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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.'"
We can make clones on the moon and insert fake memories into them - who wants to spend money on training? Then we can power the world with H3 :D
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
This isn't an issue... all we need to do is send some blimps up to collect all of the balloons that kids accidentally let fly away.
...to see how the neo-facists out there re-spin this as "but supply and demand economics will save the day!"
Nevermind that you can never, ever, get back the helium you loose on the surface of the planet.
Economics has nothing to do with the natural availability of resources; if it did then the artificial pricing of said helium wouldn't be an issue, would it?
One time when Eric S. Raymond was young he got a small jar of mustard stuck up his ass. It was so far up there that he had to go to the doctors to have it removed. When the doctor went in for an exploratory he could not find the mustard jar.
"How far is it up inside you?", the doctor asked him.
"It's deep in there," Eric said, "keep looking."
The doctor then proceeded to reach farther into his anal cavity, but still no jar.
"I can't seem to reach it," the doc said. "I think we will have to do an x-ray, to see whereabouts in your ass the jar is located."
"No. That's okay," he said back to the doctor, "I just wanted you to stick your hand up my ass. That's all."
After that the hospital banned him from coming back, but the doctor was from that point forward a valued contributor to open-source.
I hear that He3, which is used in high tech detectors in connection to neutron imaging, is harder and harder to get because the US gov't is buying up all available resource to build bulls..., err, terrorism detectors and nothing is left for science.
All I can think of is making kids laugh at parties by inhaling helium and then talking like a chipmunk. I will miss those days.
Who gives a shit about the future? I've got mine. Bugger off, graybeard.
So lets see, discover helium behaves like glass under certain conditions; raise helium prices to reflect some "perceived artificial low" price; profit from a helium super fluids.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
In the long term disney characters will finally be out of copyright and will no longer be popular. So we won't need helium to make those zany character voices. Better to use it now while the characters are still popular. That is the only use for helium right? Science? Pah, what's that!?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever.
Like property rights, why should land only be able to be sold by those who got to it first (or bought it from those who did) - I wasn't able to compete with them and doesn't seem fair that my ancestors lack of ability to "win" should deprive me.
And the same thing for all the minerals that have already been mined from the earth. And in fact, every single thing on the entire planet, ever.
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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.
What this seems to say is that the price of helium has historically been inversely proportional to the televised quantity of hot air generated by Washington pols. Now they're changing the rules so it is directly proportional to Washington gas emissions. This includes all gases generated by any Washington orifice -- lighter than air or not...
Although the answer to that all depends on what you have to offer. Incidentally it pays to be a clown, a mad mad clown that is. MWAHAHAHAHAHHAHAA! *honkahonka!*
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.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it, but this one is mine.
It's as if a million chipmunk voices suddenly cried out in terror and turned into baritones.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. If we need it, just go get it. If someone could come up with a rocket that could burn carbon-based politician gas bags, we'd solve this problem in no time.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It sounds more like a sound moral argument to me, but I guess anything which doesn't have a "$", "€", or similar symbol attached to it doesn't count as rational anymore.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I do NOT want Microsoft anywhere near my computer, my game console, my instant messaging system, my email accounts, my banking, my online transactions, ATMs, my cellphone, my car.
DO NOT WANT.
When you acquire a smaller company, I don't start using your products because it now says "Microsoft". In fact, if I'm using a product or a service from a company which you buy out, I stop using said products or services completely. You buy companies, not their userbase.
P.S.: The only Microsoft product I would use is toilet paper. Feel free to put your logo on every sheet.
I RTFA and am pleased to report that it was *really* light reading! ;)
will all be about the fight to successfully manage the earth: its climate, its species, its fisheries, its water, its minerals, its energy sources etc
and those who just want to consume, consume, consume, with no forethought, and then: "hey, where'd all the stuff go?"
but in some areas of this country, when you talk about managing things intelligently and prudently, you're some sort of anti-american fascist liberty destroying socialist
why is that?
if that sort of propaganda is allowed to prevail, our grandchildren are going to live (or rather, mostly die) in some awfully brutal conditions
but just keep ignoring the fish stock depletions, the aquifer depletions, the increased consumption of oil that just gets deeper to dig up, the slowly rising thermostat... nah, none of things are problems! keep partying see? anyone who wants to manage these things is just a killjoy evil liburul!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Best case, being outside of our puny little gravity well tends to add 4 or 5 zeros to the terrestrial price....
1. Bottle helium ...
2.
3. Profit
FUCK YEAH.
The days of sounding like an oompa-loompa with old birthday balloons are over! Back to plugging my nose.
How much does he stand to benefit from the immediate rise of helium prices? If his gain is negligible maybe he actually cares. If not, maybe he is just trying to start arbitraging. This is the era of parasitic individualism where people will sell out professional reputations in order to live comfortably into the future while everyone else suffers. As a result, we must be wary the motive.
Well...I'm GLAD I have a 1200cc/min hydrogen generator then. I've been making hydrogen balloons for years with it. I take them outside and blow them up...or inhale them to sound funny...Should have seen what I did yesterday for the 4th....
I guess I could use them for children's birthday parties huh?? Just hope some little girl doesn't think she's cute and rubs it in her hair to make it staticy and BOOM!!! I'm kidding. I guess b*day parties will just have to be dull with no balloons that float.
Here's a tip: If you want to inhale hydrogen but not kill brain cells and get light-headed, then mix the oxygen with it that you're also getting from electrolysis. Then you have 66.6% hydrogen and 33.3% oxygen. That's MORE O2 than you get from the air!! Just DON'T get a spark near you! Your lungs (and you) would seriously explode since it's mixed together...the reaction would seriously back up down your throat and into your lungs and you would explode everywhere. You wouldn't get the "fire-breathing effect" that works only if there's no oxygen in your lungs.
So what have you done? That is, other than post rants against something straight out of Amalgamated Stereotypes, Ltd?
Pipeline to Jupiter.
Sheesh. Wake me when you have a *real* problem.
Most helium is released from nat gas flares in oil wells, as at current prices it's not worth recovering either if the well is far from concentrated "civilization". And as the parent mentions, that's it, it's lost. Yes, you can make helium with fusion, and I even do it here, but in amounts that make a microgram look like large lots. Lemme know when a fusion reactor makes energy gain -- I'm working it, but....not yet. www.coultersmithing.com has some info there. Helium 3 is in far shorter supply (always, but now it's really critical) and it is because the DHS has taken it all for portal neutron detectors -- you can't buy it as a civilian (or the detectors new) for ANY price whatever. Sometimes can find it in a used detector, that's about it, and CERN is crying because they need that for their superfluid He dilution coolers. This is a separate but also important issue -- 3He is a decay product from Tritium mostly and we just don't do much of that anymore. There's only a tiny amount in natural He, which of course we're just letting whiz into space because we don't want to pay the rent to store the stuff.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
But you have to harvest it from a giant fusion reactor with the biggest gravity well in the solar system
the race for controlled fusion just got a much needed shot in the arm.
If helium and gasoline are the two staples that you cannot do without,you are a rare breed indeed.
A.k.a., chlorofluorocarbon. Or the uranium shortage? Or the ivory shortage? Or the newsprint shortage? All pre-shashdot, of course. Next, the sunlight shortage! Laugh now, you won't in 2031.
Clinton really screwed up by dumping 50 years worth of Helium on the market. It needs to be taken off and then encourage the natural gas guys to restart helium separation by allowing the prices to rise.
The really sad part about this, is that the helium reserves were about being a RESERVE. That way the west had guaranteed access to it (which IS hard to come by).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The price for manufacturing good that require welding will go up dramatically. A lot of welders us a heluim/argom mix because it allows for real nice welds.
Doesn't the Lollipop Guild have representatives to handle this kind of financial crisis?
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
...in Darwin, Australia. The He is from natural gas wells:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/03/2835141.htm
All that matters is that there are ways of mining that don't hurt the environment and that more are in use.
I defy you to name one. Mining is an inherently destructive activity. There is no such thing as a mine that does not hurt the environment. We might decide that the economic benefits outweigh the environmental consequences (and I don't necessarily have a problem with that in many cases) but make no mistake that the environment IS impacted negatively by mining. There are ways to mitigate the consequences and reduce/minimize the impact but there is no such thing as environmentally friendly mining.
My understanding is that most helium is a byproduct of extracting natural gas from gas fields. If natural gas resources are not dwindling, and no doubt there are still undiscovered fields, then isn't this scarcity somewhat artificial?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
What a coincidence -
My flat at university was also called the Bush Dome [so named for reasons that have nothing to do with shrubbery].
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
... so much more than hot air
You mean to tell me that Alpha Decay is rare in the universe? I simply don't buy the argument.
Alpha decay is incredibly rare in the universe. The reason for this is that only heavy elements will decay by alpha particle emission that is elements like Uranium, Thorium etc. All of these are far, far heavier than iron which is important.
Next question is where do all the elements come from? The very light ones such as hydrogen and helium were formed in the Big Bang and the accurate prediction of the observed abundance's of these gases is one of the major achievements of the Big Bang model (the technical term is Big Bang nucleosynthesis).
The slightly heavier elements such as carbon, silicon, oxygen etc. can be formed in the heart of any star by nuclear fusion binding nuclei together in complex fusion cycles. However iron-56 is the most stable nucleus possible so once you have bound nuclei together to form this you cannot get any more energy out and, in fact it requires energy to make heavier nuclei.
So where do all the elements which can undergo alpha decay come from? Well if you have a sufficiently massive start (above 9 solar masses) when it finally turns its core into iron there is no more energy to be had and the entire core collapses under gravity and then rebounds in a super nova explosion. In this explosion there are massive numbers of neutrons produced which stream out through the star's outer atmosphere. This results a very complex chain of neutron capture and decay (which nuclear astrophysicists study at places like TRIUMF) resulting in the heavy elements like Uranium, lead etc. that we find on the earth today - in fact ALL the elements heavier than iron-56 were produced in this manner.
So to get alpha decay you have to have a radioactive element that was produced in the heart of a particular type of dying star. In terms of the total mass of the universe the about which exists in such a rare and hard to produce form is minuscule. Hence, although alpha decay is common on the Earth is is incredible rare in the Universe.
If Helium gets expensive enough, it will be worth the money to build fusion plants just for the Helium even though the plant never produce a net positive energy output. So, in principle, there is big latent supply hidden.
Even before that, it would be economically infeasible for using Helium for blimps, eventually someone will figure out how to do it safely using Hydrogen.
Oliver.
We have already tapped all the easy forms of energy available to us. Your argument doesn't apply. If the Romans didn't have anything else to find after they used up all the trees, then they damn well should have rationed them. By conservative accounts, we've got 50 years of oil left at our current use, solar and alternative energies will never provide more than 10-20% of world consumption. Even if we were to conserve massively now, there would have to be a major population reduction. Damn right we should be rationing right now. The majority of us live in complete luxury, with artificially cheap everything but there is nobody consuming rationally. It's not in our nature.
If you look into the facts on this, because of the stockpile, the US stopped collecting helium (separation from natural gas) and allowed it to be vented into the atmosphere. Given its real value as a coolant in high temperature reactors those responsible for this really should face a firing squad!
Recapture the helium. Yeah it costs money - until you consider what He will cost in 20 years...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Uhmmm, USAsians have this weird pizza view of the world: The world is flat and if you venture beyond the borders of continental USA, then you are going to fall off. The planet is a little larger than the USA and there is helium elsewhere. The USA has a somewhat unique stash of the stuff, but it certainly isn't the only supply on the planet.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever
Doesn't the current generation determine the availability, one way or another?
I venture to guess that you haven't traveled much. It's easy to rail against environmentalism...
Read what he wrote again. He's not railing against environmentalism, he's saying let us live our lives to the fullest.
You chose to interpret that as being against environmentalism. Well I have travelled a lot internationally, including to parts of Africa and South America. What I took away from all the things you listed (and I saw all of them in spades) is this - any country with a poor economy is inherently going to suck at environmental care. In part because they do not have the resources, but also in part because poor people care less about the world that surrounds them.
If all 15 million of us lived in mansions and drove flying SUV's, the earth would look like a garden because everyone would have the spare resources and abilities to take care of the environment. So if you REALLY care about the environment, you should be doing everything in your power to boost economies, anywhere you can make a difference. You should be dying to give people that flying SUV so they care that they have beautiful places to visit in it, instead of deforesting the area where they live simply to have heat and cooking fuel.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. Raise prices on helium
2. Use extra money to fund fusion research in order to produce more helium
3. ????
4. Profit!
The weight balance is going to be a barrier to using vaccuum cells for lift for a long time. Aerogels are a good idea to investigate. Or some kind of metallic foam framework for the the shell of the sphere. The membrane does not have to be thin, it just has to be light and strong enough to create a specific gravity within the space it encloses that is significantly less than that of the atmosphere.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Rigid airships can have and probably should have separate lift cells. Those need to be spherical anyway to get optimal lift per mass. The air frame can be layered on top as a wrapper and could be a strong plastic stretched over carbon fibre or something.
Pure distilled water might work for lift. Just make an air tight, water tight lift cell that is lined on the inside with a surface that reflects microwave radiation. Then at the bottom in a depression to collect condensation, have a powerful microwave transmitter to create steam. The idea is about the same as with a hot air balloon, but with water vapor, with a closed lift cell instead of open, and running on electrical current rather than fuel. Make it diesel electric and in regions and hours when there is enough sunlight, it can cut over to solar powered or solar supplemented.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Helium will never be impossible to get, even in large quantities. Stop worrying!
The atmosphere is 5ppm helium. That is not a lot of concentration, but we have a lot of atmosphere. But we will never even get to the point of needing to recover it from the atmosphere. Helium is present in most natural gas well in concentrations of 1000's of ppm. Most of that cannot be economically recovered at this time because helium is cheap, and recovery is expensive. We are not 'wasting' helium through use, we are 'wasting' helium by not recovering it in the first place.
There must be something wrong with Sam Bell's clones on the Moon. Let's send a "rescue mission" to set things right, and get that He-3 moving again!
Man, this is a big deal. It's a tragedy that we haven't heard about this in the news before. It seems like the kind of thing Slashdot would have reported on years ago.
I guarantee you that most of the products you consume are imported from places that do significant harm to their environment. Our amenities come by exploiting willingness of other places to fubar their environment. The cost and sometimes simply the forbidden nature of extracting resources from the earth in a developed country combined with similar effects on processing those resources make developing countries the place to do it. If every square foot on the planet were as restricted as the 'developed world', then all the toys and necessities would be much more rare and much more expensive.
I'm not an uber-envorinmentalist or anything, but I have to acknowledge that my country's domestic rules and regulations are nice for our land, but bordering on hypocritical with the huge imports of goods made possible by other places not having such restrictions.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
from wikipedia (helium):
"Next to hydrogen, it is the second most abundant element in the universe, and accounts for 24% of the elemental mass of our galaxy."
just kidding : P
Agree all the way. Helium is too cheap now, considering but then again, price fixing doesn't seem like a smart road to go down either (remember some past events in USA with trying to price-fix? Oil in the '70s etc? Nixon's price/wage freezes?) -- so how to fix that one and skip the unintended (but often obvious) consequences? Helium is so cheap (right now) that I use it to prefill my fusion reactor up to STP before I open the door, as being very inert it makes the subsequent pumpdown time a lot quicker (because all the shop air doesn't get in if I work fast), and I get to purity and running conditions again faster. I could use Argon instead, but if I run the usual plasma during pumpdown to get tank-wall bakeouts, the heavier Ar does more damaging sputtering of metal the ions hit than He does. I have Ne, but at that price, forget it. If He cost the same, there would be no problems with taking care of the supply -- they'd be capturing it in the NG flares along with the gas they are now burning because it costs more to compress/liquify/transport than they'd get for the NG. In this case, the NG would just come along as a bonus to make the operation slightly more profitable than before, or that's how I'd design it.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
As you say, something that's "good for you" but is going to cost you money isn't going to fly real good. It might do better if it were some percent, rather than a fixed amount. But one thing people here are suspicious of is that statement. Here in Floyd, VA, we had a rash of hippies move in from CA when some spiritualist said this place wasn't gonna fall into the ocean. They settled in and then started hassling the locals about "recycling, "sustainability" and "green" stuff. That *really* didn't go over well at all, but in a humorous way. Not because of who said it either -- but because the locals can all *teach* this stuff to those idiots -- they have been sustainably farming these mountains since before the Revolutionary war, after all....and it's nicer now than it was then by all accounts. Rich fertile land, lots of game and all that. I think you'd have to be an idiot to live in a big city, but that's me, sitting here on my PV solar electricity, a year or so worth of food and fuel stashed up, on a nice big piece of land I own outright -- and get off my lawn if you don't like what I'm doing -- because if you weren't trespassing, you'd never know about it anyway. In a city, the ultimate unsustainable idea, you have to have a lot tighter laws and rules, because if I swing my arm there, it's likely to connect with someone's head. Here, there's little chance of that. The danger is applying the same laws to both places -- the shoe won't fit in one or the other.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
In my opinion, we should see breakthrough in this area after carbon nano-materials become cheaply available.
I have never thought about it, but apparently, a baloon with internal structure designed for optimum implosion resistance would be a revolutionary way to lift objects up to certain levels (depending on the payload) in the atmosphere.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
Helium is up to several percent in natural gas. The cost of separation is still more than the cost of the dwindling Cold War stock pile. Once that gone, the markets will take over.