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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."
It is actually light enough it can get high enough to escape into space.
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
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.....
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!
Hydrogen and helium are light enough so that they will fairly easily escape from the earth.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Helium is lighter than all the other gasses in our atmosphere. So it floats to the top and is eventually lost. The Earth isn't big enough to gravitationally keep any atmospheric helium, so it all eventually disappears into space.
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
How often do we need to repeat the same story?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
We're steadily losing our atmosphere to space by a process rather like conventional thermal evaporation, and we're losing helium far, far quicker than anything else because of its low mass and subborn refusal to form heavy compounds.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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."
Or we can get it via Alpha decay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_decay
that is how most of ours was formed in the oil reserves in the US as a lot of them are encased in layers of extremely low grade radio active uranium.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Helium can be formed a couple of other ways. One is fusion of course. The other is radioactive decay. We have lots of that, even very low activity decay going on, it's a matter of bothering to trap the helium from it. Of course if you can find some way to induce alpha decay then you could produce helium (e.g. if you could neutron induce it like with fission or something else). Some alpha emitters have a fairly long decay chain where they will spit out several alpha particles before they stop, so it's not like you're taking thorium, and then getting radium and helium, you'd get potentially 6 heliums and lead (or stop somewhere else on the decay chain).
But overall, yes, the relative lack of helium in future could pose serious problems. Wasting it on party balloons is destroying a potentially very useful product.
The other half of the problem is that it is relatively unreactive. Hydrogen is abundant on Earth only because it bonds with oxygen. The resulting water is heavy enough to hang around. If hydrogen did not form compounds like this then it would be lost from the atmosphere too.
Of course, 100 years is a long time. Helium is formed as a product of hydrogen fusion - that was how most of it formed, in stars, originally. Even without fusion power, we can manufacture helium in tabletop fusors. Even run below break-even energy, they still produce helium as a byproduct, so we're running out but this can be balanced at the cost of energy.
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Actually, we can make helium too. A tabletop Fusor can be made for a few thousand dollars and will make helium out of hydrogen as long as you keep it fed with enough energy. The only reason that we don't is cost - it's cheaper to get helium out of the ground than to make it. Exactly the same thing applies to oil.
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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
Um, no, more gravity would only make it worse... because everything else (except for hydrogen) would also be heavier too. Meaning that the helium would be expelled even faster. (its exponentially dense) You'd need a microgravity environment with some turbidity to keep it well-mixed (around)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
Actually, N2O makes your voice sound funny as well, but it makes your voice lower, not higher. You can do an excellent James Earl Jones imitation with a lung-full of N2O.
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.
Most, if not all, of the Helium on Earth is from alpha decay.
Most of the Helium found on Earth was produced as a product of alpha decay of radioactive elements, including U238, found almost everywhere. These alpha particles were trapped by local geology for a very long time. We cannot currently produce Helium in any meaningful amount and certainly not at the current cost (e.g., you can get 1 cubic meter of Helium from a party supply store for $25 US).
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.
"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.
The difference: compared to helium, even oil is a renewable resource. Oil can be made reasonably cheaply (maybe $200/bbl) from air, water and sunshine, as any rapeseed or olive farmer could demonstrate. Copper is not "used up", it's merely dug up in one place and buried somewhere else in form of cables. Helium is different: once the cheap stuff from rock fissures is gone, it can never be retrieved again. Then you can only create it by super-expensive fusion processes, which makes it 4, 5 or even 10 orders of magnitude more expensive...
Once we get fusion reactors perfected, won't there be an abundant supply of helium?
A quick Google search says the current annual consumption of He is 30000 tons (3e10g).
D-T fusion produces about 17MeV per molecule of He output, or 4.24e11 J/g of helium.
World energy consumption is currently around 5e20 J per year. If all power were generated by fusion, that would be 1.17e9 g of helium produced, which is only about 4% of current helium usage.
Not quite. He was commenting on the price the Fed was selling its helium at, which was set by legislation and has not changed. While it was approximately 25% higher than market price at the time of the act, it has since acted as a ceiling on the price of helium.
Stuff.
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
That's natural selection weeding out the wildlife not smart enough to avoid balloons.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
It was sold at a mandated fixed price. Dumbass.