Existing Helium-3 market could finance lunar elevator today

I was thinking more along the lines of lithium or nitrogen blankets. The current resources are synthetic as you pointed out. What is to bar somebody (government) from making more synthetic. Neutrons don't have to come from weapons grade radionuclide. It would be a good use of high grade nuclear waste to mix it in a vat of liquid nitrogen and just siphon off the tritium decay product, Helium-3. We have nuclear waste (some of it already packaged in rods and ready to be inserted into our vat) and we have nitrogen. Just need a place to mix it. So the trade-off is the cost of a cryogenic vat and lid versus lofting kilotons of equipment to the Moon. It hardly seems to even require a spreadsheet. At the moment the scarcity of Helium-3 seems to be more of a political issue (lack of anybody who wants to supply it) and not because there is a real reason for it.
Besides, the material that was in those warheads didn't just disappear. It was moved somewhere else where it could be retrieved if so desired. It could also be considered nuclear waste.
Mitch

>
> Unfortunately there are other cheaper ways of producing He3,

No therte are not.

The alternatives available are extremely expensive, for example extracting He-3 from Natural Gas is estiamted to cost $12,000 per liter..... we can do orders of magnitude cheaper using luanrresources.

reference
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 (production).

Do you see any price tags on those claims?

> I can't imagine
> anybody, who would be responsible for increasing supply, having mining
> the moon as a first choice without having exhausted all other options.
> Besides we don't even have a first generation fusion reactor.

We do not need any fusion reactor. There is a strong robust market for Helium-3 tday for neturon detectors and in academia.