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.'"

Comments

No Problem

[LBArrettAnderson]

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.

Re:No Problem

[DigitAl56K]

All we need to do is make nuclear fusion work.

Re:No Problem

[Arthur Grumbine]

All we need to do is make nuclear fusion work.

This is why this is a non-story. I have it from a very reliable source that practical nuclear fusion is only 20 years away. I spoke to my father and grandfather, and they assured me that this estimate was time-tested, and therefore, reliable.

Re:No Problem

[joggle]

Even practical nuclear fusion wouldn't generate nearly enough helium to meet today's needs. Fusion creates an incredibly tiny amount of helium. Even if all of the electrical power in the world was generated by fusion there wouldn't be enough helium produced to fill a single Goodyear blimp in a year.

There's already shortages of helium-3 (an isotope that has to be manufactured). The entire world only produces 20,000 liters of helium-3 per year (it takes 368 million liters of helium to fill a blimp).

See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/us/23helium.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=helium%20billions&st=cse

Once the natural supply of helium-2 runs out, all helium would have to be produced on earth artificially or somehow imported from other parts of the solar system. It would take billions of years for enough uranium to decay to replenish the earth's supply of helium.

Also, from one of the articles linked to in the story (Sobotka refers to Lee Sobotka, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis):

"When we use what has been made over the approximate 4.5 billion of years the Earth has been around, we will run out," Sobotka said . "We cannot get too significant quantities of helium from the sun — which can be viewed as a helium factory 93 million miles away — nor will we ever produce helium in anywhere near the quantities we need from Earth-bound factories. Helium could eventually be produced directly in nuclear fusion reactors and is produced indirectly in nuclear fission reactors, but the quantities produced by such sources are dwarfed by our needs."

Killing Brain Cells to end soon

[Crock23A]

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.

Re:Killing Brain Cells to end soon

[Zerth]

In the future, we'll do the trick with sulfur hexafluoride instead.

At least until enough kids suffocate.

Re:I can't wait...

[TruthSauce]

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.

"One generation doesn't have the right to..."

[BarryJacobsen]

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.

Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..."

[benjamindees]

doesn't seem fair that my ancestors lack of ability to "win" should deprive me.

Similarly, your ancestors lack of ability to provide for their offspring shouldn't deprive me.

Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..."

[fm6]

So conservation == socialism? Why not, everything else does.

Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..."

[10101001 10101001]

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.

You're examples are interesting, and they do illustrate a point. One generation does have the right to determine the availability forever. But, it also has the responsibility and obligation to wisely use those resources. This comes not only in not trivially forever consuming resources but also, as you point out, providing for future generations to inherent that which is available in a fair way. Oligarchies makes sense in a gene pool, but in the short term humanity exists much more in a meme pool where ideas have much more weight than genetic mutation.

The long-term survival of the meme pool to maintain and progress requires, then, the opportunity for everyone to grow so that those most capable, willing, and involved actually continue the meme pool. To facilitate this requires many things, including the availability of quality education and a mechanism of reallocating rival resources (property taxes and death taxes come to mind). This also can translate into absorbing into monetary costs the externalities of pollution or the warpings of other externalities. Just because a right trumps an obligation in the axioms of law doesn't mean a law cannot be created or a society can willfully choose to act individually to fulfill an obligation and withhold from the exercising of a right. Recognizing that this can and should be so is something too few seeming willing to acknowledge, so I do congratulate you on noting the difference.

Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..."

[selven]

And the same thing for all the minerals that have already been mined from the earth

Without mining minerals from the earth, we'd be stuck in the Stone Age. It's a tradeoff - our generation gets less minerals to work with, but in exchange we get all our technology. With that in mind, it's reasonable to say that things created by people are the property of their creators, since you have the same (arguably better with all of your aforementioned technology) chance at creating stuff that they did. Since everything on Earth that lasts long enough to be multi-generational and is scarce enough to bother having a property system around is either land, minerals or products, it looks like only land ownership is unfair (a point that can be argued rather convincingly, IMO).

Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..."

[falzer]

How would you prefer land ownership to work?

Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..."

[fm6]

He phrases the whole issue in terms of property rights. The idea that some evil liberal-big-government cabal is down on the concept of private property is at the core of all arguments by people fulminating against "socialism."

Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[Black Gold Alchemist]

The best way to reduce mineral scarcity, eliminate the psychopaths who consume resources beyond all reason, no more mega yachts, mansions, private jets et al. the planet can no longer cope with them.

Wrong. The best way is to develop the world as fast as humanly possible. Why? Because the more resources people consume, the less children they have. If population growth is our enemy, then our friend is economic growth. This is happening in a big way in places like India, which previously was a huge pop growth center. It is still growing, but it is down from 6 births per woman to 2.75 per woman. Why? not because of environmentalism, government or anything. It is because of consumerism and capitalism. Why? because women decided that they'd rather have cars then kids. What this means is that if we build, build, build, we end up with less people total. If we conserve and become poorer, more people will be born, and we will end up with a overpopulation catastrophe. Oh, and the mega yachts etc. of the ultra rich aren't the main resource users. It's average people in developed countries. It doesn't really matter though, because we haven't used all that much of the earth's metals.

not only from mining but also from refining (which becomes much worse as you deal with less viable mining resources).

Wrong again, rtb61. A mine in a poorer country that dumps toxic waste into a river is bad news. A modern mine, with all it's emission controls and neutralization processes is not. You really have to understand the difference between an open coal fire and highly emissions controlled one.

The world contains more than enough metal for all the stuff the enviros love to hate. More energy then we could ever find a way to use hits the earth from the sun. However, we need to actually use it. Then all 15 billion of us can live in mansions, and drive flying SUVs. The real psychopaths are people like you who wish to deny people the right to live their lives to fullest. The best way to reduce mineral scarcity (and this is proven over and over) is to allow entrepreneurs and capitalists to find new methods of mining, recycling, and substitution of materials, and sue them if they dump acid down the drain.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[ScrewMaster]

Insightful MY ASS.

Prices rises, lower concentrations become economically viable, util we use all the fucking Earth crust.

This is just a STUPID rant with the all too common "blame the rich". Way more resources are used keeping stupid people like you viable than keeping my humble pleasure boat.

There aren't enough yacht-owning rich to account for all the resource usage on this planet. Hell, one of the biggest uses of electric power in the U.S. is residential refrigeration ... let's blame the rich for that.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[eparker05]

If only the Romans had been more conservative with their wood resource use! If they had carefully controlled the cutting of trees and rationed the wood, they could have theoretically never run out, and we would still be using the burning of wood as our primary energy source today.

The next energy and/or mineral gap is always just around the bend, and while prices are cheap, people never develop (or find) alternatives. I agree that we should not be keeping the helium price artificially low, but don't think that we should go into crisis rationing mode just yet.

There are alternatives on the horizon (using NMR as an example since I am familiar with it): high temperature superconductors exist that some day will be able to make powerful magnetic fields while cooled only by nitrogen. More sensitive detectors and better analysis methods can yield more data from weaker magnets. There are solutions just waiting to be found. If we ran out of helium today, I promise you that organic chemists would still be using NMR in a year.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[haruchai]

You named your ass Insightful? Or is it really the source of your insight? That would explain many of the Anonymous Coward postings I've seen
over the years.

"Ladies & Germs, I'd like to introduce Insightful, my ass"

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[khallow]

The best way to reduce mineral scarcity, eliminate the psychopaths who consume resources beyond all reason, no more mega yachts, mansions, private jets et al. the planet can no longer cope with them.

So when are you going to kill yourself? I believe that would do more to reduce mineral scarcity than killing off the producers.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[couchslug]

"The best way to reduce mineral scarcity, eliminate the psychopaths who consume resources beyond all reason, no more mega yachts, mansions, private jets et al. the planet can no longer cope with them."

Nice rage, but the above listed uses consume a trivial amount of resources compared to more mundane but widespread consumption.

"the rest of us the majority still should consider all future generations of humanity in the way we use and abuse our mutual resources, not just the next but thousands of years even hundreds of thousands of years into the future."

Precisely why should we do this?

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[zippthorne]

Normal minerals don't go anywhere after you use them, they either remain in circulation or end up in a landfill, which we'll eventually mine for resources later. Helium rises through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere.. until the solar wind or a photon, random collisions gives it enough velocity to bounce off into space, never to return.

It's critical to at least attempt to recover helium since we don't really have it in abundance (like hydrogen, locked as it is in the oceans) and it can so easily be lost forever. At the very least, we should try to keep the annual consumption of helium below the annual production, and I don't mean the rate at which we pull it out of the ground, but the rate at which it forms naturally as a decay product of minerals throughout the earth's crust.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[ceoyoyo]

It would put a pretty bad dent in human imaging. High temperature superconductors are brittle and very, very difficult to wind in the complex coils at the sizes required to produce a homogenous field big enough to image a person in. Also, people don't sit still long enough for you to image longer to make up for NR drop with a much less powerful magnet. You could still image with resistive magnets, but you couldn't do most of the things we take for granted today.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[cowtamer]

Then all 15 billion of us can live in mansions, and drive flying SUVs. The real psychopaths are people like you who wish to deny people the right to live their lives to fullest.

I venture to guess that you haven't traveled much. It's easy to rail against environmentalism when

1) You have your own SUV to think about

2) You live in a country with abundant natural resources, trees, land, and relatively low population per area

3) Environmental destruction is an abstract concept that only "left wing wackos" and people who want to take away your "right to consume" rail on about...

4) You consume (or produce) commercially sponsored news/research/propaganda

Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:

1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity

2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)

3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).

4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).

I'm no saint. I own an SUV. I commute. I take international flights. I drink bottled water.

But there's a HUGE difference between not living up to your values and actually BELIEVING that what you do would be good policy if everyone else on the planet did it. The latter may make you feel good, but leads to the election of decision makers who create policies that are far more harmful than the actions (good or bad) of a single individual.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[deathbait]

If only the Romans had been more conservative with their wood resource use! If they had carefully controlled the cutting of trees and rationed the wood, they could have theoretically never run out, and we would still be using the burning of wood as our primary energy source today.

The next energy and/or mineral gap is always just around the bend, and while prices are cheap, people never develop (or find) alternatives. I agree that we should not be keeping the helium price artificially low, but don't think that we should go into crisis rationing mode just yet.

There are alternatives on the horizon (using NMR as an example since I am familiar with it): high temperature superconductors exist that some day will be able to make powerful magnetic fields while cooled only by nitrogen. More sensitive detectors and better analysis methods can yield more data from weaker magnets. There are solutions just waiting to be found. If we ran out of helium today, I promise you that organic chemists would still be using NMR in a year.

Friend of mine actually said something similar to me. It's bad when people use that kind of thinking when they're assuming property prices will always go higher just because it has so far. It's just downright scary when you're using the same logic on resources that may or may not be replacable by The Next Big Thing.

Natives on Easter Island would no doubt have come up with a conservation plan if they had indeed come to the conclusion that there was NEVER going to be a replacement for wood. Part of the reason they chopped that island clean of trees is probably due to the same kind of thinking you're doing now.

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[swilver]

It is just unbelievable that this was modded insightful. Parent couldn't be further off base.

I shudder to think what would happen when the approx. 500 million modern consumers in this world are joined by another 5.5 billion modern consumers. It would probably result in a direct proportional increase in natural resource expenditure and environmental destruction. This planet cannot support the people that are on it now in the way we have been living so far, and you think that transforming those 5 billion poor people into Americans is the solution?

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[backwardMechanic]

Which is why NMR and MRI are both moving to weaker magnets...oh, no, they're not. They're moving to bigger magnets requiring more helium. We're struggling to find low-temperature superconductors that will maintain a high enough current density, let alone high Tc. Maybe you want to give away sensitivity, but I think you'll find your colleagues don't. Guess who'll be getting published?

Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers

[Simetrical]

Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:

1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity

2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)

3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).

4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).

So in other words, pretty much like America too, until we got rich and instituted environmental regulation? Like how 20 people died and 7,000 grew sick in a 1948 smog incident in Pennsylvania? That and many other incidents in the same vein were what spurred the first air pollution regulations in this country. That we all take clean air for granted today is a testament to their effectiveness.

But when you're poor, you live in lousy conditions anyway, so pollution isn't the most important thing on your mind (vs., e.g., disease or starvation). Plus, pollution controls make things more expensive, and you need that money for necessities. It's completely rational for poorer societies to tolerate more pollution, and that is in fact what happens. None of this is the fault of developed nations – it's due to developing nations' quite sensible lack of pollution regulations. As they grow richer, they'll regulate pollution more, totally independent of us.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[Jafafa Hots]

Looks like I should do that before the price goes up.

Or, you could explain to him about the situation with helium that you wouldn't want to waste a rare, precious resourse that might be unavailable to future generations even for more important uses, should we continue to use it frivolously today.

Health care impact

[adamwpants]

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.

Re:Health care impact

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Not to mention the use of superconducting(and thus typically liquid helium cooled) magnets in medical diagnostic imaging and medical research.

No helium, No MRIs.

Re:Health care impact

[retchdog]

Since the only choices we've allowed ourselves are 1) use it all up now; 2) impose Strict Market Discipline, we're just going to have to go with the latter since the former is clearly nuts.

Re:Health care impact

[turing_m]

The rising cost of helium may make Heliox prohibitively expensive.

Only if you don't recover it. At some price for helium, sucking the exhalations into a compressor, bottling it and selling it back to the gas company for reprocessing becomes cost effective. I don't imagine that recovering the helium would be difficult given the difference in densities between helium and other gases.

Re:Health care impact

[imsabbel]

Any real use of helium for cryogenics is usually combined with helium recapturing lines. It would be _insane_ to let it go up into the air, even at todays prices.

Re:Health care impact

[Firethorn]

I'd hardly say that government regulations that are artificially deflating the price of helium is 'libertarian'.

Given the description, the helium is a natural resource 'owned' by the government. A proper libertarian response is that the government should get the maximum price it can get for it. IE the most benefit.

As mentioned, 20X the price might be a little less money in our pocket now, but it's much more later. Fusion plants aren't going to provide sufficient quantities any time soon.

Re:Health care impact

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Newer ones are being based on MgB2 and liquid hydrogen.

Re:Health care impact

[zippthorne]

Unfortunately, hydrox has some rather explosive risks. Not sure you want to be playing with it in an area where there might be sparks or flame sources, and there aren't many other options: you're looking for a diluent that's less dense than diatomic nitrogen, with an atomic mass of 28. Preferably a lot less. Not a huge range of possibilities there.

Re:Health care impact

[IndustrialComplex]

Another way is to find another light gas to form your low density mix.

Well there are a few limitations:

You sure as hell aren't going to find a substitute for Oxygen.
There is 1 gas that is lighter than Helium, and mixing it with Oxygen and introducing it in high enough volume to breath is dangerous as hell.

So let's move up the Periodic table. If we can't do Helium, we go up the elements... Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon and finally.... Nitrogen, which puts us right back at regular air, and thus is pointless.

So no, there isn't a substitute for Helium.

Do you hear that?

[Adrian Lopez]

It's as if a million chipmunk voices suddenly cried out in terror and turned into baritones.

I RTFA and...

[martyb]

I RTFA and am pleased to report that it was *really* light reading! ;)

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unless the hydrogen cylinder is slowly leaking into an enclosed room, it is basically as harmless as the helium one.

Hydrogen will give a reasonably zesty(but ever so eco-friendly) explosion if mixed with oxygen in an enclosed space in the right concentrations; but, being less dense than air, tends to just float away unless well enclosed. Plus, at ~atmospheric pressure, H2 has crap energy density, so it is way less dangerous than larger hydrocarbon gasses and liquids.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[countertrolling]

The moon? There's lots more in the sun. Just stick a big straw into it and drain it out. Just don't let BP do it. They'll blow out a big hole and the thing will fly off like a balloon.

the coming century

[circletimessquare]

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!

Re:the coming century

[fotbr]

why is that?

I live in redneckland. It sucks at times and is great at others. But maybe I can give you some insight as a result.

1) Often, "intelligently and prudently" comes across as very condescending, and that doesn't sit well with most people, regardless of their intelligence or social status.

2) People around here have a very high distrust of anyone that doesn't believe the same as them. Yes, that means religion, and their belief that anyone who isn't their particular variety of christian is automatically "wrong" in some manner. Add to that the fact that most people haven't ever lived far from where they grew up, and a distrust of most "big city folk", and a paranoia of those from either the east or west coasts.

3) Most of the things you mention aren't an issue around here, so there's also a big case of "out of sight out of mind". Fishing? That's a way to spend the afternoon drinking beer; not a way of life (though some of the bass fishermen would call those fightin' words). Aquifer depletion? Not a huge deal here (yet). Oil? Again, not produced here, and no one will care until it all goes away.

4) Things that work in the more densely populated area simply won't work here. Small commuter cars are great in cities and suburbs. A better system of public transit and light rail would be completely awesome to have. But they really don't work out in the rural areas. So various proposals that have been made regarding high taxes on gas, or on "gas guzzlers" (specifically light trucks), are seen as directly and unfairly targeting them.

5) Incomes out here are very low compared to the coasts. So while people in Boston or LA may not think much of something that might cost an extra $1000 / year per family, people out here often cannot afford it. When a family of 4 are barely getting by on an income under $30k before taxes are taken out, ANY increase is difficult. Being told "it's worth it" by someone out east making 6 figures, with no kids, and a wife/husband/partner who ALSO makes a nearly 6 figure salary, doesn't go over very well.

6) Lastly, when they try to make any of these points, they're often dismissed with little thought because they often don't come across as terribly educated. So when they find anyone willing to listen, they can be fiercely loyal.

I'm not saying any of these make people around here right (indeed, I often disagree with them on just about everything), just trying to explain part of what's going on.

Re:the coming century

[Mspangler]

"will all be about the fight to successfully manage the earth"

And you got it in one, once you add the part that it's even more about managing people, as in dictatorship.

You will decide what car (if any) I get to drive, you will decide what I eat, when I'll be allowed to have kids, what medical care I'm eligible for, and so on.

That's the not so hidden agenda that riles up people so well. I don't know if you intend to be one of the new slavemasters or not, but someone is pushing for that role. Richard Heinberg is very open about using "Government means" to "encourage" 50 million people to move out to newly confiscated and redistributed lands to take up organic subsistence farming.

As for him, in his own words (I do give him full points for honesty)

http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/189

"Many people (this includes him) who are doing this necessary work (leading others on the path of righteousness as defined by him) will be unable immediately to put much effort into building alternative, off-grid dwellings, and may have to continue using computers and jet transport, at least in modest ways. "

He will milk the system for every luxury he can get because he has to show the true path to the 50 million new eco-serfs who are being marched out into the country at bayonet point.

And this one is really a riot: http://energybulletin.net/node/22584

"Rather than a new peasantry that spends all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a new population of producers who maintain interests in the arts and sciences, in history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology--in short, the whole range of pursuits that make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile."

As if subsistence farmers have time for anything other than subsistence. And you are never more than two bad years from starvation. See the Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan, who has a much more realistic view of subsistence farming, or the opening act of said book;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315-1317

Yes, I grew up on a farm, and even with Friend Diesel and Friend Hydraulic System, it's not easy.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[swb]

Mom, why is dad such a boring, sanctimonious pain in the ass?

I found the solution

[ckedge]

1. Bottle helium
2. ...
3. Profit

FUCK YEAH.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[sznupi]

But if you would multiply that by the number of all other people doing such experiments / fun and telling themselves (well, OK, mostly just don't know & don't care) that they don't have an impact?

Re:emotional appeal?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Biomass - a renewable resource

[imsabbel]

Yes, it is. And hydron is the simply most common ones. Why are we then not all just using hydrogen for power?
Ding Ding Ding. Our planet is not a typical case of "universe", dimwitt.

Our helium sources are _very_ scarce, as it will depart our atmoshpere in quite a short time, geologically speaking. We have to make do with the results of radioactive decay down below, and even then you need something like long-time accumulation in natural gas fields to get usable helium fractions.

Re:I can't wait...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Nevermind that you can never, ever, get back the helium you loose on the surface of the planet.

I don't mean to burst your Helium bubble, but the stuff is actually produced naturally by radioactive decay in the crust, etc. You may have heard of things called alpha particles, which sometimes have the symbol He2+. All you need to do to get Helium at this point is add 2 electrons, and we're not short on those.

Re:Biomass - a renewable resource

[v1]

"abundant" does not equal "easily available". The Sun for instance, is "relatively" close to us in space, and contains more helium than we could ever use, many million times over. Stars tend to have a lot of that and hydrogen in them. But it's not easy for us to get, obviously.

The problem with helium is it's light enough to escape earth's gravity well, and drift off into space. Because of that, it's not in our atmosphere anywhere in any concentration. So we have to get it from the ground. Looks like the main source is natural gas wells. So all we need to renew our helium supply is more dinosaurs.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[Bman21212]

I have no problem seeing BP sent into the sun

Whew!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Facts

[DCFusor]

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.

There's an inexhaustible supply just 1 AU away

[mykos]

But you have to harvest it from a giant fusion reactor with the biggest gravity well in the solar system

Re:I can't wait...

[mysidia]

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?

Re:I can't wait...

[slack_justyb]

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.

Re:emotional appeal?

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[zippthorne]

Yeah, airships should absolutely no longer be allowed to use helium for buoyancy. They ought to use hydrogen, hot-air, or, heck, even nitrogen.

When there are so many alternatives, there's no good reason to use helium, especially when there are medical and scientific uses that practically require helium to be effective. Ever try diving deep on hydrox? Hydrogen plus oxygen plus pressure is not a cocktail one would recommend lightly.

Re:I can't wait...

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Oh the Humanity!"

Yeah, the overlap between common aircraft dopes and "really flammable shit" is an unfortunate one.

Assuming you just use mylar or something, you probably won't be Hindenberging in the living room quite as often...

Re:I can't wait...

[zippthorne]

There is a reason that helium deposits are often associated with natural gas deposits. They both take a *long* time under a non-porus rock to accumulate to anywhere near useful levels. Like.. geologic time.

If you think you're just going to get a ton of granite and stick it under a tarp for a few days, you're way, way off base.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[deglr6328]

I don't know why the post above responding to you is at +3 insightful. It is not. Because if you "multiply that by the number of all other people doing such experiments / fun and telling themselves that they don't have an impact" as Sznupi says, you still only end up with a trivial fraction of He use overall, since only 7% of all He production is used in "fill" applications for buoyancy etc. I'm pretty sure the majority of that 7% is going to fill weather balloons and blimps and the like as you note, and the overwhelming majority ISN'T being used as kid's party decoration.

So don't worry, go out, get your kid one of those small $40 tanks and have fun. Better still, use your imagination and take the opportunity to teach your kids about some physics / chemistry. Start with the phenomenon of buoyancy and how that works (look at how a He filled balloon weirdly behaves in a car), show how helium is non-flammable and explain where its inertness comes from (electron valency - It's already "happy" with the number of e- it has), pick up a cheapo $10 vacuum thermos from Wal-mart or wherever and have your local welding supply shop fill it with liquid nitrogen ($5) so you can demonstrate how gasses expand/contract with temperature changes (the air in a balloon that has been manually blown full will liquefy in LN2, but a He filled balloon won't - explain WHY!), show them some videos about liquid helium on youtube and how much colder it is than LN2, explain how breathing it shifts the speed of sound - thereby shifting the pitch of your voice, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Is some of this well beyond the level of your 8yr old? Hell yes, and that's why you should do it! It doesn't matter if kids "get it" 100% all the time as so many stultifying grammar school teachers stupidly seem to believe. It matters much more that they are exposed to new things that make them think about familiar phenomena in new ways. They'll remember how fun and interesting the experience was, and the curiosity bred from that will stick with them forever. [/tangent]

Re:I can't wait...

[KarmaKhameleon]

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.

Re:I can't wait...

[khallow]

There's also significant helium in the upper atmosphere (that is, you can scoop it in low Earth orbit). I don't see anyone touching that before we reduce Earth helium stocks a lot, but if helium goes up a crazy amount, we do have alternatives near Earth.

Re:I can't wait...

[Thing 1]

The actual reason He is the second most abundant element in the universe [...]

Now, that's just freaky. I mean, not that I believe all the religious clap-trap, but my cousin is certain that "God is everywhere", and is now rather painfully confused as to what could possibly be more everywhere than the sky fairy he refers to as "He".

Re:I can't wait...

[disambiguated]

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?

Land of Oz

[SoundGuyNoise]

Doesn't the Lollipop Guild have representatives to handle this kind of financial crisis?

Alchemist's Guide to Making Elements

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[Tacvek]

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.

Re:I can't wait...

[Waffle Iron]

You mean to tell me that Alpha Decay is rare in the universe? I simply don't buy the argument.

Alpha decay generally happens to elements heavier than lead. Those elements are only created as a small side reaction in supernova explosions. Only a fraction of matter is in stars, and only a fraction of stars become supernovas, and only a small fraction of the matter in a supernova becomes heavy elements. Relative to the total matter in the universe, alpha decay is in the parts-per-billion category. In particular, the abundance of helium is NOT due to alpha decay.

The Earth is not so special that we can have zero Helium.

It is pretty special. The only thing that holds helium over the long term is gravity, and earth just doesn't have enough of it. The only place we can get at abundant helium is gas giant planets, and we don't have any technology in the foreseeable future to lift anything out of those gravity wells.

Arguing that helium is abundant in the universe therefore there must be plenty on earth is silly. Using that logic, I could say that a much, if not most, of the planetary mass in our solar system is in the form of metallic hydrogen. Therefore metallic hydrogen is available for us to use here.

There are not infinite sources of energy

[tentimestwenty]

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.

Re:There are not infinite sources of energy

[Black Gold Alchemist]

solar and alternative energies will never provide more than 10-20% of world consumption.

Why?

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[Jeremi]

They ought to use hydrogen, hot-air, or, heck, even nitrogen.

I've determined that the most efficient way to fill an airship is to evacuate it... a vacuum-filled airship would be much lighter than air, non-flammable, and vacuum is available in abundance throughout the universe.

All I need is a sufficiently rigid balloon body...

USA based flat earth doom and gloom

[flyingfsck]

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.

Re:Mining is destructive by definition

[AigariusDebian]

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.

Re:Lets mine the Moon!

[ultranova]

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?