Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
While on the train ride back from Germany, I read a headline in the Financial Times.
"Mineral Prices Depress as Fear Dissipates"
It was spot on. I was involved over the last year in a major project for the Dutch government on the topic of mineral scarcity. After a year of intensive research I came to the conclusion that the mineral scarcity situation was effectively the inability of manufacturers and managers to effectively communicate their material requirements. There is really no absolute scarcity on the planet. We've tapped less than 2% of the resource base on the planet. Unless we suddenly run out of energy, prompting us to slow down extraction of these minerals, it is unlikely we'll ever really be faced with a shortage.
Needless to say, such analytical conclusions are not popular these days, we'd much rather claim there really is a scarcity situation as that would give the government something to do. Not a shock that the results of my study were warped, rewritten and omitted. In the end there was no science left in the report presented to the Dutch government. Just another fear piece, much like this one, which temporariliy increases the price of a resource so a few greedy bastards can make a buck while legitimate manufacturers get screwed with a major artificial spike in price.
Agreed.
He has basically put all the badness of using up a resource on the single generation variant. Its as if its not bad when more-than-one generation depletes a resource...
I've got news for him. The generation that doesnt have access to the resource doesnt give a fuck how many generations it took to use it up.
"His name was James Damore."
Perhaps you could get every natural gas producer in the county to STOP THROWING IT AWAY.
They used to capture it and re-sell it. But when the govt got out of the helium business and liquidated their supply in Texas, the nat.-gas folks just started discharging it (it doesn't burn, so they strip it off the supply). It's been about 2 decades since they stopped capturing it. Now STFU about these stupid articles that haven't the faintest clue what they're talking about.
Raise prices - jeezus fucking christ - you have no idea what's even going on in the supply chain and you want to enforce price controls...fucking morons.
Of course you are right but how many alpha particles does it take to make a meaningful amount of helium gas? I'm too lazy to do the calculations, but off the top of my head, I'd guess that's an insane amount of alpha radiation. Is this really enough to not bother with conservation?
The last time airships powered by vacuum were attempted it was found that the then current technology could not create a container strong enough to support a 1 atmosphere pressure differential without weighing enough to cancel out all the displaced air, preventing any buoyancy. Modern technology might be able to do better, but this is not guaranteed.
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Well, there would be if the government had more regulatory will and power - you could easily tax all mining activities at the exact level that they are harming the environment and use those tax incomes to foster green environments (plant trees, clean up old dump sites, ...). A company can pillage and leave, a country, where its happening can not. So it is for the government of the country where mining is happening to impose taxes and regulations that must ensure that environment actually benefits from the mining overall. That is the role of the government - insure that in the long term, the country benefits and not just the companies.
Vacuum is lighter than helium (0 g/l vs. 0.1786 g/l at NTP). The problem is the weight of the casing necessary to keep the atmospheric pressure out. Since it seems that nitrogen is diamagnetic, putting a sufficiently strong superconducting magnet in the middle of the balloon might help by reducing the effective density of the atmosphere around the balloon; unfortunately it's not quite sufficient alone since oxygen is paramagnetic, so we can't build a vacuum bubble with that alone. Then again, simply repulsing nitrogen should create lift...
Anyone care to work the physics out?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.