxide (SOx) emissions, and 96 percent of its nitrous oxides emissions (NOx).269 Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that the air pollution from conventional energy sources kills between 50,000 and 70,000 Americans every year. These researchers found that the emissions from just 9 power plants in Illinois directly contributed to an annual risk of 300 premature deaths, 14,000 asthma attacks, and more than 400,000 daily incidents of upper respiratory symptoms among the 33 million people living within 250 miles of the plants.271

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They misunderstand the moon treaty, it simply doesnt allow space colonies, but does allow extracting resources, even if it didnt, the US hasnt signed it, means it doesnt violate international law DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha The phrase the Moon shall be the province of all mankind has created controversy among nations. This is because
the way the sentence is phrased sounds like it means that all the resources of space belong to all nations and the use or extraction by one nation is against this treaty. On the other hand, it actually meant to say that no single country could claim outer space or other celestial

A2: Moon treaty & PA CP

bodies as colonies, but it permits the use of the resources (Graham, 1995). Due to this misinterpretation of the Treaty many nations havent signed it yet. The fact that the wealth obtained from the Moon has to be shared with all the nations of the world equally does not give the private-sector a chance of developing their own lunar economic development business. The ethical issues arise when profits are earned by these businesses and supporters of the Moon as the
province of mankind principle demand distribution of the benefits and profits from commercial lunar development (Livingston, 2000). According to the Moon Treaty, an international agency is to be created which will be responsible for and capable of distributing lunar resources equitably. However,

political and economic tensions might rise between developing nations and developed nations making any attempt to enforce the Moon as the province of mankind principle a questionable proposition. Even if an international organization could be created to distribute benefits equally and fairly among nations, no private investor would be willing to invest capital on the Moon if it would obtain no return on its investment. In reality, the Moon as the province of mankind principle is a serious hurdle for the private sector in creating lunar-based businesses (Livingston, 2000). Thus, its up to governmental organizations of nations to develop any interests they have on the Moon.

As of now, the Treaty has not been accepted by all the members of the UN. The nations that have ratified them are Australia, Austria, Chile, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, and Uruguay. In addition, the agreement has been signed, but not ratified, by five countries: France, Guatemala, India, Peru, and Romania.3 Article 11 of the Treaty states that, Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon, nor

any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international 55 intergovernmental or non- governmental organization, national organization or nongovernmental entity or of any natural person. The placement of personnel, space vehicles, equipment, facilities, stations and installations on or below the surface of the Moon, including structures connected with its surface or subsurface, shall not create a right of ownership over the surface or the subsurface of the Moon or any areas thereof (Graham, 1995)It is interesting to note that the nations that have ratified the Treaty have no ongoing lunar exploration activities and that the current main players in the Moon race, the United States, China and Russia which have ongoing lunar projects, have not signed and ratified the treaty. Although it bans appropriation of lunar territory, the Space Treaty
does contemplate the use of lunar material for scientific purposes and for technological development. The Space Law consultant Amanda Lee More, says that the principle of non-appropriation is sufficiently normative in character so as to be considered a valid principle of international law both in treaty and costume.

Whoever gets there first has control, and wont allow anyone else resources Beljac 7 (Marko, Ph.D. Monash University, He-3 Nuclear Fusion and Moon Wars, Science and Global Security (Blog), 5-22, http://sciencesecuri....com/43875.html)//Abraha
"Whoever conquers the moon first will be the first to benefit," said Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist of China's lunar programme
China is planning to send up a lunar orbiter in September. The interesting thing is that this opens up the possibility of Total Recall (Ok, this Arnie flick was set on Mars but you get the deal) style Moon wars,
But many officials in Moscow's space programme believe Washington's lunar agenda is driven by a desire to monopolise helium-3 mining. They allege that President Bush has moved helium-3 experts into key positions on Nasa's advisory council. The plot, says Erik Galimov, an academic with the Russian Academy of Sciences, would "enable the US to establish its control of the energy market 20 years from now and put the rest of the world on its knees as hydrocarbons run out."

If the worlds energy supply is to be dominated by Helium-3 fusion then it follows that whoever controls the Moon controls the Earth just like whoever controls the Middle East has critical leverage in international relations. Helium-3 would become a resource worth fighting for.
But, alas, lets put this into some perspective. Firstly, He-3 mining may well be uneconomical, Indeed for now, the economics of extracting and transporting helium 3 from the moon are also problematic. Even if scientists solved the physics of helium 3 fusion, "it would be economically unfeasible,"asserted Jim Benson, chairman of Space Dev in Poway, California, which strives to be one of the first commercial space-exploration companies. "UnlessI'm mistaken, you'd have to strip-mine large surfaces of the moon."

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While it's true that to produce roughly70 tons of helium 3, for example, a million tons of lunar soil would needto be heated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius) to liberatethe gas, proponents say lunar strip mining is not the goal. "There's enough in the Mare Tranquillitatis alone to last for several hundred years," Schmitt said.

The moon would be a stepping stone to other helium 3-rich

sources, such as the atmospheres of Saturn and Uranus

Secondly, nuclear fusion as a practical source of energy, even based on first generation fusion reactions, is a long way off. He-3 is even harder, but possible in principle.

But the interest in the Moon by Washington, Moscow and Beijing (perhaps also the EU) is very interesting and if He-3 fusion is driving the agenda then it certainly opens up the prospect of conflict on the Moon and creates a perverse logic behind moves to weaponise space. If the US achieves space control it would have the ability to deny Moscow and Beijing the use of near Earth orbit, let alone the Moon and other sources of energy in the Solar System.

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A2: Moon will run out of He3

First, the amount we have now will last for thousands of years and research will have advanced to the point where we have multiple alternatives Wakefield 2k (Julie, June 30, Moons Helium 3 could power the earth http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/pdf/space_com063000.pdf)//Abraha Researchers and space enthusiasts see helium 3 as the perfect fuel source: extremely potent, nonpolluting, with virtually no radioactive by-product. Proponents claim its the fuel of the 21st century. The trouble is, hardly any of it is found on Earth. But there is plenty of it on the moon. Society is straining to keep pace with energy demands, expected to increase eightfold by 2050 as the world population swells toward 12 billion. The moon just may be the answer.
Helium 3 fusion energy may be the key to future space exploration and settlement, said Gerald Kulcinski, Director of the fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Scientists estimate there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands

of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States energy needs for a year, according to Apollo17 astronaut and FTI researcher Harrison Schmitt.
Cash crop of the moon

When the solar wind, the rapid stream of charged particles emitted by the sun, strikes the moon, helium 3 is deposited in the powdery soil. Over billions of years that adds up. Meteorite bombardment disperse the particles throughout the
top several meters of the lunar surface.

Helium 3 could be the cash crop of the moon, said Kulcinski, a longtime advocate and leading pioneer in the field, who envisions the
moon becoming the Hudson bay of Store of Earth. Today helium 3 would have a cash value of $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil, he estimates. When the moon becomes an independent country, it will have something to trade.

Second, mining the moon is just the starting point to other He3 rich sources DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha
For the topic of a He-3 mining venture, Mr. Dietzler has some interesting views. He believes that by the end of this century we might be on the Moon and using lunar resources to build on the Moon, and that there could also be space tourism. In this case, He-3 would expand the horizon for further lunar activities and uses. And if we use this He-3 from the Moon as the primary source for energy on the Moon, it would last for about 200 years. But we would also use terrestrial energy sources like biofuels, hydroelectric and geothermal sources, which would make the He-3, last even longer. Mr. Dietzler makes another interesting point that after we mine He-3 successfully from the Moon, we could use He-3 power fusion rockets

to travel to other planets, like Uranus, and mine even more He-3. He believes that mining on the Moon would just be a start towards more future mining explorations

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Process is simple, and the startup costs would easily be made up Popular Mechanics 2k4(December 7, Mining The Moon, science magazine, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283056)//Abraha

A2: Process expensive/difficult/cant extract

Samples collected in 1969 by Neil Armstrong during the first lunar landing showed that helium-3 concentrations in lunar soil are at least 13 parts per billion (ppb) by weight. Levels may range from 20 to 30 ppb in undisturbed soils. Quantities as small as 20 ppb may seem too trivial to consider. But

at a projected value of $40,000 per ounce, 220 pounds of helium-3 would be worth about $141 million.
Because the concentration of helium-3 is extremely low, it would be necessary to process large amounts of rock and soil to isolate the material. Digging a patch of lunar surface roughly three-quarters of a square mile to a depth of about 9 ft. should yield about 220 pounds of helium-3--enough

to power a city the size of Dallas or Detroit for a year. Although considerable lunar soil would have to be processed, the mining costs would not be high by terrestrial standards. Automated machines might perform the work. Extracting the isotope would not be particularly difficult. Heating and agitation release gases trapped in the soil. As the vapors are cooled to absolute zero, the various gases present sequentially separate out of the mix. In the final step, special membranes would separate helium-3 from ordinary helium. The total estimated cost for fusion development, rocket development and starting lunar operations would be about $15 billion. The International Thermonuclear Reactor Project, with a current estimated cost of $10 billion for a proof-of-concept reactor, is just a small part of the necessary development of tritium-based fusion and does not include the problems of commercialization and waste disposal.
Inexpensive, profitable and easily done DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha
Mr. Galimov, a scientist at the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences believes that Russia can compete with the United States in the race for the Moon again. He believes that Russia can afford an economically profitable and

inexpensive project to mine He-3 on the Moon and will cost only about a mere $25-30 millions to extract He-3 by warming lunar soil and scraping it from the surface of the Moon with the help of lunar bulldozers (Radyuhin, 2004).

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A2: no fusion/long timeframe

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Note: This argument is true, the technologys a good 30-50 years off, but make arguments about why the US has to get their first to 1) maintain energy leadership 2) so we can actually obtain the helium3 before other countries do and 3) what matters is who gets the He3 first, even if the technologys not here yet. Additionally probably makes their DAs inevitable He-3 reactors already exist Hedman 2006 (Eric R., January 16, Hedman is the chief technology officer of Logic Design Corporation and Kulcinski has spent the last two decades studying how to develop feasible fusion reactors using helium-3 part of the NASA Advisory Council. A fascinating hour with Gerald Kulcinski http://www.thespacereview.com/article/536/1)//Abraha Professor Kulcinskis lab is running the only helium-3 fusion reactor in the world. He has an annual research budget that is barely into six figures and allows him to have five graduate research assistants working on the project. Compared to what has been spent on other fusion projects around the world, the teams accomplishments are impressive. Helium-3 would not require a tokomak reactor like the multibillion-dollar one being developed for the international ITER project. Instead, his design uses an electrostatic field to contain the plasma instead of an electromagnetic field. His current reactor contains spherical plasma roughly ten centimeters in diameter. It can produce a sustained fusion with 200 million reactions per second producing about a milliwatt of power while consuming about a kilowatt of power to run the reactor. It is nuclear power without highly radioactive nuclear waste.

--A2: no reactor

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He3 key to economic development and is only 30 years off but we must get it before China Hedman, 2006 (Eric R., January 16, Hedman is the chief technology officer of Logic Design Corporation and Kulcinski has spent the last two decades studying how to develop feasible fusion reactors using helium-3 part of the NASA Advisory Council. A fascinating hour with Gerald Kulcinski http://www.thespacereview.com/article/536/1)//Abraha
After our discussion on what it takes to inspire young people to enter technical fields our conversation drifted back to my original reason for wanting the interview, nuclear fusion using helium-3. Most nuclear fusion research is on reactors that use a deuterium-tritium fuel cycle. Helium-3 is not

--A2: no fusion/timeframe

used anywhere else because the supply on Earth is so very limited. The limited supply on Earth is what makes the connection
between Professor Kulcinski and NASA so very intriguing. Imagine a world thirty years from now. NASA has led the way to returning humans to the Moon and is in the final steps of preparing for human exploration and settlement of Mars. On Earth our environment is cleaner with reliable fusion reactors steadily replacing coal-fired plants and fission reactors. The fuel for these reactors is being mined from the surface of the Moon relegating the mercury, radium and carbon dioxide-laced exhaust from coal-fired plants to the ash heap of history. The growth of highly radioactive

waste from fission power plants is following coal into history. Dependency on highly volatile regions of our planet for energy supplies is steadily diminishing. Clean power is allowing economic development of the world to continue, lifting a higher and higher percentage of the population out of poverty. Is this a possible future for our country and the planet? Professor Kulcinski and his small team of researchers just might have the answer and NASA might provide access to the key enabling resource. The deuterium-tritium fuel cycle has some inherent problems that might be extremely
difficult to overcome. A deuterium-tritium fuel cycle releases eighty percent of its energy in a stream of high-energy neutrons. These neutrons are highly destructive to anything they strike, including the containment vessel. Tritium is a highly radioactive isotope of hydrogen that is hard to contain with the risk of release. Radiation damage to structures may weaken them and leave highly radioactive waste behind as components need to be replaced and when reactors are decommissioned. It wasnt long after the development of the atom bomb that development work on thermonuclear weaponsthe hydrogen bombwas started. Physicists already knew that fusion as a power source was theoretically possible. It wasnt until the seventies, though, that scientists started trying to develop the technology to do it. A roadmap was laid out to try to get it to work. Thirty

years later were still thirty years away from commercially-viable fusion reactors based on current development plans. Most qualified experts agree, itll be here within a decade Kulcinski 2006 (Gerald, February 17, PhD Nuclear Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, NASA Advisory Council, Fellow at the American Nuclear Society, HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha
The fusion power plant faces an important scientific obstacle; the mining operation is subject to engineering obstacles that can be overcome. Transportation faces cost issues more than technical
Kulcinski: In order of difficulty the list is: developing a fusion power plant, the mining operation, transportation and energy distribution. The level of difficulty is due to the nature of the difficulty. issues and the distribution of energy is not even an obstacle. The time frame at which the fusion power plant is developed which is the critical difficulty will be overcome depending on the level of research. At the ongoing rate there is no firm time frame, though I can assign a period of more than twenty years.

If there is reasonable effort then it could be shortened

to a 10 to 20 year time frame. Itll be here in 10 years BW 2009 (OCTOBER 05, Nuclear Fusion Research and Development Renaissance http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/10/nuclear-fusion-research-and-development.html) The potential from nuclear fusion is even larger as discussed in the Mr Fusion scenario. Energy would have the potential to become two to fifty times cheaper than today which would enable more wealth and a larger economy. Commercial nuclear fusion energy generation also opens up the solar system to space access. Successful research in the projects that follow over the next two to seven years could initiate a race to develop commercial nuclear fusion for energy generation, space technology and weapons. Futurists had speculated that there
would be crash research programs for molecular nanotechnology and other technologies. It would be somewhat ironic if the next major crash technology program turns out to have a nuclear related goal again.

Several crash national programs could mean that instead of waiting twenty years for this to be developed and

82/110 deployed in a major way it could happen within ten years. Their evidence doesnt assume new high beam lasers Beale 2010 (Bob, April 12, New hope for ultimate clean energy: fusion power, http://www.physorg.com/news190295239.html#top)//Abraha

Berkner 2010 - 2011 Danny Abraha

(PhysOrg.com) -- Imagine if you could generate electricity using nuclear power that emitted no radioactivity: it would be the answer to the world's dream of finding a clean, sustainable energy source. That is the great hope raised by researchers who believe they have found a radical new path to the ultimate goal of solving the world's energy crisis through nuclear fusion power, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.
The international team of researchers - led by Emeritus Professor Heinrich Hora, of the University of New South Wales Department of Theoretical Physics -has shown through computational studies that

a special fuel ignited by brief but powerful pulses of energy from new high-energy lasers may be the key to a success that has long eluded physicists. The intense laser beam would be used to ignite a fuel made of light hydrogen and boron-11. The resulting ignition would be largely free of radioactive emissions and would release more than enough energy to generate electricity.

The amount of radiation released would be even less than that emitted by current power stations that burn coal, which contains trace amounts of uranium. In another plus, the fuel source is plentiful and readily accessible and the waste product of ignition would be clean helium gas.

"This has the potential to be the best route to fusion energy," says Steve Haan, an expert in nuclear fusion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California, in a news report in the Royal Chemical Society's Highlights in Chemical Technology. Both Haan and Hora caution that the study only demonstrates the potential of the new process and that much work would need to be done to demonstrate it in practice. The conventional fusion process uses highly compressed spheres of deuterium and tritium as fuel. Hora says the proposed new process overcomes previous objections to hydrogen-boron11 fuel because it would not have to be compressed and therefore need much less energy than previously thought to start the ignition. "It was a surprise when we used hydrogen-boron instead of deuterium-tritium," says Hora. "It was not 100,000 times more difficult to ignite, as it would be under the usual compression process. It would be only 10 times more difficult, using the latest generation of lasers."

As it happens, a unique new laser capable of producing the required amount of ignition energy is in its early stages of testing in the US at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Another extraordinarily powerful US laser known as the National Ignition Facility has been built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: "It is the largest laser on earth and has cost about US$ 4 billion," he says.

"The laser pulse of about few billionths of a second duration produces 500 times more power than all US power stations." Companies already have the technology, it will be commercialized in 3 to 4 years, their arguments dont assume Magnetized Target Fusion Kanellos 2008 (Michael, February 7, Nuclear fusion is coming, says noted VC http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9866626-54.html?tag=nefd.blgs)//Abraha
INDIAN WELLS, Calif.--Nuclear

fusion will move from the lab to reality in a few years, a noted venture capitalist says. "Within five years, large companies will start to think about building fusion reactors," Wal van Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, said in an interview at the Clean Tech Investor Summit taking place here this week. In three to four years, scientists will demonstrate results that show that fusion has a 60 percent chance of success, he said. If van Lierop were some crazy guy off the street with an old stack of Omni magazines, you could dismiss him. Fusion--which extracts energy from nuclear reactions without the dangers associated with nuclear fission--has been studied for decades, but has yet to go commercial. Van Lierop, however, isn't a random individual. He is one of the earliest and more active investors in clean tech: Chrysalix started investing in clean energy in 2001. The firm's limited partners include BASF, Shell, and Rabobank. Chrysalix's optimism is pinned on an angel investment the company made in General Fusion, a Canadian company that says it has found a way to hurdle many of the technical problems surrounding fusion. The company's ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with conventional electricity. The company uses a technique called Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) model. In this scenario, an electric current is generated in a conductive cavity containing lithium and a plasma. The electric current produces a magnetic field and the cavity is collapsed, which results in a massive temperature spike.
a byproduct.

The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested. So in short, lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as

MTF has an advantage over other fusion techniques in that the plasma only has to stay at thermonuclear temperatures (150 million degrees Celsius) for a microsecond for a reaction to occur, according to the General Fusion's Web site. General Fusion has also filed for several patents.

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Other firms, such as Venrock, have invested in nuclear fusion, but most avoid it. Lierop claims that's because most don't understand the fundamentals. (Interestingly, Venrock's partner overseeing nuclear

it would solve many of our problems," he said. Other notes from van Lierop: Although onshore wind power is mature, companies building offshore wind turbines have to figure out a way to deal with corrosion and maintenance. It is going to be a big problem that we will hear more about in the next few years.
investments, Ray Rothrock, is a nuclear engineer.) It is also politically volatile. "I want to see it succeed, not only because I would make a lot of money, but because

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Mining he3 makes it possible Kulcinski 2006 (Gerald, February 17, PhD Nuclear Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, NASA Advisory Council, Fellow at the American Nuclear Society, HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha The impact will be huge on the prospect of people living on the Moon. Mining He-3 produces great amounts of extremely valuable byproducts. The same technology that is required for He-3 extraction yields these byproducts. Sustainable lunar settlement will happen even before electricity is extracted from He-3.

A2: Cant sustain a lunar base

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A) the 1AC assumes this, mining the moon wouldnt be possible without building new space crafts to get us there and back B) We have the technology to build one now, the plan is key Popular Mechanics 2k4(December 7, Mining The Moon, science magazine, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283056)//Abraha

A2: no spaceship big enough

The Apollo Saturn V spacecraft remains the benchmark for a reliable, heavy-lift moon rocket. Capable of lifting 50 tons to the moon, Saturn V's remain the largest spacecraft ever used. In the 40 years since the spacecraft's development, vast improvements in spacecraft technology have occurred. For an investment of about $5 billion it should be possible to develop a modernized Saturn capable of delivering 100-ton payloads to the lunar surface for less than $1500 per pound.
Perhaps the most daunting challenge to mining the moon is designing the spacecraft to carry the hardware and crew to the lunar surface.

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Perm do both solves better than the counterplan ever could, empirically proven to work the most effectively, they cant do it alone and works especially well with Helium-3 Popular Mechanics 2k4(December 7, Mining The Moon, science magazine, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/1283056)//Abraha

A2: Private actor CP

Although the president's announcement did not mention it explicitly, his message implied an important role for the private sector in leading human expansion into deep space. In the past, this type of public-private cooperation produced enormous dividends. Recognizing the distinctly American entrepreneurial spirit that drives pioneers, the President's Commission on Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy subsequently recommended that NASA encourage private spacerelated initiatives. I believe in going a step further. I believe that if government efforts lag, private enterprise should take the lead in settling space. We need look only to our past to see how well this could work. In 1862, the federal government supported the building of the transcontinental railroad with land grants. By the end of the 19th century, the private sector came to dominate the infrastructure, introducing improvements in rail transport that laid the foundation for industrial development in the 20th century. In a similar fashion, a cooperative effort in learning how to mine the moon for helium-3 will create the technological infrastructure for our inevitable journeys to Mars and beyond.
Private sector fails on its own, means no solvency and is a reason only the perm solves DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha
The weighs and the criteria for evaluation used in Table 7 depict Dr. Schmitts principles and values and hence represent only one point of view. Though it is possible that Dr. Schmitt has in fact gathered data from the corresponding sectors, this is not 71evident from his text. Regardless of the weighing distribution and the total that Dr.Schmitt arrives to, the issues he presents are relevant and should be evaluated in depth for any commercial enterprise of the size of lunar He-3 mining. For example, the ability of private sectors to successfully introduce new technology into an existing market place gives the private sector a competitive advantage in development. However, the private sector has a very significant obstacle to overcome,

capital investment. Unlike the government sector that has the power and resources to engage in monumental enterprises through specialized agencies, the private sector is subject to larger financial liability and is more reluctant to invest in risky ventures. Nonetheless, the potential for a technology spinoff, given a weighting of 1 under Schmitts scheme, is a valuable asset for risk taking entrepreneurs. Because the strengths of the private sector do not overlap with the strengths of the government sector, and in fact these two sectors complement each other in terms of capital and efficiency, a joined private-government initiative would be very likely. Such an initiative is not without precedents; technology spinoffs of the Apollo missions led to a huge boom in the aeronautics industry to the point that NASA now flies aircraft manufactured by components made in commercial industries.

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A. Funding space programs is bipartisan and popular with the public BarnHard 010 (Gary, November 29th,Director of the National Space Society, National Space Society Calls on the Senate and the House of Representatives to Fully Fund NASA in Accordance with the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 http://www.nss.org/news/releases/NSSPressRelease11292010.pdf) //Abraha In late September 2010, after many months of debate, Congress passed the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. This three year authorization demonstrated a bipartisan, cooperative effort on the part of both the House and the Senate to provide a framework for engaging the Executive Branch in a comprehensive dialog on the future of NASA. On October 11, 2010, the bill was signed into law by the president. In an era when such strong bipartisan agreement is rarely seen, the overwhelming support on both sides of the political aisle for our nations space program and for the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 reaffirmed our nations strong commitment to a space program that is dynamic, engaging, and sustainable. Although the compromise embodied in this legislation is not without risk to the ultimate success of the U.S. human spaceflight program, it nevertheless provides guidance to the Executive Branch and a path forward. It is now incumbent upon Congress, the Administration, NASA, commercial concerns, and non-governmental organizations to work together to implement both the spirit and the letter of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. It is now time to enact legislation that
appropriates the required funding in compliance with the Authorization Act. Rick Zucker, Executive Vice President for the National Space Society (NSS), stated, Throughout this debate, the NSS has reaffirmed its longstanding and unwavering commitment to further space

A2: Politics

exploration and development. We were encouraged that the Executive and Legislative branches listened to the publics pleas to maintain American leadership in space, utilize our investment in the International Space Station, stimulate the development of commercial space, and develop technologies to reach beyond low Earth orbit. The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 was a victory for our nation as a whole. However, there is still much work to be done, not the least of which is the passage of an appropriations bill that is in accordance with the Authorization Act of 2010. NSS calls upon our political leaders to, once again, put aside partisan politics, and to enact an appropriations bill that funds NASA to the full extent of the Authorization Act. Unless the necessary funding as set forth in the Authorization Act is appropriated by Congress, the people
will view the Authorization Act as just another empty promise from a government in gridlock. In contrast, with a matching appropriation passed, Congress and the Administration can share in the credit for NASAs accomplishments in the coming years, including high-tech jobs, American youths dreaming of the future, and an economy stimulated by new technology and discoveries.

B. Bipartisanship key to control proliferation Percy 82 [Charles H. Percy, The Partisan Gap, Foreign Policy No. 45, Washington Post Newsweek Interactive Winter 1981-1982] No one should underestimate the benefits of bipartisanship. Nor should anyone underestimate the loss to the country if America's leaders fail to forge a bipartisan consensus. Today, a president may be forceful and his administration may be far sighted; yet without the necessary degree of comity with Congress, his foreign policy may fail on the great issues of the day-nuclear proliferation, arms control, the Middle East peace process, EastWest relations, North-South differences, and international terrorism. The coherence sought by the executive branch will disappear, lost in a sea of partisan recriminations and congressional vetoes. Despite the obstacles to strengthening bipartisanship, it must be achieved if the United States is to maintain a leadership role in the world.

C. Nuclear Proliferation Causes Extinction Utgoff 02

Victor Utgoff, Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis, SURVIVAL, Fall,2002, p. 87-90

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is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.

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He3 extraction process simple Hedman 2006 (Eric R., January 16, Hedman is the chief technology officer of Logic Design Corporation and Kulcinski has spent the last two decades studying how to develop feasible fusion reactors using helium-3 part of the NASA Advisory Council. A fascinating hour with Gerald Kulcinski http://www.thespacereview.com/article/536/1)//Abraha Helium-3 and other useful gasses are easily released from lunar soil when heated to 700 degrees Centigrade. You then cool the gas until everything except the helium-3 condenses out. The helium-3 can then be separated from the more-common helium-4 by well-known techniques. You bottle the remaining gas and ship it back to Earth. The
University of Wisconsin is working on a design of an automated lunar miner to rove across the surface of the Moon to extract helium-3 and life-support volatiles. NASAs vision for exploration provides potential access to get sufficient quantities of helium-3. If sufficient supplies of helium-3 are available, the next issue is how to get fusion to work using it.

A2: cant extract

[Read applicable mining dangerous cards]

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nah, its safe bro Wakefield 2k (Julie, June 30, Moons Helium 3 could power the earth http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/pdf/space_com063000.pdf)//Abraha In contrast, helium 3 would produce little residual radioactivity. Helium 3, an isotope of the familiar helium used to inflate balloons and blimps, has a nucleus with two protons and one neutron. A nuclear reactor based on the fusion of helium 3 and deuterium, which has a single nuclear proton and neutrons, would produce very few neutrons about 1 percent of the number generate by the deuterium-tritium reaction. You could safely build a helium 3 plant in the middle of a big city, Kulcinski said.

A2: mining dangerous

He3 solves dependency on oil and is very environmentally safe DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha Energy is the most important driving force for powering industrial nations. In fact, a measure of a countrys industrialization is its annual energy consumption. Fossil fuels like coal, petroleum and natural gas are the chief means by which most nations get their energy. Because of the worlds increasing standards of living and its increased dependence on oil, fossil fuel amounts might not last longer than a few decades. Also with the worlds population expanding to almost 12 billion by the year 2050, our oil demand will also increase drastically. Oil has become a key issue in the political and economic affairs of many nations especially after the United States second war with Iraq. In such cases of crisis, the development of He-3 will alleviate the dependency on crude oil. Fossil fuels also release a lot of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that have detrimental effects on the atmosphere, whereas the usage of He-3 fusion technology will be a great substitute to the fossil fuels as it doesnt release any harmful byproducts. In addition to the non- polluting properties of He-3 fusion on Earth, the mining of He-3 from the Moon will not contaminate the Moon as the gases that are released during the extraction process (water and oxygen) arent harmful, and instead could be used for sustaining a lunar colony as outlined in the technical section.

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Theres enough He3 on the moon to power the United States for over a millennium and its safe Associated Press 2004 (January 20, US: UW scientists want to mine moon energy http://www.energybulletin.net/node/192) Two University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists believe moon rocks contain all the energy the United States needs for the next millennium. The moons surface is full of the energy source helium-3, said Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineering professor and director of the
MADISON Fusion Technology Institute at UW.

If we could land the space shuttle on the moon, fill the cargo with canisters of helium-3 mined from the surface and bring the shuttle back to Earth, that cargo would supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year, he said.
President Bushs plan to create a permanent lunar base brings Kulcinski and others at the institute hope for their idea. Kulcinski said he does not know of any other institution that is working on helium-3 fusion. John Santarius, a professor at the Fusion Technology Institute, said helium-3 provides one million times more energy per pound

than a ton of coal. Fusion of helium-3 does not produce greenhouse emissions, and mining it would do little environmental harm,
Kulcinski said.

The moon doesnt have air or water. So, there wont be any of that kind of pollution, he said. Helium-3 is found in the top few feet of lunar soil. To access it, miners would shovel up the surface, bake it and isolate the gas, Santarius said.
Since 1985, Kulcinski, Santarius and others at UW have thought about the possibility of harnessing the energy of helium-3 through fusion, which combines atoms to create energy. Fission, which is the process used in nuclear reactors, splits atoms. We came at it from an energy standpoint, Kulcinski said. We were looking for a long-term economical and safe form of

energy.

The researchers still are working on building a helium-3 reactor that would produce more energy than it takes in. The team estimates the moon probably holds more than 1 million metric tons of helium-3

on its surface, more than

enough energy to provide the nation with more than 1,000 years of electricity.

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A2: Other countries solve

Whoever gets there first has control, and wont allow anyone else resources Beljac 7 (Marko, Ph.D. Monash University, He-3 Nuclear Fusion and Moon Wars, Science and Global Security (Blog), 5-22, http://sciencesecuri....com/43875.html)//Abraha
"Whoever conquers the moon first will be the first to benefit," said Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist of China's lunar programme
China is planning to send up a lunar orbiter in September. The interesting thing is that this opens up the possibility of Total Recall (Ok, this Arnie flick was set on Mars but you get the deal) style Moon wars,
But many officials in Moscow's space programme believe Washington's lunar agenda is driven by a desire to monopolise helium-3 mining. They allege that President Bush has moved helium-3 experts into key positions on Nasa's advisory council. The plot, says Erik Galimov, an academic with the Russian Academy of Sciences, would "enable the US to establish its control of the energy market 20 years from now and put the rest of the world on its knees as hydrocarbons run out."

If the worlds energy supply is to be dominated by Helium-3 fusion then it follows that whoever controls the Moon controls the Earth just like whoever controls the Middle East has critical leverage in international relations. Helium-3 would become a resource worth fighting for.
But, alas, lets put this into some perspective. Firstly, He-3 mining may well be uneconomical, Indeed for now, the economics of extracting and transporting helium 3 from the moon are also problematic. Even if scientists solved the physics of helium 3 fusion, "it would be economically unfeasible,"asserted Jim Benson, chairman of Space Dev in Poway, California, which strives to be one of the first commercial space-exploration companies. "UnlessI'm mistaken, you'd have to strip-mine large surfaces of the moon." While it's true that to produce roughly70 tons of helium 3, for example, a million tons of lunar soil would needto be heated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius) to liberatethe gas, proponents say lunar strip mining is not the goal. "There's enough in the Mare Tranquillitatis alone to last for several hundred years," Schmitt said. Secondly, nuclear fusion as a practical source of energy, even based on first generation fusion reactions, is a long way off. He-3 is even harder, but possible in principle.

The moon would be a stepping stone to other helium 3-rich sources, such as the atmospheres of Saturn and Uranus

But the interest in the Moon by Washington, Moscow and Beijing (perhaps also the EU) is very interesting and if He-3 fusion is driving the agenda then it certainly opens up the prospect of conflict on the Moon and creates a perverse logic behind moves to weaponise space. If the US achieves space control it would have the ability to deny Moscow and Beijing the use of near Earth orbit, let alone the Moon and other sources of energy in the Solar System.

[Read Blomfield]

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random k card?
DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha Another possible side consequence of He-3 harvesting would be the beginning of a truly global mindset. Exploring space further may result in making us increasingly aware that we exist together in a single planet, which is but one of millions of planets. This realization might blur political and national boundaries. Visions of this type are best embedded in the context of space travel and
may not pertain to He-3 directly and will hence not be explored further.

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***Random cards***

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Backfiles - space militarization inevitable

Other countries are increasing their military dominance of space this will be used to challenge U.S. hegemony The Washington Times, 8 (David. R Sands, China, India hasten arms race in space; U.S. dominance challenged, 625-08, Lexis) On the planet's final frontier, more and more countries are beefing up their border guards. India became the latest country to boost its defense presence in space, announcing last week plans to develop a military space program to counter the fast-growing space defense efforts of neighboring China. India, which has an extensive civilian space satellite program, must "optimize space applications for military purposes," army Chief of Staff Gen. Deepak Kapoor said at a defense conference in New Delhi. "The Chinese space program is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content." Last month, Japanese lawmakers passed a bill ending a decades-old ban on the use of the country's space programs for defense, although officials in Tokyo insist that the country has no plans to develop a military program in space. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first major review of France's defense and security policy in more than a decade, has proposed nearly doubling spending for space intelligence assets, including spy satellites, to more than $1 billion annually. "I don't think what you are seeing is coincidental," said Wade Boese, a researcher at the Washington-based Arms Control Association. "Countries are increasingly aware of the potential for military development in space, and increasingly aware that other countries are moving ahead." The issue of an arms race in space took on new prominence in January 2007, when China stunned Western military analysts by using a medium-range ballistic missile to shoot down a defunct weather satellite. Pentagon planners said two orbiting U.S. spacecraft were forced to change course to avoid being hit by the thousands of pieces of space debris caused by the surprise test. China insists the exercise was not conducted for military reasons. "We are against weaponization or an arms race in space," Zhou Wenzhong, China's ambassador to the United States, said in an interview at The Washington Times earlier this month. "This was a scientific experiment." But in what many around the world saw as at least in part a return salvo to the Chinese action, the U.S. Navy in February shot down a wayward U.S. spy satellite over the Pacific, arguing that the action was needed to prevent the craft from crashing to Earth and spreading potentially toxic fuel. India, which competes for influence with China even as trade relations between the two Asian giants have blossomed, made no effort to hide its concerns about Beijing's plans for space. "With time we will get sucked into a military race to protect our space assets and inevitably there will be a military contest in space," Lt. Gen. H.S. Lidder, one of India's most senior officers, said last week in comments reported by the Indian Express newspaper and confirmed by the country's defense ministry. "In a life-and-death scenario, space will provide the advantage," Gen. Lidder said. Although the United States holds a vast technological and spending edge in space defense programs, the military's reliance on satellites and space-based assets exposes the United States more than any other country to military threats in space. Weaponization of space inevitable, with or without the U.S. Pfaltzgraf & Van Cleave, 7 -* Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies The Fletcher School, Tufts University and President Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and ** Professor Emeritus Department of Defense and Strategic Studies Missouri State University (Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraf and Dr. William R. Van Cleave, Independent Working Group, Missile Defense, The Space Relationship, and the 21st Century, 2007, http://www.ifpa.org/pdf/IWGreport.pdf.) //WCH While in effect, the ABM Treaty served as a critical impediment to U.S. deployment of space-based missile defense. With the Treatys termination in 2002, new opportunities for space-based missile defense have emerged. However, the key obstacles to space defenses remain more political than technological in nature. For example, certain constituencies continue to voice vehement opposition to space-based missile defenses in the mistaken belief that they could result in the weaponization of space. This assumption is the result of the dubious logic that if the United States refrains from the deployment of space- based missile defense; other nations will behave in similar fashion. There is no empirical basis for expecting such international reciprocation, however. Whatever the United States chooses to do (or not to do), China,

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among other nations, seems determined to pursue space programs and, at least in the case of Beijing, to establish itself as a space superpower.

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Backfiles - space militarization inevitable

Increasing U.S. militarization of space coupled with 12 other space nations makes space militarization inevitable Myers, 8 (Steven, International Herald Tribune, Is an arms race in space a given?; U.S. not backing down from quest to defend orbiting interests, 3-11-08, Lexis) Is war in space inevitable? The idea of such a war has been around since Sputnik, but for most of the Cold War it remained safely within the realm of science fiction and the carefully proscribed U.S.-Soviet arms race. But a dozen countries now can reach space with satellites - and, therefore, with weapons. China strutted its stuff in January 2007 by shooting down one of its own weather satellites 530 miles above
the planet. ''The first era of the space age was one of experimentation and discovery,'' a congressional commission reported just before Bush took office in 2001. ''We are now on the threshold of a new era of the space age, devoted to mastering operations in space.'' One of the authors of that report was Bush's first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the policy it recommended became a tenet of U.S. policy: The United States should develop ''new military capabilities for operation to, from, in and through space.'' Technology, too, has become an enemy of peace in space. Twenty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was considered so fantastical by its critics that it was known as ''Star Wars.'' But the programs Reagan began were the ancestors of the weaponry that brought down the American satellite. The Chinese strike, and now the Pentagon's, have given ammunition to both sides of the debate over war in orbit. Arms-control advocates say the bull's-eyes underscore the need to expand the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the United States and 90 other countries have ratified. It bans the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on the moon. Space, in this view, should remain a place for exploration and research, not the destructive side of humanity. The grim potential of the latter was hinted at by the vast field of debris that China's test left, posing a threat to any passing satellite or spaceship. The Pentagon said its own shot, at a lower altitude, would not have the same effect - the debris would fall to earth and burn up.

the Chinese test broke an unofficial moratorium that had lasted since then. And he expressed disappointment that the Pentagon's strike had damaged support for a ban, which the Chinese say they want in spite of their 2007 test. ''The truth of the matter is it doesn't take too many satellite hits to create a big mess in low earth orbit,'' he said. The White House, on the other hand, opposes a treaty proscribing space weaponry; Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, says it would be unenforceable, noting that even a benign object put in orbit could become a weapon if it rammed another satellite. A new American president could reverse that attitude, but he or she would have to go up against the generals and admirals, contractors, lawmakers and others who strongly support the goal of keeping U.S. superiority in space. The reason they cite is that the United States depends more than any other country on space for its national security. And so, research continues on how to protect U.S. satellites and deny the wartime use of satellites to potential enemies including work on lasers and whiz-bang stuff like cylinders of hardened material that could be hurled from space to targets on the ground. ''Rods from God,'' those are called. For now, such weapons remain untested and, by all accounts, impractical because the cost of putting a weapon in orbit is huge. ''It is much easier to hold a target at risk from the land or sea than from space,'' said Elliot Pulham, who heads the Space Foundation, a nonprofit group in Colorado Springs.
The risk posed by space junk was the main reason the United States and Soviet Union abandoned antisatellite tests in the 1980s. Michael Krepon, who has written on the militarization of space, said

US militarization of space inevitable Asia Times, 7 (Jack Smith, The Militarization of Outer Space, 3-10-07, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IC10Aa03.html) The White House is reluctant openly to acknowledge its intention to militarize space, but the USAF in particular has been quite frank. In 1996, the then head of the Space Command, General Joseph W Ashy, was quoted as saying: "We're going to fight from space, and we're going to fight into space. That's why the US has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms. We will engage terrestrial targets some day - ships, airplanes, land targets - from space." In 2004, Under Secretary of the Air Force Peter B Teets, discussing America's intentions in space, declared bluntly, "We are paving the road of 21st-century warfare." In May 2005, the New York Times quoted General Lance Lord, another head of the Space Command, as revealing, "Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. Space superiority is our dayto-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future." He did not explain how space superiority is obtained, but there is only one way - dominant military force. The USAF acknowledges that the militarization of space is a prime objective. Air Force Doctrine Document 2-2.1 on "Counterspace Operations", published in August 2004 (and available online), states: "US Air Force counter-space operations are the ways and means by which the air force achieves and maintains space superiority. Space superiority provides freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack."

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Backfiles - space militarization inevitable

The US has already militarized space- Rods from God and Global Strike programs prove Asia Times, 7 (Jack Smith, The Militarization of Outer Space, 3-10-07, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IC10Aa03.html, quoted from Giuseppe Anzera, Italian professor, Star Wars; Empire Strikes Back, 8-18-05) On the technological level, the Pentagon's planning is in the advanced stage: some projects - aimed at space weaponization - have already been in place for some time. Among the (partially known) Pentagon's new plans, the two most interesting projects are the "Global Strike" program and the "Rods from God" program. Global Strike involves the employment of military space planes capable of carrying about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of high-precision weapons (with a circular error probability less than 3 meters) with the primary use of striking enemy military bases and command and control facilities in any point of the world. The main strength of military space planes is the ability to reach any spot on the globe within 45 minutes. This is a short period of time that
could provide US forces with a formidable quick-reaction capability, as opposed to the enemy's subsequent inability to organize any effective defense. Such a weapon's primary target would be the enemy's strategic forces and - according to US Air Force sources widely quoted in the news - the Pentagon is inclined to give priority to this project. One of the main reasons, these sources say, is that the Pentagon itself - after spending more than US$100 billion - has finally admitted its failure to create an infallible Earth-based, anti-missile system to protect American soil from ballistic strikes.

The socalled Rods from God project, according to Anzera, "consists of orbiting platforms stocked with metal tungsten rods about 6.1 meters long (20 feet) and 30 centimeters (1 foot) in diameter that could be satellite-guided to targets anywhere on the Earth within minutes, for the rods would move at more than 11,000 km/h (6,835mph). This weapon exploits kinetic energy to cause an explosion the same magnitude of that of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, but with no radioactive fallout. The system would function due to two satellites, one of which would work as a communications platform, while the other would contain an arsenal of tungsten rods." Satellites key to the US military now and will only become more crucial in the future Kislyakov, 8- RIA Novoski political commentator (Andrei, Space Militarization, 12-02-08, http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080212/99008082.html) Recent conflicts have shown that the ideas that dominated military thinking in the 20th century have become desperately obsolete. In the wars of today, and the future, the objective is to deal surgical strikes against an enemy's sensitive facilities,
rather than seize its territory. Massive use of ground troops and armor is already a thing of the past. The role of strategic aviation is similarly decreasing. In strategic arms, the emphasis is shifting from the

This kind of precision warfare has only been made possible by orbital support vehicles - satellite-based reconnaissance, warning, forecasting and targeting systems. Much has been done in recent years for the development of "smart" weapons - guided bombs and missiles that are highly accurate over hundreds of miles. Military analysts say that by 2010 the leading military powers will have 30,000-50,000 such weapons between them, and by 2020 some 70,000-90,000. It is hard to imagine how many satellites will be required to support such a vast arsenal, but without them, the cruise missiles capable of hitting a mosquito at a hundred miles will be absolutely useless. Thus, hundreds of seemingly harmless "passive" space systems, which themselves are not designed to attack anything, are a crucial component of high precision weapons, the main armaments of the 21st century. But this very strength makes space systems the Achilles heel of the modern army. Disabling its satellites would effectively cripple the US military - and they are almost completely undefended.
classic nuclear triad to high precision weapons of different basing modes.

Even with incentives not to enter a space race, a lack of a ban on ASAT weapons make space race inevitable in the SQUO Saunders, 7- Senior Research Professor at the National Defense Universitys Institute for National Strategic Studies (Dr. Phillip C., Chinas Future In Space: Implications for U.S. Security, 2007, http://www.space.com/adastra/china_implications_0505.html?submit.x=94&submit.y=10&submit=submit) Despite incentives to avoid a space race, arms control solutions face significant obstacles. China has long advocated a treaty to prevent an arms race in outer space. The joint Sino-Russian U.N. working paper, tabled in May 2002, called for a ban on weapons in orbit and on any use of force against outer space objects. The United States has been skeptical about the utility of such a treaty, believing verification would be difficult and that it might limit future missile defense options. A ban on ASAT weapons would be one means of protecting U.S. satellites, but a verifiable ban would be hard to negotiate. U.S. policymakers must address a number of difficult questions. Is space domination an achievable, affordable and sustainable objective? Will efforts to dissuade Beijing from developing ASAT weapons require tolerating significant improvements in Chinese military space capabilities? Can arms control protect U.S. space assets? The United States has legitimate security concerns about China's improving space capabilities, but will face tough choices in deciding on its best response.

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Backfiles - space militarization inevitable

Space weaponization is inevitable Oppenheimer 3, (Andy, regular contributor to lane's Information Group and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arms race in space Foreign Policy, Issue 138, p. 81, September- October 2003) // CCH Predictably, these plans to expand the Monroe Doctrine above the ozone layer do not sit well with the rest of the world. Closer to home, critics warn that the United States risks triggering a self-defeating arms race. Given that the United States owns 90 percent of all military satellites and 60 percent all commercial ones, arms-control advocate John Pike argues that starting a shooting match in space makes about as much sense as holding "rock-throwing contests" in a glass house The
inaugural issue of Astropolitics, published by Frank Cass in London, attempts to bring this dispute down to Earth. According to the editors, the journal was founded on the belief that "the international space policy community, with its attendant academic inquisitors, lacks a rigorous an scholarly forum." (Note to would-be contributors: All political views are welcome, but don't send articles on the existence of extraterrestrial life "until proven otherwise.") The lead article, "Totem and "Taboo: Depolarizing the Space Weaponization Debate," by Karl P. Mueller, a political scientist at RAND, strives to inject nuance into the debate over the weaponization of space by giving a detailed political taxonomy of its key players. U.S. proponents of space

weaponization, he says, fall into three categories: "space racers," who argue the United States must be first to develop space weapons when rival nations appear poised to do the same; "space controllers," who see space weapons as a valuable military asset that should be built as soon as the United States deems them necessary; and "space hegemonist," who favor intense development of space weapons to safeguard U.S. political and military dominance the 21st century. These three views share the belief that the weaponization of space is inevitable. Mueller disagrees. A "space Pearl Harbor" is possible but crippling or destroying an object whipping around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour is a bit more challenging than doing "comparable damage" to buildings, electrical grids, and computer networks. Moreover, adversaries can develop comparatively
low-cost terrestrial options for disrupting U.S. space assets, such as ground-based laser and electronic jamming.

Space militarization is inevitable Eisendrath 6, (Craig, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., is an adjunct professor of American Studies at

Temple University, Philadelphia, Waging War in the Heavens: Profit and Power Go Hand in Hand as the U.S. Gears Up to Spread Its Military Influence to Vet Another Vast Region-Outer Space USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Vol. 135, November 2006) // CCH

Moore cites the problem, often raised by critics, that space weaponization is being driven by those corporations, such as Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and TRW, which benefit from the , tens of billions of dollars of defense contracts. Although profit is a motive, the overwhelming driver in shaping defense policy is a conviction that space weaponization is the way to defend the U.S. and its vital interests, argues Gen. Chuck Homer, former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command. "Space is becoming increasingly important in combat and we must address--and deny the enemy--the use of space and ensure our access to [it]. We did it in Desert Storm by bombing satellite group sites and asking the Russians and the French not to provide overhead imagery to the Iraqis. The idea of keeping the military out of space is a little late. The train has left the station." Space militarization is inevitable and has partially happened Logsdon 1, (John, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C, Just Say Wait to Space Power Issues in Science and Technology, Vol. 17, Spring 2001) // CCH The concept of space power has been receiving increased attention recently. For example, the Center for National Security Policy, a conservative advocacy group, has suggested that there is a need for "fresh thinking on the part of the new BushCheney administration about the need for space power" and "an urgent, reorganized, disciplined, and far more energetic effort to obtain and exercise it." According to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a mainstream defense policy think tank, "the shift of near-Earth space into an area of overt military competition or actual conflict is both conceivable and possible." Some definitions may be useful here. The most general concept--space power-can be defined as using the space medium and assets located in space to enhance and project U.S. military power. Space militarization describes a situation in which the military makes use of space in carrying out its missions. There is no question that space has been militarized; U.S. armed forces would have great difficulty carrying out a military mission today if denied access to its guidance, reconnaissance, and communications satellites. But to date, military systems in space are used exclusively as "force enhancers," making air, sea, and land force projection more effective. The issue now is whether to go beyond these military uses of space to space weaponization: the stationing in space of systems that can attack a target located on Earth, in the air, or in space itself. Arguably, space is already partially weaponized. The use of

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signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to guide precision weapons to their targets is akin to the role played by a rifle's gun-sight. But there are not yet space equivalents of bullets to actually destroy or damage a target.

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***Neg ***

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Status quo solves DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha Interest in Lunar exploration has sparked once more and the United States has announced that it intends to repeat a manned lunar landing before 2018. One of the main interests of the future landing would be to explore and develop He-3 mining.

A2: Inherency

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Theyre wrong about everything, it wont work Williams, 2007 (Mark, August 23, Mining the Moon Technology Review is an independent science magazine owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19296/?a=f )//Abraha Helium-3 advocates claim that it, conversely, would be nonradioactive, obviating all those problems. But a serious critic has charged that in reality, He3-based fusion isn't even a feasible option. In the August issue of Physics World, theoretical physicist Frank Close, at Oxford in the UK, has published an article called "Fears Over Factoids" in which, among other things, he summarizes some claims of the "helium aficionados," then dismisses those claims as essentially fantasy. Close points out that in a tokamak--a machine that generates a doughnut-shaped magnetic field to confine the superheated plasmas necessary for fusion--deuterium reacts up to 100 times more slowly with helium-3 than it does with tritium. In a plasma contained in a tokamak, Close stresses, all the nuclei in the fuel get mixed together, so what's most probable is that two deuterium nuclei will rapidly fuse and produce a tritium nucleus and proton. That tritium, in turn, will likely fuse with deuterium and finally yield one helium-4 atom and a neutron. In short, Close says, if helium-3 is mined from the moon and brought to Earth, in a standard tokamak the final result will still be deuterium-tritium fusion. Second, Close rejects the claim that two helium-3 nuclei could realistically be made to fuse with each other to produce deuterium, an alpha particle and energy. That reaction occurs even more slowly than deuteriumtritium fusion, and the fuel would have to be heated to impractically high temperatures--six times the heat of the sun's interior, by some calculations--that would be beyond the reach of any tokamak. Hence, Close concludes, "the lunar-helium-3 story is, to my mind, moonshine."

A2: Nuclear fusion adv

DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha What approach Europe undertakes depends largely on the success and future of the European Union. Will they issue a joined initiative, or will each nation autonomously determine its energy path? It is very unlikely, however, that the United States be the only country to develop or show interest in He-3 (Kulcinski, 2006). In fact, if the trend we have observed in the past prevails, many other countries will follow the United States lead

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Even if we have the He3 the US and other countries will simply resort to Earth based alternatives DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha In the case that He-3 reaches Earth when fossil fuels are completely exhausted, the scenario might be completely different. It is very likely that the countries with nuclear programs will have developed a large dependence on fission energy. For example, India and China already have ongoing projects to harvest Uranium for use in their nuclear power plants. Europe has an organized and well regulated nuclear industry and it is very likely that in the near future it will greatly increase its dependence on nuclear energy. The question then is: will Europe, China and India continue to pursue He-3 fusion reactors or will they simply abandon the project to focus on fission? It is possible that many economies will revert to alternative energy sources on Earth like wind, hydroelectric and solar energy to supplement their energy needs. If this is the case, we might be exposed to a very different world, in which countries are not competing directly for a single energy source, but instead where each country develops its own autonomous energy infrastructure. Under this scheme Latin American countries, for example, would come to rely heavily on hydroelectric and solar power, which conform better with the natural conditions; whereas countries in the former Soviet Union might adopt a more nuclear oriented program, given the Uranium resources available and their technical background on nuclear fission. Fuel cells and the hydrogen economy would also become important 93 players and hydrogen energy would predominate in countries where enough infrastructures are developed for implementing it

A2: Reliance solvency

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Mining he3 will require a moon base DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha In order to start mining He-3 from the Moon, along with other minerals present in the regolith, it is first important to develop an infrastructure that can support such activities on the lunar surface. It is rational that before humans can start excavating the 41lunar surface, they should develop a lunar base with sufficient selfsustaining power, and technology to transport cargo to and from Earth.

Moon base link

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Politics Links
Plan is unpopular causes political fights DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha The energy portion of the project is perhaps the most complicated from a commercial and technical perspective. Apart from the engineering difficulty of attaining a steady state fusion reaction, power ownership and distribution are delicate issues, which have even become hot political subjects. Whether energy should be a national asset or if it can be privately owned is an ongoing debate and will certainly come back again if and when He-3 fusion makes it to the market place.

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FYI: The US hasnt signed the moon treaty, this is all in the context of other countries that have, but itll work against not so great teams CP Text: Private corporations should substantially develop space beyond the Earths mesosphere by establishing a moon base for the purposes of mining and extracting Helium-3 Isotopes and Hydrogen from the moon Aff doesnt solve the US will just use he3 for continued space exploration unlike private companies DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha whether the US will use He-3 to power its economy on Earth or if it will use it as an astrofuel for further space exploration. The answer to this question depends largely on whether NASA is the agency directing He-3 mining on the Moon or whether it is a private enterprise. NASA has voiced its objective of using resources on space almost uniquely for space exploration and expansion, but private enterprises would most likely want to seek profits on Earth before they embark into a long and very uncertain space exploration.
Another pertinent question is

1NC Private Sector CP[helium specific]

Moon treaty means aff cant solve as well as the CP DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha The 1979 Moon Treaty-The Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies was a treaty developed by the United Nations to set the limits for the future regulation, exploitation, and exploration of the Moon. The basic purpose of this Treaty was to ensure that any wealth obtained from the Moon was to be distributed to all the nations of the world. Article 4 (2) of the Treaty states that, The exploration and use of the Moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development. Due regard shall be paid to
the interests of present and future generations as well as to the need to promote higher standards of living and conditions of economic and social progress and development in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. (Office for Outer Space Affairs, 1967)

Loophole means cp solves DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha loophole in the UN Outer Space Treaty has given advantages to individuals and companies to hold Mineral Rights on the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies. It stipulated that no government can own extraterrestrial property. However it neglected to mention individuals and corporations. Taking undue advantage of this error, Dennis Hope,
However, a a Lunar Entrepreneur has claimed to have started a Lunar Embassy, which sells plots on the Moon and other celestial bodies. There is also a Lunar Settlement Initiative that provides a framework for private development of the Moon. Another individual, Dr.

Resnick (former NASA scientist and current consultant to NASA) states "Space law does not allow countries to have land ownership on planets and Moons in the solar system but it does allow for the Mineral Rights to be obtained by individuals and companies. The countries party to the Space Treaty Act have agreed that none of them has either jurisdiction or ownership of any extraterrestrial body, nor samples. He found this ambiguity in the
Space Law 25 years ago that allowed him ownership of all planetary bodies outside the "Third Planet from the Sun submitted the 57 document to the

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World Court at The Hague, and to the United Nations in New York City. For more than years no one has ever disputed Dr. Resnicks claimed ownership. This loophole in space law has been a growing concern to scientists; however, most were unaware that Dr. Resnick had foreseen some of these issues long ago when he obtained ownership of the mineral rights (Cramer, 2004).

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Private corporations are the only means to extract the He3 for American use DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha Like hydrogen, He-3 has the potential of becoming the first truly democratic fuel. If extraterrestrial resources are not to be appropriated by any nation, as outlined in the Space treaty, then He-3, wherever it is found, rightfully belongs to all of humanity. The question of propriety is a fundamental one. Although the land, call it lunar regolith or the soil from other planets, legally has no one owner, the extraction, compression and reaction of He-3 to
produce energy is immensely costly. It has been proposed that the cost of non-renewable resources, of which He-3 is an a typical type, follows a Hubbert 91bell curve (Figure 17) in which the price is initially very high due to the difficulties of extraction, then plummets when and rises once more once processing the scarcer fuel becomes more difficult.

2NC cards

Solves case better and avoids politics DSouza et al 2k6 (Marsha R., Diana M. Otalvar, Deep Arjun Singh, February 17,HARVESTING HELIUM-3 FROM THE MOON, An Interactive Qualifying Project Report submitted to the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031306-122626/unrestricted/IQP.pdf)//Abraha One of the large hindrances that the government and even international initiatives face is that they must respond to the public about their decisions and are thus subject to monumental political pressure. Financing would be compromised for a long term venture, since it would be subject to the approval ratings of the current governments, the political choices of leaders and the whole weight of bureaucracy. These indirect links would endanger the long term sustainability of the project if financed uniquely by the government. 72 The efficacy of the private sector to turn projects into revenues is a big asset that seems to favor the private approach over the others. Schmitt (pg. 165) argues that the likelihood of success is, without competition, higher if the all private approach is adopted. Nonetheless, an all private approach implies that the energy generated would be governed by market rules, which tend to favor the
industrialized nations as they have greater acquisition power. This result is in direct opposition to the principles of the Space Treaty, which indicates that all celestial resources should benefit the whole of mankind. In spite of this, it can be argued that even developing nations would have access to technology if they were to purchase it through debt financing. Debt financing, however, is a risky business and can prove catastrophic for the future liquidity of the country as a whole, which is the current case of many Latin and African nations.