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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.
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.
It is actually light enough it can get high enough to escape into space.
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.....
Careful, or I'll get a "[citation needed]" stamp and go all stamp-crazy on your Bible...
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.'
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.
I think you're confused. The price was set in the "Helium Privitization Act of 1996," that's simply a fact and has nothing to do with market forces.
When the government makes a law which says "we will sell our helium for $1.50 per cubic meter until it is gone" and that supply is 1/3 the global total market for two decades, the "market" has not set the price.
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.
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.