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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?"
based on how the government usually operates I expect this would be a typical response.
Apples and oranges, Helium 3 is an isotope of Helium. It's kind of like saying we need to conserve water because there's Tritium in it. There will be a shortage of regular Helium as well soon so it's ironic it's still cheap. Helium 3 was a bi-product of cold war weapons making but since we stopped trying to see how many Hydrogen Bombs we could make there's been little or no Helium 3 produced in decades. There were once huge stockpiles but they are largely gone now.
There are large amounts of He3 being made in heavy water reactors that is not being collected. Until now there has been little motivation to go through the trouble and expense of modifying these reactors to extract it, but it's not THAT hard. At some point it will just be done and then we'll be fine. This is only a short-term problem. DNRTFA, of course.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
The reason the helium is becoming scarce on earth is because it's too light and escapes from the earth's atmosphere. So how do we stop that? Simple, make it heavier like we did to our own fat asses. If there is one thing we are great at it, it's getting fat, why can't we extend that to Helium? "So Mr. Helium 3, would you like to supersize that today?"
By the time we are done with helium it won't even be able to get off the floor, let alone escape the atmosphere.
Monstar L
It's actually a fundamental physics + policy issue, but a different policy than the one you're referring to. As the article very briefly touched on, He-3 comes from the decay of Tritium. Tritium is the stuff that we put into the H-bomb (Fusion reaction rather than the atomic bomb's Fission reaction, basically redonkulously more powerful). The policy in question came from the end of the Cold War, where nonproliferation, disarmament, and the end of tritium creation.
The physics comes in because tritium has a half life of ~13 years. This means that if someone gave you a canister of pure tritium, after two decades it'd be 1/4 tritium, and 3/4 He-3. Do the math for when the cold war ended, and you start to see why we're feeling the hit from the end of this "production cycle".
It's also important to note that H-bombs, crafted from Tritium (Hydrogen-3), have a different yield once enough of the warhead has decayed into He3, which is actually one of the real main reasons why we're reducing our stockpile even though we didn't agree to the nonproliferation treaty. We're re-refining what tritium is left and putting it into new warheads (as a tanent: using more advanced warhead designs than the previous ones they replace too, so nonproliferation/stockpile-reduction in this case is a very generous casting).
While there are many "alternative" ways to create He-3, it's pretty obvious from this situation that trying to buy $150 dollars of decayed bomb innards is definitely going to be cheaper than trying to buy refined nuclear-reactor extract. But at the same time, that was probably taken into account for the final price adjustment to $1500/L.
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.
This is a consequence of the decline in the U.S's nuclear industry. Tritium is usually produced in nuclear reactors. It's useful for several purposes, from boosting nuclear weapons to exit sign lighting in aircraft.
Tritium is made by irradiating lithium with neutrons Tritium decays with a half-life of 12 years. He3, which is stable, is one of the decay products, and that's where He3 comes from. (This is a commercial application of transmutation.)
The US used to have a reactor at Savannah River to produce tritium, but that was shut down in 1988. Since the early 1990s, there have been efforts to set up a new source, and presently, two power reactors of the Tennessee Valley Authority are used to produce tritium, A few extra lithium rods are put in, and changed out occasionally to recover the tritium.
The He3 shortage is a side effect of the tritium shortage.
Spread very thin though. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Extraterrestrial_supplies
The Moon's surface contains helium-3 at concentrations on the order of 0.01 ppm in sunlit areas,[40][41] and concentrations as much as five times higher in permanently shadowed regions.[2] A number of people, starting with Gerald Kulcinski in 1986,[42] have proposed to explore the moon, mine lunar regolith and use the helium-3 for fusion. Because of the low concentrations of helium-3, any mining equipment would need to process extremely large amounts of regolith (over 100 million tons of regolith to obtain one ton of helium 3),[43] and some proposals have suggested that helium-3 extraction be piggybacked onto a larger mining and development operation.[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Build some more atomic weapons.
That's a really silly idea. They shouldn't build any more atomic weapons until they've used up the ones they've got.
That's incorrect.
Helium-3 is a *byproduct* of the *existence* of hydrogen bombs. More specifically, byproduct of the existence of tritium. Tritium decays into helium-3. Helium-3 was unwanted, while tritium was wanted; there were actually some projects to attempt to convert the helium-3 back into tritium.
This shortage has absolutely nothing to do with how easy or hard helium-3 is to produce or acquire, nor is it a testament to how "free market planning" works so much better than central planning. Quite the opposite, this is a well known phenomenon of free markets: products which are of lower value and which are produced in a limited number of places as a byproduct of producing a more valuable goods can be extremely vulnerable to price swings.
Present day. Present time.