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Price Shocks May Be Coming For Helium Supply
Ars has an update on the potential helium shortage we discussed a couple of years back. A Nobel laureate, Robert Richardson, argues for ending market distortions that are resulting in an artificially low price for helium, which is accelerating the projected exhaustion of the supply. "Richardson's solution is to rework the management of the Bush Dome [so named for reasons that have nothing to do with the politician] stockpile once again, this time with the aim of ensuring that helium's price rises to reflect its scarcity. In practical terms, he said that it would be better to deal with a 20-fold increase in price now than to deal with it increasing by a factor of thousands in a few decades when supply issues start to become critical. But he also made an emotional appeal, stating, 'One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever.'"
Supply and demand are a short-term adjustment, not a long term one.
There is absolutely nothing (other than perhaps some sort of "speculative warehousing" schemes) that would allow supply-and-demand adjust to prevent the depletion of a non-renewable resource.
Helium, for example, is priced based on how easy and cheap it is to extract it from the ground immediately, right now, rather than on what its real time-value is when considering the value of potential important industrial, medical and scientific usage 100 years from now when the stuff will be impossible to obtain, because too many people stuffed it into party balloons and party favours and a billion other random uses today.
I work in respiratory care. We administer a 70%/30% mix of helium and oxygen, called Heliox. It is a low-density gas, making it easier to breathe for people with airway obstructions (such as asthma, throat cancer, etc.).
The rising cost of helium may make Heliox prohibitively expensive.
Just wanted to share that helium is for more than balloons.
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There certainly is a moral element; but helium is a very special case, virtually unique among the elements of human relevance.
Once it hits the atmosphere, it is inert enough not to combine with anything and light enough to diffuse into space. Game over. No mining the garbage dumps for this one. The only "recycling" that occurs is that in the sense that, if a piece of hardware hasn't been breached, you can remove the helium it contains before decommissioning it.
The only earthly source of the stuff is assorted alpha-emitting radioactives, since an alpha particle is just a helium nucleus in need of electrons. Very slow. The only viable sources are places where it has had millions of years to be trapped underground, often with natural gas deposits. Once those are tapped out, we wait until some more alpha emitters decay.
Helium also has some unique properties. There are other inert gasses(nitrogen is inert enough for many purposes, argon is even more so and doesn't float into space), there are other lift gasses(hydrogen, hot air); but if you want very cold fluids, liquid helium is it. Game over. Nothing better available. Hope you guys can figure out high-temp superconductors that don't quench at trivial magnetic field strengths before you run out...
Virtually every other element or chemical of which we might "run out" we actually mean "run out of really inexpensive supplies". They also tend to be recyclable(in the case of elements and some chemicals) or synthesizable(if you have the energy), and they stay within our gravity well pretty much no matter what you do.
Are you forgetting that this entire situation is due to government meddling, as in government buying helium for one price, building a massive reserve, and then selling it for a much lower (ridiculously low) price, totally independent of any demand or worth of the product?
because too many people stuffed it into party balloons and party favours and a billion other random uses today.
Okay I've grown really tired of this argument. The Helium that is used in balloons and blimps accounts for an incredibly small amount of the total use. The most single use of Helium is as a coolant. The largest group of uses is as a purging gas or artificial atmosphere (like in arc wielding, silicon mfg., etc...) Just those two together account for 75% of all uses.
Second, Helium is under constant resupply here on Earth, pretty much all helium on Earth today is the radioactive decay of heavy metals in the interior of the Earth.
I understand where people are coming from when they warn of this kind of stuff, but LONG term this stuff resupplies at a pretty decent rate. Hence the reason He is the second most abundant element in the universe. Fine, rise the price, but don't blame it on the balloons.
I understand where people are coming from when they warn of this kind of stuff, but LONG term this stuff resupplies at a pretty decent rate. Hence the reason He is the second most abundant element in the universe.
The actual reason He is the second most abundant element in the universe is that huge amounts of it were formed in the first moments of the Big Bang. A little more has been formed since then by fusion in stars. Unfortunately, essentially none of the helium from either of those sources has stayed put on earth. It all floated away long ago.
Helium created by decay of heavy elements in incredibly rare in the universe, and it's rare on the earth as well, but it's the only helium we can get at. It forms at a rate that's way too low and too diluted for us to use. It has accumulated over millions of years in the same geological structures that capture natural gas, but those special traps certainly aren't being replenished fast enough for our needs.