The Outfall of a Helium-3 Crisis

astroengine writes "The United States is currently recovering from a helium isotope crisis that last year sent low-temperature physicists scrambling, sky-rocketed the cost of hospital MRI's, and threw national security staff out on a search mission for alternate ways to detect dirty bombs. Now the panic is subsiding, what is being done to conserve, or replace, helium-3?"

Comments

Re:Temporary problem.

[Mt._Honkey]

Okay, now I've RTFA, and it is one of the worst science articles I've ever read outside New Scientist or Conservapedia. Let us delve in:

But the isotope, helium-3, like many rare Earth elements, has been in high demand with only limited supply.

Helium is not a rare earth element. I have a feeling this line was inserted just to pitch the link below it.

The gas is part of the leftovers that come from cooking up a hydrogen bomb: you know two parts uranium; one part tritium

No idea where that ratio came from. It's not true and irrelevant.

While there are other ways of decaying tritium without needing to build a bomb to do it...

Is the author fully ignorant of nuclear physics or is she gearing up for some kind of scam where she sells "Tritium Decayers" to the government?

But if a patient takes a breath of helium-3, the resulting MRI is so bright it looks as though the patient inhaled a light bulb.

Not as bad, but misses a great opportunity to explain HOW He3 helps lung imaging. He-3 doesn't exist in any significant quantities in the body, so you can tune the MRI to look for that nucleus and bam, you can see the shape of whatever you fill with it.

Until the FDA approves the recycled helium for humans...

The FDA needs to approve this? That's odd, I wonder why. Too bad you didn't explain why or tell us what stage of approval its in.

For a party that suddenly saw the balloons all pop, despite the warnings, everyone jumped.

wat

Re:Free market

[sjames]

Because, naturally, the vagaries of the market are so much more important than human life. We live only to serve the economy, OH WAIT!

The economy and the market exist ONLY to serve us, never the other way around. Their "goodness" may be judged exclusively by how well they accomplish this.

I doubt a shortage will be allowed to continue though since DHS needs it to check our Chinese diethylene glycol laden toothpaste for bombs.

Re:an outlaw of balloons

[AlecC]

They made it for one purpose - building H-bombs. Once they had stockpiles of it, other more constructive uses were found for it. Then they more-or-less gave up the original purpose, so they abandoned the production line. precisely because there was no free market, the new uses had been getting a free ride from the bomb makers. When the bomb makers stopped producing it, the others were left flailing around. This is /precisely/ the kind of problem that arises when resources are allocated by the commands of bureaucrats instead of a market mechanism - the Soviet Union was full of it. The value of something is either ignored completely ir is frozen arbitrarily at some point early in the life of the product.