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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.'"
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.
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.
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 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.
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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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."
I RTFA and am pleased to report that it was *really* light reading! ;)
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.
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.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Mom, why is dad such a boring, sanctimonious pain in the ass?
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.
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
I have no problem seeing BP sent into the sun
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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?
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.
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.