Could you elaborate on this? Enriching lithium sounds much more feasible than setting up a moon base, but it still sounds like it would be economically infeasible.

First, am I understanding correctly that you aren't talking about DT fuel, but are instead suggesting that we use the tritium to produce helium-3 by letting it decay? This sounds extremely inefficient, and it also seems like it would cause supply chain issues where power production relies on helium-3 that we started producing decades ago. This would mean that the infrastructure we set up wouldn't be useful for decades, and that if production stopped for a few months there would be a helium-3 shortage decades later. Lunar helium-3 extraction would have a shorter feedback delay, making it less vulnerable to latent shortages and more useful as a medium-term power source.

Second, isn't lithium-6 a rare material? Lithium is abundant, but brine and rock deposits that are cheap and easy to extract are quite limited. Also IIRC something like 92% of it is lithium-7 which is much less useful in enrichment. And that's not even considering the geopolitical factors you mentioned. I'm obviously not saying that tapping into harder-to-access deposits and filtering for lithium-6 would be more difficult than sifting lunar regolith for helium-3, but it still sounds extremely difficult.

The article is talking about kilogram-scale amounts of helium-3, so lithium abundance (billions of tons) isn't remotely a factor.

> "there would be a helium-3 shortage decades later"

There's a conceptual misunderstanding: radioactive decay is continuous—there's no latency of waiting. You get a stream of decay product right from the start.

> "economically infeasible"

It's the sole source of helium-3 today.