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Why the World Is Running Out of Helium
jamie writes "The US National Helium Reserve stores a billion cubic meters of helium, half the world supply, in an old natural gasfield. The array of pipes and mines runs 200 miles from Texas to Kansas. In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap. Physics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Richardson says: 'In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market. The motivation was to sell it all by 2015. The basic problem is that helium is too cheap. The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken that long to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will dissipate in about 100 years. One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever.' Another view is The Impact of Selling the Federal Helium Reserve, the government study from 10 years ago that suggested the government's price would end up being over market value by 25% — but cautioned that this was based on the assumption that demand would grow slowly, and urged periodic reviews of the state of the industry."
Jesus, Richard, does she really need hundreds of fucking balloons at *every* party? Isn't it enough we got her ponies *and* two clowns, for crying out loud?!?!?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Because it's a finite resource! (Sheesh!)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I like how we can talk about peak helium but the second you try to discuss peak oil or peak coal you're a treehugger, an alarmist or trying to destroy the economy. I guess we have to wait until we're certain we're only a century away from using the last of a resource that took the Earth 4.7 billion years to accumulate before it's okay to start to talk about appropriate measures ...
My work here is dung.
pardon my non science background, but is there a way a to manufacture helium?
Let's just say that the wasted gas tends to float out of reach....
It is actually light enough it can get high enough to escape into space.
Apparently, they forgot that without a large supply of helium operating their favorite cash cow, the manned space flight program, would become a lot harder. There are also many scientific applications that are virtually impossible without helium, with its boiling point at 4.1 Kelvin. Hydrogen, at 14 Kelvin, is not a perfect replacement, and has a tendency to explode. They really ought to be inflating the price, so we learn to conserve helium now while we still have plenty left.
Because no generation should be denied the fun of inhaling helium to speak with a goofy high-pitch voice.
And the helium is retrieved from the atmosphere for reuse by which process, exactly?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium:
In the Earth's atmosphere, the concentration of helium by volume is only 5.2 parts per million. The concentration is low and fairly constant despite the continuous production of new helium because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space by several processes
Doesn't most of it just get released back into the atmosphere? Sure, it's not contained underground or anything, but it's not REALLY "disappearing", exactly.
That's the problem. Helium collects in underground deposits and we drill down and collect it as it escapes. When helium dissipates into the atmosphere it is essentially gone to us.
I said nothing of retrieval or reuse.
I was thinking the exact same thing - it's not like we're feeding it all into a fusion plant and leaving none for later generations, they just might have to expend the energy to recapture and re-purify it.
Actually, it's light enough to reach escape velocity at atmospheric temperatures. So it is effectively being lost for good. What we have now only managed to avoid being leaked into space because it got trapped in rock cavities with natural gas.
Once we get fusion reactors perfected, won't there be an abundant supply of helium? We only need enough helium to hold out until then. If we run low, the law of supply and demand should make it prohibitively expensive to waste the stuff on parties and get-well balloons.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
From the opposite of heavy water. ;)
Helium doesn't stay in the atmosphere, it is released into space. So yes, it is lost, since it takes hundreds of millions of years to regenerate via radioactive decay underground.
I live in Amarillo Tx, what this article fails to mention is all the helium we still have here, We shut down refining after we had enough stored, we didn't stop because we ran out of helium to refine. Our plant is still here waiting to be used comes the time to gather more. It's good to know people can make up stories about resource and how little we have left to stir up some sort of reaction. Now if oil disappears, worry.....
Citation needed????!!!!!
With the rate that technology advances, by the time our supply is used up in 100 years, we (a) will be able to make more by fusing hydrogen, (b) will be able to get more by mining the Sun, or (c) will all be dead.
That would be low-temperature gas liquefaction, of course! What, you want it to be as easy and cheap as finding it buried in the ground? Well, keep dreaming!
Distillation of liquid air.
Steel mills (or Iron works?) need oxygen for converters. They are obtaining it by liquifying air. Liquid nitrogen and other gases is just byproduct. In my city small amount is sold to university for low temperature research, the rest is just left alone to boil and evaporate back into atmosphere.
So if i go out and buy a $20 tank of helium then in 30 years it could be worth $200 or $2000?
Pet peeve wrt the summary, which quotes Richardson as saying that the price was low because a lot of helium became available, which meant that the "price was not determined by the market."
But this is what markets do, they use the power of pricing to set the balance between supply and demand. If you introduce a large additional supply of a resource with low marginal cost to a market, the market's price mechanism will reduce the price of that resource. The market will determine a low price.
The observed behavior wrt the price of Helium is the opposite of "not determined by the market".
There are enough flame wars around about the merits of markets as a means of determining prices, and IMHO they have their limits, but FFS, can we at least have educated professionals know what a market is and what it does? Markets are pitiless, soulless mechanisms for matching up buyers and sellers of resources, and disclosing price information, period full stop. They have no a priori relationship to fairness, justice, accessibility, or legality, and only a tangential relationship to efficiency.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
What's the problem? When you're broke, you'll hock your stuff for less than it's worth down a pawnbrokers.
The US is broke.
If you didn't sell the Helium, the US debt would go up and interest rates on the credit loaned would increase. So if you waited 15 years for the market to rise, you'd be 15 years of debt further under.
And as for the "it's being used in 100 years" bit, unless we're using the earth's reserves in ~4.7billion years, then the helium WILL run out because we'd be taking it out faster than it can be replenished.
Doesn't most of it just get released back into the atmosphere? Sure, it's not contained underground or anything, but it's not REALLY "disappearing", exactly.
If I recall correctly, it is actually disappearing. I believe I read once upon a time that helium is actually bleeding out of our atmosphere. Once it's gone, it's gone.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Not only that. It was a strategic reserve for something we do not USE, blimps. Yes blimps. It was created so the USAF and Army would have a place to get helium for blimps. What both of those forces quickly realized is blimps are sitting air targets with any sort of SAM.
What most of these guys are seeing is a end to the mega cheap way of getting helium and are thinking it will cost them 25% or more to get. They want the Gov to get back into the field of getting them cheap helium.
Helium still has its place in the national defense. However, does it really need such a large operation to do so at this point in time?
When the strategic reserve was made it made sense to build. Not so much anymore.
It had, and is, creating a crazy depression in the market of what helium is worth with tax payers eating the cost. After 2015 when it is scheduled to run out you will see things like party balloons go way up in price. As that will be the comodities market over reacting. Then it will under bounce then wavy back and forth until we end up with a stable price.
Does having cheap helium today help with things? Yes. Long term however it is not tax payer sustainable. In this case it is not a matter of building infrastructure to help everyone. It is providing a small group a cheap good. They can bear the burden of the cost as they also get all the reward...
In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market.
Uh, what? If the helium was sold and not given away, bled into the atmosphere, or some other odd thing done to it, the price was determined by the market. You may question the wisdom of putting it all on the market at the same time and getting a lower price for it than if you doled it out bit-by-bit, but I think the market did fine in determining the price in a glutted market.
This is the problem when you get experts in one field (in this case physics) talking about things in other fields, like economics - quite often, they are no better informed then any other layman. If the government buys and/or sells something on the open market, it's part of the market, umkayyy? And you don't need to be a Nobel Laureate to understand this. The fact that this was wrapped up in a nasty little bit of anti-government sentiment makes it clear that Richardson was more interested in scoring political points than enlightening the public.
That is all.
That will be the day all the party stores start selling their Helium reserves to NASA.
Then your point was what, exactly? Simple pedantry?
Hydrogen and helium are light enough so that they will fairly easily escape from the earth.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
"Matter isn't created nor destroyed"... so can't we just collect it back up somehow?
"Once helium is released into the atmosphere in the form of party balloons or boiling helium it is lost to the Earth forever, lost to the Earth forever," he emphasised.
No mention of why this would be the case. I thought that all that Carbon we were releasing was staying up there, so why not all that Helium?
...say some aspect of the government is fucked up, or being run poorly, force it to be sold to private interests. Let them run it like crap, screw the public, force the government to come back and take things over again.
Yay!
When it comes to most people's problems, they don't even see what they desire isn't going to happen just because they believe in their fairy dreams and bubblegum wishes. Yet they will slash and burn with the sincere delusion that it will.
It's stupid, it's short-sighted, it's ultimately more wasteful...but they manage to get the populace behind them, because most people are just as stupid.
I suggest we start a project dedicated to collecting the sounds of helium squeaked languages around the world. We can't allow this beautiful example of the diversity of human experience to be lost forever. Plus, it sounds funny.
And what impact, if any, has this had on the deficit??? Looks like its still climbing pretty steadily to me. This is the primary problem with our government. They take out "loans" essentially from the federal reserve to create these programs, promising billions of dollars to something or other. And we all know a large portion of that is wasted. Then they sell of some resource like this with the promise that it will mitigate some of this absurdity, but none of that money ever makes it to its destination either. Seriously, where the hell is all this money going?
If the government was selling it "too cheap" then surely at least one company would come along and buy up this "cheap" helium and resell it at the "right" price!
Helium is essential for keeping most of superconducting stuff at superconducting temperatures. Current NMR machines, for instance, all depend on He for maintaining their magnets and the market for these is slightly bigger than the market for Large Hadron Colliders.
So, if the He availability really goes down, prices will go up in the typical "supply vs demand" effect and people will stop using it for such important tasks as keeping children and girlfriends happy with princess and heart shaped balloons.
(On a side note, there should be enough alpha-decay radioactivity out there to prevent "panic" when this starts really depleting. And if it becomes scarcer, people will take measures to recycle/reuse it, rather than just letting it go to the atmosphere, and other countries (Poland is also "rich" on He) will make sure they don't waste their "gaseous gold".)
"One generation does not have the right to determine availability for ever.", eh? Helium, eh? Let us all form a circle and talk about how we should all help save the helium for our grandchildren and ignore that we already used up more than half the oil, plutonium and other important energy sources. And copper. And we are killing off a whole range of biological diversity. But let us all ignore that and talk about the helium.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
True, but that's splitting hairs. Here we are clearly talking about "running out" in the context of not having it available for our use in some manner and not gone forever. Until we can extract the helium we have used and released into the atmosphere and oceans for reuse, or utilize some other source (the moon?), then the quantity available for our use is indeed running out.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
How often do we need to repeat the same story?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Sadly, their constituents would never go for it. Neither would their lobbyists.
Other than that it's an excellent idea.
It's a real shame that it would be political suicide to even suggest this.
But think of the children!
I was thinking the exact same thing - it's not like we're feeding it all into a fusion plant and leaving none for later generations, they just might have to expend the energy to recapture and re-purify it.
Recapture it from SPACE, you ignorant tool.
The gas is light enough to escape into space, once released into the atmosphere it is gone forever.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
This topic is complex and much discussed among low temperature and high energy scientists, who need liquid helium to cool their experiments. Unfortunately a large portion of helium usage is waste, such as deliberate dumping by natural gas companies who do not think the helium market (tiny compared to the natural gas market) is worth their time, or welders who still use helium when argon is cheaper.
In my lab, the liquid helium is the primary cost of doing experiments. We spend around $100 for each four-hour experimental session. It is by far our biggest expense. We try to recover as much as possible, but we only get a small refund for returned gas. So, please don't use helium where it is not needed; you are limiting our science, and you may be limiting your own access to medical technologies such as MRI in the future.
Simon's Rock College
Yeah, I looked back at the summary and realized my statement was not really useful.
And then you'll learn that having a budget surplus doesn't magically make recessions and unemployment go away. You'd have a budget surplus, though, for all the good it'd do you.
Because the crust of the moon is full of the stuff, and this would provide an economic incentive to go there and stay.
But aren't we doing the same thing with fossil fuels? 500 years from now there will be none left...
Your basic blimp uses as much fuel in a WEEK of operations as a 747 uses taxiing from the gate to the runway. We need to get people out of these wasteful planes and into a more efficient (and comfortable) form of air transport.
I piss off bigots.
"One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever.' "
Now I am for making best use of our environment for mankind, considering both the present and the distant future.
However, who decides this 'right' exists or not?
You'd probably cure the budget deficit (but possibly not; it's a substantial deficit) but you'd collapse the economy. Have fun with that.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
There is a division and more on the Mexican border.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bliss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Armored_Division_(United_States)#Move_to_Fort_Bliss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mcas_yuma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Air_Ground_Combat_Center_Twentynine_Palms
All Federal subsidies? So no more GI Bill?
While watching the Macey's Parade last year, they mentioned that the parade balloons (big charlie brown, etc) makes it the single largest helium user in the US (maybe world?) next to the US Government.
Interesting stuff.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Energy can be derived from other sources. Yes, we'll use up the U-235, but there will be plenty of U-238 is we must use the element Uranium for something. Oil can be synthesized via Fischer Topp. Helium is an element. It can not be synthesized. And if we use up earth's supply, we'll have to grab it from a gas giant.
Recorded human history is exclusively about the times we ignored fears of our perceived limitations.
Air Force Planning Giant Spy Airship
http://www.military.com/news/article/March-2009/air-force-planning-giant-spy-airship.html
ILC Dover has extended its contract with Lockheed Martin to provide lighter-than-air "aerostats", very similar to a blimp. The aerostats are used in Afghanistan and Iraq to provide surveillance and communication for U.S. troops.
http://whyy.org/cms/news/regional-news/delaware/2010/06/24/delaware-company-builds-unmanned-airships-for-u-s-military/40647
Iraqi conflict brings increased interest in military airships
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3738/is_200307/ai_n9258465/
And in case you were wondering, it's not just the US that's interested in modern airship technology. China has plans for them too.
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4649479
Bring democracy to the moon!
Another reason we need a space elevator - so we can ride to the top and fill our balloons!!
This is not about balloon animals, and it's not your typical media scare story.
I'm a condensed matter physicist. It's very common in my field to use helium to examine the properties of materials at very low temperatures. This is how things like superconductors and quantum computing are often worked on in their early stages. Using helium is important, and because universities don't like concentrated hydrogen (for safety reasons), pretty much required.
The current supply of helium is uncertain. Many research institutes (like the university I work at) have rationed helium. That is, we're allowed to buy a certain amount, and can't get more than that. This is set by the suppliers, who get their helium from the US government. The result is that my experiments compete with the experiments in particle physics, the medical school and other groups for helium. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I can't. From a practical viewpoint, we're not running out of helium in 2015, we're running out now.
There is helium available somewhere else, but there's no economic incentive for anyone to capture it and sell it. As long as stockpiles are sold off at fixed, below-market prices (TFA says helium should be 20 to 50 times more expensive), no one can economically afford to capture and purify the helium which is available. We're wasting the tail end of potential helium production (most in the stockpiles came from oil processing). Think of it this way: when oil runs out, helium runs out. We can replace oil much more cheaply than we can replace helium. Helium is too light an element to be captured by Earth's gravitational field this close to the sun, so that wasted helium is gone.
Which one of these proposals do you really think would "collapse the economy", and why?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
However, hydrogen, unlike helium, is a resource that is very, very abundant on our planet. It's quite literally everywhere.
My blog
Just a few tidbits I found since I assume many will follow the same track:
REF: http://www.helium.com/items/19276-the-uses-of-helium
I was then curious as to how quickly we lose helium to space and ran across this:
REF: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_gases_such_as_helium_escape_Earth's_atmosphere
I gather from the above that although helium can escape earths atmosphere, it does so very slowly.
In the end, it seems foolish to me to release a known finite resource (finite as to what our technology can easily harvest today) to the hands of whim.
Ok, this doesn't make sense.
Either, Helium is stable enough in the atmosphere that it lasted 4 billion years, long enough for the US government to exist, and decide to refine lots of it. Or it isn't, and so we couldn't have gotten any?
I guess I question, how could we possibly get 1/2 the world supply, if that supply could possibly evaporate into space in 100 years?
Not really gone forever. Prohibitively expensive from retrieving because it's distribution in space.
"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill." -- CEO Nwabudike Morgan
They took citations and stamped "Bible needed".
Cutting subsidies would increase state taxes, so you'd have to lower federal taxes to compensate. Further, the states like to take their money and run with it: if they tax $1Bn for "Highway Maintenance," but spend $600M, they'll find something else to do with the $400M.
It'd be cool though. The states have to pass laws making 21 the drinking age and 0.08BAC the illegal-per-se level for DUI if they want highway subsidies. This means the government has passed laws it's not allowed to pass by strong-arming the states. They could strong-arm in a mandatory 18 years old flat Age of Consent by tying it to school funding if they wanted, too (what a mess, then you'd have 19 year old college guys dating their 17 year old girlfriend and he gets caught with a hand up her shirt in a theater and gets a permanent SEX OFFENDER registration!).
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How much Helium are we actually 'using'?
What I mean is; how much Helium is getting trapped in some form that is not reclaimable? It's not like Helium is burnt, and I don't know what kind of compounds have Helium bonds or otherwise trap a Helium molecule. So where is the Helium going that we are using up?
To use another element as an example, take Gold. There's only so much Gold on the planet, we know that, and Gold is constantly being bought and sold, melted and reformed, used and then reclaimed. If Gold is 'used', say, for plating electrical connectors, once it is no longer needed it can be recycled, resold, and reused. It is never destroyed, just schlepped around from one place to another. Why isn't it the same for another element like Helium?
I'm obviously no Helium expert, which is why I'm asking so many questions, but I've never heard of a 'Helium mine', so I'm assuming that most of the Helium we have wasn't trapped in gas pockets underground, so we must have distilled it from the atmosphere. So can't we do it again after the Helium has fulfilled it's 'use'? Like melting down circuit boards to make jewelery?
My conclusion would be that if there is only so much Helium, and it does not get destroyed, and our supply is running out, then our Helium requirements must be on the rise. Or it must be trapped in some form or another that is still considered a 'use' and therefore cannot be recycled.
So what use of Helium is growing so fast that we are running out, and that does not release the Helium from it's bondage in a timely matter for recycling?
For all the dead and ill animals in the wild that I've seen as a result of eating rubber balloons that have floated from cities and dropped in the wilderness...I'm glad helium is running out. Fucking stupid, irresponsible people that enjoy a few seconds of fun releasing balloons into the air, thinking no harm is caused elsewhere....they should sent the clean up beached whales the died from getting a toy balloon stuck in it's blow hole.
One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever.
Anything else the article says is also trash. Who the hell determines that a given generation may or not use a resource as it sees fit? This is the most ridiculous concept I've heard in ages. Do we have to preserve the last few atoms of helium so that all future generations will have some? At some point you're going to run out of something. Deal with it.
People who talk like that should be killed and used as fertilizer so we can save a few ounces of oil for future generations.
somebody please think of the children!!!
We can just start burning Republicans. Between them spitting out hot air and being a bunch of old fossils, we should be able to power the planet for centuries.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Umm.... It leaves the earth. You know is is lighter than air so it goes up and away.
It is not like Oxygen, or Argon, or Neon, or Nitrogen.
It also isn't like Hydrogen which when released is so reactive that a good a precentage will combine with other elements and tend to stick around.
So yes it is pretty much gone.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap.
Perhaps the wealthy proteges of Marie Antoinette in DC are no more familiar with fundamental credit counseling than they are with basic public finance. In the interest of spreading the enlightenment that virtually every sub-50th percentile income earner eventually learns, here is a tiny bit of wisdom:
You can't solve overspending by selling your CD collection.
Debt reduction, perhaps. Deficit reduction, you are an idiot.
Part II: Debt Reduction Effectiveness:
How much is the helium worth at current price? How much is our national debt? So, now, if it's the debt you are trying to solve (since solving the deficit by selling possessions is a non-sequitur), what percentage of the debt will you cover by selling all that helium?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I could give you an in-depth explanation of why this proposal is mind-numbingly stupid, but instead I will just invite you to consider (a) how big the dirigible will be and (b) how difficult it is going to be to ballast it with enough ice to get back again. What happens to a blimp when you take the load off? An oil rig weighs thousands of tonnes. When you offload it, you get thousands of tonnes of lift. Either you have to deal with that, an interesting technical challenge, or you have to dump hundreds of tonnes of expensive helium. In either case, as the arctic ice is melting, history is against any long-term dirigible design.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
are the deep 'monster' voices of really dense gases.
No sig today...
Once the fusion plants come on-line, we won't know what to do with all the helium we make.
We're earning top-dollar now for something that we'll have to pay to get rid of in the future.
Actually no.
It was for the Navy. The Army, Army Air Corp, and later USAF really didn't get into air ships much.
They may have used it for barrage balloons but Hydrogen is just as good since you don't care a whole lot of those burn.
And it was for not just blimps but also Zeppelins.
When created it made all the sense in the world. In the 1920s and 30s how could anybody bomb the US? Only by airship. Well maybe if Mexico or Canada decided to go to war with the US but that was unlikely.
BTW the Navy used it in AEW blimps up till the 1960s I believe and are thinking about bringing back airships as sensor platforms. We are not too concerned about SAMS since SAM sites tend to have a short life time and MANPADs lack the range to hit airships.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Damn you, Thanksgiving Day Parade!!!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Get a job you /. crybabies. Since solutions to producing more helium exist, STFU. You people annoy me. Love /. otherwise.
Pretty much the bit about "Cut all federal subsidies" followed by using the savings to reduce the deficit. As things stand now, some of that money gets eaten up in graft, and not all of it is spent efficiently, but a lot of it ends up getting paid out to people as well.
So all federal subsidies are cut, a lot of farmers go out of business, a lot of construction workers lose their jobs, a lot of teachers lose their jobs, a lot of researchers lose their jobs, perhaps everyone at NASA loses their jobs. (I'm not sure what all is being included under "federal subsidy.")
So all those people are out of jobs. The economy isn't doing great currently so they certainly can't all find new jobs. They're making no income so they spend less. The economy suffers even more. Kids aren't being taught, the highways aren't being repaired, pretty soon the economy starts suffering even worse. Perhaps the states will step in to fund things like that, but the money would have to come from somewhere, which would mean new taxes and a further strain on the economy.
One can make arguments either way about which is healthier for the economy, letting everyone keep their money or taking some portion of that money and redistributing it to another area. Both are thermodynamically sound processes (so to speak.) I don't see how you could argue that taking the money out in taxes but not putting it back into the system wouldn't have any kind of negative impact however. Yes paying off the debt is important, and we either need to cut spending or raise taxes to do that. However trying to go "cold turkey," either by getting rid of _all_ spending or raising taxes by an exorbitant amount, would be a bad idea. Whatever we do it should be done slowly and in moderation so the economy has time to adjust to the new situation.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
But aren't we doing the same thing with fossil fuels? 500 years from now there will be none left...
Well, there will never be "none left", oil will just become too expensive to use as fuel. But one can hope that we'll have fusion worked out by then! Of course, if fusion were "20 years away" 500 years from now, it wouldn't really surprise me much.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Most helium comes from natural gas deposits. In the richest deposits in the central US, it can actually comprise a couple percent of the natural gas.
There has been a huge increase (4x) in recoverable natural gas as a result of new drilling technology. Drilling can now traverse horizontally through layers, cracking the rock along the way. Old vertical drilling only sampled a small portion of a deposit. More natural gas = more helium.
So who's buying all the helium? You realize that's a lot of gas to breath and sound like donald duck.
Okay, that's a good explanation. I guess I was assuming that there'd also be some level of tax reduction that goes along with this, but in the absence of that I can see what you're saying.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Apart from fusion of hydrogen, which we will have to get around to soon if we are to survive , isn't helium produced in some fission reactions. An alpa particle is a He nucleus.
And, of course, now we have fellows trying to design large helium lifted windmills to generate power from the more consistent winds high in the atmosphere, A wonderful sustainable energy source tapped using a technique completely dependent on a completely non sustainable resource. Well, unless we start using Hydrogen to lift these electric power generators, that is. Yeah, that'll work real good.
"I don't have an anger management problem. I have an idiot management problem." Hank HIll
Is that too many geeks think it's funny to talk in high squeaky voices.
I prefer Argon myself.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Presuming you had large reserves of gold, enough that you could sell to pretty much anyone who wanted to buy, and you decided that you were willing to unload it cheap then yes, that'd be the market price. The price of gold would plummet. Other sellers would have to adjust to meet that price to be able to sell their stocks, or perhaps they'd decide simply to let you sell things, and hold theirs in reserve.
The market price is the price at which things sell on the open market for. Please note that gold has been far, far less in the recent past. Few years ago you could get it at around $300 an ounce, which is what it tends to float around most of the time. The reason it is so high now is not because it costs a lot more to produce but because there's insane demand and expanding production capacity isn't easy. Thus, the market price is high. However if, say, the US decided to sell off its reserves the price would take a nose dive because of a massive supply influx (not to mention it would shake faith in it).
Also using gold as an example is a really bad one since gold is used primarily as a hedge, a financial instrument. Thus it is subject to people perceptions more than realities. Most of the gold in the world is useless, commercially speaking. It gets dug up, melted down, assayed, then put back underground in a different place. It's value is largely a product of people's imaginations and a western obsession with shiny things, rather than actual uses.
The 1996 Congress was the height of the Republican era controlling the Congress 1994-2006 and aggressively changing longstanding policies. That's who sold off the US strategic helium reserve and encouraged the world to run out of helium.
How many ways did shortsighted Republicans liquidate America's precious assets that were earned over centuries for the minimum prices to be snapped up by crony corporations and foreign competitors? Is everyone who ever failed math or economics given a referral to join the Republican Party?
--
make install -not war
http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/cargolifter/
"The CargoLifter CL 160 is a semi-rigid airship under development by CargoLifter AG, a German company that plans to build airships capable of carrying enormous loads for the bulk air freight market. In May 2002, the CL 160 development was halted due to financial problems and the status of the programme is uncertain. In June 2002, the company made an application for insolvency. In August 2002, work on Cargolifter's other major programme, the CL 75 lifting balloon was also halted."
whereas these 747's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400 see to hit bout 124 tons
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Because no generation should be denied the fun of inhaling helium to speak with a goofy high-pitch voice.
The pitch does not change; it's the timbre.
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
This is what happens when politicians realize they can buy votes with bread, circuses, and helium.
I don't see how you could argue that taking the money out in taxes but not putting it back into the system wouldn't have any kind of negative impact however.
What exactly do you think happens to that money when you use it to pay down the debt? It doesn't just vanish, it goes to the person who lent that money to the government, who then does something wtih it... and something that's likely to be far more useful than anything a government bureaucrat might decide to do with the same amount of money.
Can someone who know what they're talking about comment on the feasibility of using a below-unity fusion reactor (like a Farnsworth Fusor) to create helium in useful quantities? At some point, doesn't the cost of helium rise above the cost of the electricity needed to just make some?
Why not?
We deal with large amounts of chemical energy every day.
While putting turbines like that over a city would be dumb even with Helium I don't see a big problem with using Hydrogen for this.
Don't let the Hindenberg syndrome scare you. That crash wasn't any worse than hundreds of aircraft crashes that have happened since. It just happen to be filmed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Well once they figure out this fusion powerplant stuff, we'll have all the He we need.
perspective. Guess my one way 2 hour commute really isn't shit compared to this.
"In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change" --Thich Nhat Hanh
"One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever", um, actually whichever generation or people are alive at the moment pretty much have the right to do whatever the heck they want. Your righteous indignation means exactly squat. I may agree that we should not waste what we have but the current generation has the right to do anything it wants because none of the future generations have a voice or can stop them. Let's refrain from saying idiotic crap and focus on reality. In reality what you mean to say is that, "one generation should not allow itself to determine availability forever." I don't have any Dodo bird meat available but what can I do about it a past generation gave itself the right to determine its availability forever and I'm screwed.
If this is true, smart investors are no doubt buying much of this subsidized Helium, and storing it for when prizes go up.
> sed 's/Republicans/Politicians/g' > slashdot_post.sh
There, now it's accurate.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Inflation
You're worried about HELIUM?? Well, if we use it all, where will it go? I've got another one for you... How do we obtain helium? How do we 'make' it? Where does it come from? Get a life.
It leaves the what now? Pop quiz: Why do helium filled balloons float? Because the surrounding environment/atmosphere is heavier. The surrounding air is pushed down, with the natural result of the lighter substance being pushed up.
However, it won't simply keep going "up" forever. It will reach a point of equilibrium where the force of gravity equals the upward thrust of the surrounding particles.
For the gas to escape the earth's gravity well, it'd need some external force to act upon it. Perhaps the solar wind, or the moon's gravity.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Assume we go the p+B -> 3He + 9Mev.
1 mole of p yield 3 moles of He - or 24 * 3 liters of gas at STP.
It also yields 9 * 1.6*10^-13 * 6*10^23 = 9 *10^11 joules = 9*10^11 Watt seconds.
So for 72 liters ( 0.072 m^3) of He, you would need a giga watt for about 15 minutes.
Your table top fusor is now plasma, you just used up more electricity than I will likely use in my life, and you can fill a small balloon.
But at a few million fusions/second/kilowatt -- good luck making a mole of He of any isotope in your lifetime. For those who don't do chemistry a mole is 6.02 e 23 atoms, more or less, or 22.4 liters of gas at STP. Lessee, 23 - 6 is 17, so roughtly speaking, at current production rates you need say 6 e17 seconds of running to get a mole or so of output gas. call it 1.9 e-10 years per mole, running at a kw input with current tech at its best. As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat.
You can see more about fusors here:
My homepage (we also have a forum linked on the front page, but it's invite-only)
and
The open source fusor forum
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
On the other hand, the solar wind is constantly bombarding the planet with alpha particles, a.k.a helium nuclei. Harvest the aurora!
But once it floats "above" the denser atmosphere, even a slight solar wind is enough to blow it away. It then winds up outside the heliosphere, where it reaches *real* equilibrium between the force of the suns gravity and the upward thrust of the solar wind, about twice as far out as Jupiter.
> This is the problem when you get experts in one field (in this case physics) talking about things in other fields, like economics - quite often, they are no better informed then any other layman.
Your comment looks funny when put right next to the other comment, telling us that the Helium Privitization Act of 1996 stated that the Helium reserve (with 1/3 of the Helium supply) would be sold at $1.50 per m^3. Don't you think it causes a bit of distortion if someone with a huge stockpile is selling it at a price fixed by law?
Helium balloons stop because you are lifting the balloon. Helium will never reach equilibrium because it is the lightest gas in the atmosphere. It will keep going up until it reaches the top and then be lost to as you said the solar wind.
Also it is so rare that it will never reach a large enough percentage of the atmosphere to be extracted.
So yes in simple terms it will just keep going up. As the air gets less dense so will the He. All the way up until it gets blown away by the solar wind.
That is why there is so little of it in the Atmosphere of the Earth or any of the inner planets.
Not enough gravity to keep it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yes, except "the person who lent that money to the government" is the Chinese government.
But hey, the invisible hand of the free market never said anything about keeping America on top.
The sad part is that when it's almost gone we'll find it's needed for FTL.
And, from a previous Slashdot article (I think):
Airships: a second age
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7918762/Airships-a-second-age.html which includes the following:
There’s a niggling worry I have about the LEMV squatting over Afghanistan: surely a giant white balloon will be vulnerable to attack, despite its lofty position? Fortunately, that’s something they’ve thought about a great deal at Cardington. Indeed, they’ve been thinking about it for many years now, because they also designed ships that were to be deployed over Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
At that time they tested a full-sized airship against a range of artillery including a Russian mounted machine gun filled with .22 calibre armour-piercing incendiaries and a SAM-7 surface to air missile. What they learnt was this: the airship is almost invincible to attack. Helium is an inert gas, so it doesn’t explode.
The pressure inside the envelope is so low that when a hole is made, say by a bullet, air seeps out slowly rather than rushing out catastrophically. Missiles need something hard to connect with if they’re going to explode, but an airship is accommodating, not hard-shelled. The material has the flexibility of a plastic bag; make a hole in it and it almost immediately shrinks inwards.
...and this recent article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters suggests using a porous graphene-based nanostructure to separate it
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jz100748x
"Helium Separation Using Porous Graphene Membranes" Joshua Schrier, Department of Chemistry, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania 19041
J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2010, 1 (15), pp 2284–2287
DOI: 10.1021/jz100748x
Problem is that it will work and maybe even work well for some time then there will be an accident. Anything made by man will eventually fail or break. It won't even matter if it's over a city or not although, given the hubris of the species, they'll declare the things so safe that they will find themselves placed over cities just to reduce the cost of the transmission lines.
Anyway, eventually, one of them will fail and if it's full of hydrogen, it will fail spectacularly. This will prompt the powers that be to take the rest of them out of service until the problem can be determined and solved "so that it will never happen again." (god, i hate that phrase.)
Meanwhile there will have become people dependent on them and they'll be back to power rationing with little diesel generators or some such.
I tend more along the lines of solar power generation with solar cells, if people feel the must use high tech, or plain old heat collection and steam turbines; good old ground based boiler plate technology. There was version mentioned recently that used a salt as the medium. It had a high heat capacity and could actually store heat for a while when the sun was not available.
By comparison, let's look at how China has manages strategic resources:
If fusion really works by then, we won't have to worry about helium, as it is the product of nuclear fusion. The resulting helium-3 is even lighter than the regular helium-4 as found on earth, the party balloons will fly into the stratosphere even faster!
By then, however, we'll waste all our reserves of lithium-6 needed for production of tritium used in the nuclear fusion. And of course all humans will be killed long before that by the antibiotics-and-everything-else-resistant crazy flesh-eating-for-breakfast bacteria, so it won't matter at all.
I didn't say it was feasible now, I said it would be feasible within a hundred years. Fusor efficiencies have increased by almost two orders of magnitude in the last decade or so. Still a long way to go before this is considered a cheap, efficient, or even sensible way of producing light elements, but it's a much easier goal than running fusion at break-even rates, which projects like ITER aim to do in well under 100 years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This article seems like total bullshit to me. If Helium is going to be valuable, stop complaining and buy the stuff up. Just like these idiot oil pundits who say oil is going to be really valuable in the future. If you really believe your story, buy it and sit on it. If you don't believe your story, why do you expect me to? This is especially ridiculous since the original article was published in New Zealand. Is NZ governed by the US now?
Greed & Power eh? There's no /intelligence/ there I see.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Now when I travel back in time I have to add "Don't accidentally change history in ways that ensure zeppelins remain the de facto form of mass transit for the next two centuries" to my already-prohibitive list of safety precautions. And to think Kitty Hawk was about the earliest I could have hoped for not being burned as a witch.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Why does cargo need to get halfway around the world in 15 hours? Very little cargo actually needs to move that fast, except perishable food (which we really shouldn't be transporting that far -- grow locally or do without), and organs for donation. Ships take weeks. Some of them are so big they can't pass through the Panama Canal and have to go around the Horn like in the old days.
Seriously, planes use vast amounts of fuel to generate lift that helium gives you for free. Blimps are a good compromise between wildly excessive airplanes and ships.
I piss off bigots.
If someone thinks that the government is selling helium at 25 to 50 times below value, they should buy some and store it until 2020. If there's no one willing to do this, then I'd wager that the government is really not selling it at such a bargain. There's always someone with sufficient resources to capitalize on a government selloff of a critical resource. The current large private helium industry would be a good candidate. Once the government has sold off its inventory, the private industry can sell at true market value, and standard market efficiencies can kick in. Everybody wins.
There will be no "peak helium", just a slide into higher prices, and a shift to higher conservation and efficiency, as with other non-renewables.
this is the dumbest slashdot ever. We gots plenty of hydrogen, all you got to do is fuse it together for instant helium. WE will never ever need to worry about floaty balloons again.
The greeting card sections at Wal-Mart probably contain 30% of the world's helium supply, inside of Spongebob and Dora the Explorer mylar balloons.
I am sadened by the fact that, instead of worrying of our consumption of a rather finite resource, the article seems to worry more about the price it was sold at... heck, its a gaz, ffs, it shouldnt be sold in the first place. Sure this covers the cost of the refinement and collection and all... Still, this page makes me sad.
World energy consumption is 15 terawatts. Assuming my gp calculations are correct, and all energy was produced by fusion, there would be 36 million cubic meters of helium created each year. At that rate it would be 30 years to generate the billion cubic meters that was in the reserve in 1995.
Fuck gold... I'm saving up helium!
The helium must flow...
What these articles fail consistently to do is make clear the importance of helium to the future.
It's not kids party balloons or even aircraft, it is high temperature nuclear power and the fact that helium is the only coolant that by it's nature cannot become radioactive.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.html
Whether we agree with nuclear technology or not, we have not right to limit the choices that future generations may require. This is not a new story, what is sad is that it has not got action to resolve the issue.
We already heard about it last month and two years ago!
Another possibility is fission reactors. Alpha particles - which after neutralization become helium atoms - are trapped in the fuel, together with other gaseous fission and decay products. There's a number of nuclear reactions that produce helium as one of the products. The dreaded nuclear waste storage can pretty well turn into a helium production with just a bit of reprocessing. That should do the job until ITER's children take over energetics.
All it needs is collisions with other particles in the air. Helium is light enough to reach escape velocity in the thermal distribution found in the upper atmosphere.
The Hindenburg failed spectacularly because its paint was made of rocket fuel, which burns brightly. Hydrogen flames are barely visible and therefore boring.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Fusor efficiencies have increased by almost two orders of magnitude in the last decade or so.
No they haven't.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
"The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken that long to accumulate our helium reserves"
Bullshit. We accumulated our reserves in a little over 100 years, since fraction distillation of air became commonplace. The very useful oxygen gets all used up. There is a surplus of nitrogen, over what we use. Helium over a long time was a by-product with production far over demand, and that's how our reserves were made. And that's why it is so cheap - production was greater than demand.
Great most of helium "used up" is released back into the air. Being a noble gas, the helium that isn't released, is still stored in whatever it was used in, unchanged. And even if not, there's still a plenty of it.
Even at 5.2 parts per million in air, that's 5.2cm^3 in a cubic meter of air. If the demand grows enough, air can be distilled for helium alone, surplus oxygen and nitrogen released back into the atmosphere, and by doing so through right mechanisms we can recover most of energy used to liquefy air in the first place. Or use it to cool devices that need cooling - imagine producing helium as a byproduct of cooling a data center.
This all of course needs infrastructure and infrastructure needs time. So if the policy doesn't change, we're up for a period of helium crisis, when the reserve runs out and the new infrastructure still isn't in place. But it's only the lack of infrastructure to extract it that is missing - natural supplies of helium are nowhere near to depletion.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
One of the reasons airships ceased to be was the cost and supply of helium. If currently the cost is unnaturally low then airships would seem like a good idea. This however is very short term thinking as a revitalisation of the airship industry thriving on helium would be short lived due to a resulting sudden spike in the cost of helium. Supply and Demand.
You're right in that the visible flames were from the coating on the Hindenburg but even if there'd been no visible flames the result would still have been the same, a crashed blimp, people dead and the formation of a distrust of Hydrogen as a lifting gas. The real irony is that it might have been averted if there hadn't been a tight control on who could buy Helium at the time.
Now, what are these new power generating floating windmills going to be made of? We have a new wonderfully non-flammable material that will be light enough and strong enough to carry the generator. If the gas bag fails, there will be a parachute to lightly waft the machinery to the ground?
Come on guys, you know that if these things make it into production they'll cut every corner they can to save weight and cost and put off that cost until something goes wrong. When has it ever been different?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Then they can relax about the helium shortage, right? (N.B.: yes, I know)