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Helium Crisis Approaching
vrmlguy writes "Within nine years the National Helium Reserve will be depleted, according to an article in Science Daily. It quotes Dr. Lee Sobotka, of Washington University in St. Louis: 'Helium is non-renewable and irreplaceable. Its properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas or oil), there are no biosynthetic ways to make an alternative to helium. All should make better efforts to recycle it.' (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a local article with quotes from Dr. Sobotka and representatives of the balloon industry.) On Earth, Helium is found mixed with natural gas, but few producers capture it. Extracting it from the atmosphere is not cost-effective. The US created a stockpile, the National Helium Reserve, in 1925 for use by military dirigibles, but stopped stockpiling it in 1995 as a cost-saving measure."
Oh, no!
does this mean all the party balloons will be filled with hydrogen instead?
oh the humanity!
Remember to spell 'crisis' as 'business opportunity'.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Then it does seem a waste to use it on those toy balloons as it's almost a sure thing the helium will be "lost".
:).
Well as it gets scarce the prices will go up. Maybe some people should start hoarding now
Build a refinery.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Could someone please explain how exactly is there a crisis? I mean, the article states that the only thing that is happening is that the US national helium reserve is being depleted, an artificial stockpile program that stopped stockpiling due to being too expensive. Then it is stated that there are plenty sources of helium but no one bothers to take advantage of them due to the fact that at the moment it simply does not make anyone any money. So, to sum things up, no one bothers to store helium because it isn't cost effective and no one bothers to mine helium because there isn't any money to be made by it.
Doesn't that mean that the offer outweighs the demand by a landslide? Doesn't this mean that there were a lot of people smooching the US national helium reserve for a long time?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
damn. there goes my billionaire sky yacht. damn those pesky kids and their party tricks.... damn them.
It's not the End of the World, but you can see it from here, and if we're not careful Things Could Go Poorly. The problem is the smartest people around think "technology" will fix the "resource" problem. Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources. So, if we're at the top of the heap - look around you: this is as good as it gets.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
... not only of a looming Helium shortage - just google for "Aluminum Shortage" and take a look at the results... many resources on earth are becoming more and more scarce while everybody seems to only concentrate on energy resources.
That, my friends is one of the best reasons for putting money into space exploration rather than wars for oil. We're still far from being able to actually mine anything that's not already on our planet, but we're not so far from a shortage in the critical resources that would make extraterrestrial retrieval of resources possible in the first place.
With Helium it's actually a matter of re-using what we have - gas recycling hasn't been much of an issue in the past, but people need to hear about it. And please don't throw 'statistical evidence' at me that suggests 'there is no crisis'. Even the potential crisis is enough to be worried about it, if the implications are that dramatic. Much of our economical and scientific growth currently depends on the reckless abuse of non-renewable (or non-renewed) resources. We don't want to break Moore's Law, do we?
I'm an infovore...
I commented about this the other day, and I was surprised at the comments that indicated that so many ppl did not realize that we are headed for issues on this. I only hope that we start recapturing it again. Since Natural gas prices have gone up, we have quit separating it. Combine that with Clinton having opened up the store, and we are losing our massive stockpile. Instead countries like Russia and China do it. IOW, the west is about to be dependent on countries on other countries.
BTW, folks, helium is looked at for a number of important uses esp nuclear power, medical, and welding.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't think our society remembers being in a time of shortage - and I think that's a problem. It's easy to consume and throw away things if you don't think there will be a problem in getting more, and that attitude is pretty wasteful.
Extracting it from the atmosphere is not cost-effective
Not now, but as the availability goes down and focus turns to finding ways to extract helium more efficiently, along with a sharp price rise, then the incipient profit involved in extraction will likely create a market for atmospheric or some other method of extraction... or perhaps lead to the future ability to synthesise helium.
My question: can any science-types here list some important uses of helium? I'm sure that there are some, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Subject says it all.
FTA: helium is a rebel, a loner, and it does not combine with other atoms while hydrogen does
Helium: the James Dean of elements. All by itself in the upper right hand corner of the periodic table.
Which I guess makes hydrogen the Paris Hilton of elements? Alone at the top??
Why oh why couldn't I have been a science journalist...
Companies are already looking at scavenging raw materials out of recycled industrial (or even consumer) waste. As we are able to extract less through mining, we may look more at extracting (what may be in the future) semi-precious metals through various forms of recycling. Already a lot of companies are springing up around this concept, and some are even making decent bucks. As availability through mining starts to fall short, I'd expect to see an increase in price followed by availability picking up again to some extent through re-use.
This may be a pretty damn cool use for bio-science too, as I seem to remember articles about modified plants that could be placed about areas such as garbage dumps etc and absorb various metallic minerals from the ground. Maybe one day we'll see people growing trees of copper and aluminum over previous landfills, leeching bits of once-discarded waste metals from the ground.
I wouldn't say that the lack of raw materials shouldn't be a concern, but in the perhaps it will actually force society to view such things as less "disposable" and further the science and industry of re-use in the future.
TFA says few natural gas producers recover the helium from their wells. If the price of helium rises due to scarcity, those producers will recover the helium. Problem solved.
Yes, there is a fairly large amount of it only a few lightminutes away from earth; and the best thing is: tons of helium are being created every second! Unfortunately you have to overcome some issues, like gravitational pull and high temperatures.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
I was going to mod you up but then I remembered I time when I didn't have mod points and thought better of it.
Two important points about helium
1. It's the smallest atom/molecule, since hydrogen is diatomic and H2 is a bit bigger than He. This makes it more difficult to store as it can get through any holes in a container
2. It escapes from the atmosphere. So, once it's out of the container it goes into outer space and is gone forever.
The balloons that drop at political events aren't filled with helium, smart guy. Otherwise they wouldn't DROP.
1) Inhales balloon
2) ?????
3) <squeakyvoice> Profit! </squeakyvoice>
I live in Amarillo, TX where the Helium plant used to be. Check to the Amarillo Globe News to find out what happened to it. They closed it for financial reasons, not lack of helium. It sold last year to a developer. Had been closed ~10 yrs or so and had not been updated for decades before then. When they built it, it was the edge of town. Town grew out to it. This is a stupid story. There is no lack of helium only a change in government policy.
The USGS compiles a large quantity of useful information about mineral production and consumption, including helium:
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/
You can buy helium from the US government at $2.037 per cubic metre, whilst the commercial price is nearer $3 per cubic metre; adjusting that would seem to make some kind of sense, since the US has 600 million cubic metres of the stuff in Amarillo.
There are plants at Skikda in Algeria and somewhere in Qatar which aim to extract 25 million cubic metres from natural gas a year, but there have been some issues in getting them to work; both Algeria and Qatar's natural gas reserves contain about as much helium as the US total reserves do.
It is impossible to substitute for helium for cryogenics; nothing else stays liquid at that low a temperature, and the ultra-refrigerators that get to liquid helium temperatures use helium as working fluid.
I did my PhD at Nottingham University, which uses a fair amount of liquid helium; the arrangement there is that it's delivered to the MRI building at the top of the hill, and the boil-off passes through a liquifier and is used by the theoretical physicists at the bottom of the hill. I don't know what the theoretical physicists do with their boil-off; there are obvious practical problems with running piping from lots of separate labs to a central liquifier, and liquifiers are bulky and vibrating enough that you don't want to have them in the same lab as your delicate semiconductor-physics experiment.
No, they are filled with helium, but after the speeches they've just given up all hope and are too depressed to float anymore.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You go out of your way to present people with a plan how to get rid off politicians and someone comes along with an XXL ego and an S brain and starts shouting "It won't work! It won't work! They only go up!"
Of course they don't drop down. Ceiling drops down.
Sheeesh! Do I have to tell you how to do EVERYTHING?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That's not really practical. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that a fusion reactor can convert 10% of the power from its reaction to electricity.
The most promising reaction, according to Wikipedia, is that of:
First of all, there is the Deuterium. This is harvested from Heavy Water, water that has one or two deuterium atoms instead of normal hydrogen atoms. This heavy water costs approximately US$300/kg[2] for consumers, and the deuterium produced approximately US$1/L[3]. This is a lot. Deuterium has a molar mass of approximately two g/mol, with one mole of a gas taking up one cubic metre at standard temperature/pressure. At US$1/L, this deuterium costs US$1000/m^3, or US$500/g (I'm assuming that gases volumes refer to STP. If I'm wrong, feel free to point this out---I've never dealt with bottled gas).
Next is tritium. At US$30000/g[4], it's hardly cheap. For the reaction to take place, you need the two isotopes to react stoichiometrically (in the proper ratio). IOW, for each mole of tritium, you need a mole of deuterium. Converted to masses (tritium's molar mass is approximately three), this means that you need a ratio of 3g tritium : 2g deuterium. For each mole of Tritium, you will get a mole of helium. Because we're dealing with helium-4, the molar mass is ~4g/mol. The rest of the mass is made up by the neutron; this doesn't matter to us. Therefore, to make four grams of helium, we need three grams of tritium, and two grams of deuterium. At the prices given, this is US$91000 per four grams of helium, which, because it is one mole, is one cubic metre at STP. Helium, as of 1986 (yeah, yeah, I know) cost US$37.50/1000f^3. This is about US$1.30/m^3. Think about those prices. 9.1 x 10^4 US$/m^3, vs 1.3 x 10^0 US$/m^3. That's almost five orders of magnitude. There would have to be be a bloody good reason to be using helium at those prices.
In conclusion:
Helium-4 produced by fusion will cost five orders of magnitude more than current prices
References:
Yes, nuclear fusion produces helium.
The fusion of 1kg of deuterium produces near enough 1kg of helium, and, umm, 2.7MeV per fusion * 6*10^23 atoms per mole * 500 moles of D atoms per kilogram / 2 deuteriums per fusion * 1.6e-19 joules per eV = 64.8 terajoules of energy.
So, a one-gigawatt fusion power plant would produce a kilo of helium every eighteen days; if the current electricity use of France were provided entirely by fusion plants, you'd get thirty tons a year. The large hadron collider uses 120 tons of helium, but efficiently; present planetary helium use is about seventy-five tons a day.
For comparison, the US produces from natural gas about 76 million cubic metres of helium a year; a cubic metre of helium weighs 1000/22.4*4 grams, so 76 million cubic metres weigh about fifteen thousand tons.
Ever fill a balloon with carbon dioxide then drop it? It gives visual meaning to the phrase 'went over like a lead balloon.'
Now that would be a cool sight. Dropping C02 filled balloons at a political rally. They wouldn't float down. They'd plummet straight to the ground and wouldn't even bounce. It wouldn't look natural.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Mythbusters did a segment on this and found that the thermite coating causing the disaster was nothing more than a myth. Well, at least the part of it being caused solely by the thermite was... From Wikipedia: "Using the same compounds used in the Hindenburg's paint, the MythBusters discovered that they could combine to form highly incendiary thermite. However, the actual proportions of components in the paint burned too slowly to match the film footage of the Hindenburg disaster. A scale model of the Hindenburg using the same paint and placed in a hydrogen-rich environment took about a minute to burn and did look very similar to the original events. In the end, they concluded that the Hindenburg's demise could be attributed to both the hydrogen and the paint, and they agreed that the paint by itself was not responsible for the rapid burning of the airship. They also pointed out that if actual thermite covered the Hindenburg, it would make the airship too heavy to fly." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_5)#Episode_70_.E2.80.94_.22Hindenburg_Mystery.2C_Crocodile_Zig_Zags.22
Doesn't this sound sort of like part of an old Adam West script?
And on a side-note which is probably more relevant. . .
Since the Hindenburg went up in flames because it had been painted with thermite and not because of the gas it had been filled with, perhaps our airships should be using hydrogen which has more lifting power than helium anyway.
I've always felt slightly gyped by not getting to live in that reality where we had regular airship traffic and where classy chicks all smoked from foot-long cigarette holders. I want to wear a waxed mustache and say things like, "Now see here, what?" and not sound like an idiot like I currently do when I speak that way.
-FL
Hmmm.... There's a joke here about hot air, but I can't quite get it off the ground.....