That July, a 50 percent tariff on an array of Canadian goods — dairy products, alcoholic beverages, and cement among them — took effect under a trade action the administration justified by pointing to what it described as discriminatory treatment of certain American products by Canada. Matching tariffs on American products — covering steel, aluminium, appliances, and electronics — were rolled out by Prime Minister Mark Carney's administration on a dollar-for-dollar basis, a move that deepened the ongoing trade dispute between the two countries.
Crude oil from Canada feeds roughly 60 percent of all U.S. import volumes, and on the broader trade ledger, Canada ranks as the second-largest commercial partner for American goods and services, trailing only Mexico — a standing that has held through repeated episodes of bilateral friction. Some analysts have pointed to Canada's position as a leading supplier of a particular resource as a potential card to play when bilateral trade talks with the United States resume.
Zero Point Cryogenics chief executive Chris Cassin has put forward the view that Canada holds a distinct advantage when it comes to building up reserves of helium-3, a rare gas that has attracted considerable demand across multiple industries. Among nations that do not rely on military programmes, Canada ranks first worldwide in the production of helium-3 — a stable, non-radioactive isotope with applications spanning quantum computing, deep cryogenic research, neutron-based detection at border crossings, and experimental work in nuclear fusion.
Tritium extraction from the heavy water circulating through CANDU reactors — the Canada Deuterium Uranium design used across the country — releases the gas as a byproduct, positioning Canada among the world's meaningful producers of it. CANDU reactors operate on natural uranium — a fuel whose U-235 content sits at around 0.7 percent and arrives without any prior enrichment — meaning the costly processing facilities that light-water designs rely on are not part of the equation, and fuel-cycle costs tend to run lower as a result.
Because neutrons are used so efficiently within CANDU reactors, a broad range of fuel options becomes viable — among them recycled uranium, mixed oxide (MOX) fuels, thorium, and spent material drawn from conventional pressurised water reactors. Of the 26 CANDU reactors operating worldwide, 17 are situated within Canadian borders.
Helium-3 generation in the United States, Russia, and China follows a different path — the isotope surfaces as a residual output when tritium concentrations are raised through the removal of the gas from nuclear warheads. A substantial portion of the helium-3 these countries generate is retained under state control, where port inspection teams deploy it in neutron-detection equipment to identify nuclear materials being moved without authorisation.
Forecasts place quantum computing at the forefront of rising helium-3 consumption in the near term, while a number of governments have come to treat advances in quantum capability as tied to both national defence priorities and broader economic independence. Governments, financial institutions, and technology enterprises have been channelling resources toward post-quantum cryptography and quantum-safe security architectures in response to the anticipated arrival of cryptographically capable quantum computers, a development the industry refers to as Q-Day.
Referred to as Q-Day, the point at which quantum computing hardware grows capable of dismantling the public-key encryption methods — RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) among them — that underpin online transactions, banking infrastructure, private messaging, and digital identity verification remains a future threshold rather than a present reality. Most quantum computing systems demand that their processors be kept at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero on the Kelvin scale.
Dropping temperatures further requires blending helium-4 — itself cooled to around 14 K through standard refrigeration techniques — with its rarer isotope, helium-3, whereupon the entropy generated by that mixing process drives the combined system down to temperatures as low as 5 millikelvin.
A $6.9 million Small Business Innovation Research contract awarded to Interlune that month set out a mandate for the firm to develop a lunar payload suite — one capable of landing on the moon by 2028 and engineered to collect, apply thermal processing to, and extract helium-3 along with hydrogen from the surface regolith. Under an arrangement described as the first of its kind, the Department of Energy committed to purchasing 3 liters of helium-3 extracted from the Moon by Interlune — a procurement that would place a government agency on record as a buyer of a natural resource drawn from beyond Earth for the first time.
Founded in Seattle, Interlune develops robotic technology aimed at extracting raw materials found on the lunar surface. Estimates place the helium-3 content of lunar regolith at somewhere between one and three million tonnes locked within the Moon's fine surface layer — a volume that stands in contrast to Earth's annual production of roughly 15 to 20 kilograms, most of which arises as a byproduct of tritium decay inside thermonuclear weapons programmes, with smaller amounts recovered during natural gas processing.
Accumulated over geological timescales, helium-3 became embedded in the uppermost layer of the moon through the unrelenting flow of charged particles from the sun — a process made possible by the absence of any magnetic shielding around the lunar body.
Tritium's price tag of roughly $30,000 per kilogram exceeds the $20,000 per kilogram that helium-3 commands on the market, a gap that undermines the financial case for nations such as the U.S. to extract helium-3 by allowing the radioactive isotope — which sheds its mass through decay into helium-3 over a half-life of around 12.3 years — to serve as a feedstock. Commitments from buyers across quantum computing cooling, national security, and clean fusion energy research have brought Interlune's order book — spanning binding purchase agreements and supply contracts — to nearly $500 million in contracted value.
