Helium Crisis Approaching 501
vrmlguy writes "Within nine years the National Helium Reserve will be depleted, according to an article in Science Daily. It quotes Dr. Lee Sobotka, of Washington University in St. Louis: 'Helium is non-renewable and irreplaceable. Its properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas or oil), there are no biosynthetic ways to make an alternative to helium. All should make better efforts to recycle it.' (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a local article with quotes from Dr. Sobotka and representatives of the balloon industry.) On Earth, Helium is found mixed with natural gas, but few producers capture it. Extracting it from the atmosphere is not cost-effective. The US created a stockpile, the National Helium Reserve, in 1925 for use by military dirigibles, but stopped stockpiling it in 1995 as a cost-saving measure."
A lost age (Score:2, Interesting)
Time to ramp up fusion research (Score:2, Interesting)
Want to replace the helium lost and create cleaner, more abundant energy? Now is a good time to pour some more money into fusion research to try and get over the hump and create sustainable fusion reactions.
wha?! (Score:3, Interesting)
If the price increases enough ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Helium Plant in Amarillo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Peak Everything (Score:3, Interesting)
Once you're in space, orbit around the sun is easy because there's no friction. Energy expenditures for going long distances aren't much - only what it takes to start and stop. Getting into space, though....
Now figure out how you're going to shield it from radiation
Big chunks of metal (Faraday's cages)
, and feed the hundreds of employees.
Lets not bring people into this. People can't survive very long without gravity. Industrial robots will be doing this. Telerobots, for sure. People will probably be doing administration of them using radio signals.
And keep in mind all of that capacity is to produce something for a regional demand, not a global demand
The things will have to be bigger than aircraft carriers. They will likely cost trillions of dollars and use enough metals to rival the total yearly consumption of metal right now. Probably large portions will have to be made of glass based solely on the fact that we can't get enough metal to cover everything. Its trips will probably take decades, and it'll bring back hundreds of tons of new material.
Even when you've got it, now figure out how you're going to get it back down to the ground.
Big ceramic boxes+gravity. Presumably the materials to make new big metal boxes will be mined.
Seems like the only really, really hard problems are how to be able to escape the earth's gravity whenever we want...and the logistical problem of getting every nation on the planet working together to produce this thing. Are these two issues insurmountable?
No, acetylene! (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, he kind of won the Darwin award one dry very dry year when static electricity beat him to the punch. He only singed off the hair on his eyebrows and arms and didn't get serious burns or lose eyesight, but he quit the displays.
Re:helium toy balloons (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought of that. The problem is that it doesn't stay contained very well. If you bought one of those tanks, and never used it, it wouldn't keep for more than a few years. Even 100% air-tight containers might have a hard time containing helium.
Re:Increase public awareness (Score:3, Interesting)
What aluminum shortage? (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a guy on Science Friday, Jerry Woodall of Purdue, who has a process of generating hydrogen from an aluminum alloy. I heard him on Science Friday on NRP and he never mentioned any kind of worldwide shortage of aluminum, although he was largely pushing the fact that the aluminum alloy used as a catalyst in his process was completely recyclable and reusable for the same process.
I have heard there are supply problems related to aluminum smelting limitations, primarily due to the energy required -- in fact, I seem to recall that Iceland of all places is a leading refiner of aluminum due to the geothermal energy resources; its cheaper to ship the ore to Iceland and refine it and ship it out due to the immense "free" geothermal energy.
Re:Cost effective? (Score:4, Interesting)
First, most if not all high-temp superconductors are ceramics, which are hard to make into coils of wire. So that's why they don't get used much in magnets.
Second, superconductivity is inhibited by magnetic fields - the lower the temperature the more field you can sustain. So even if you could barely get by with LN2 you still end up using He in magnets...
Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:2, Interesting)
In a well-functioning market for a limited resource that a lot of people have access to, what is the result that pure capitalism creates? A race to the bottom competition in prices, which normally is great and one of the main advantages of capitalism, but in cases of limited resources might not be. It may well be that the most rational overall response would be to conserve the non-renewable resource, but humans value an immediate benefit over a distant one, and would rather feed themselves today than their children tomorrow.
As a result, as soon as a few helium sellers lower their prices, then the entire market would have to follow, until soon the price of helium is based upon the current cost of extraction, rather than a higher, rational cost to society that maybe should be being imposed to preserve a non-renewable resource.
This is a negative externality, something that without that bogeyman of government intervention stepping in, capitalism is unable to deal with effectively. The negative effects are felt by future generations, but the benefits are enjoyed by the current generations. Pure capitalism and market forces encourage the imposition of negative externalities, to the net detriment of all.
In the long run, the result of the pure market system advocated by some here is that once supplies start running short, prices will increase as the supplies become scarce relative to demand. However, at that point we will already have frittered away 99% of our helium reserves, and it may be that many worthwhile usages will no long be economically feasible, despite being more efficient usages than the original wasteful usages that reduced the supply.
Re:If the price increases enough ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:If the price increases enough ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently, there is clear ownership, there is no significant government oversight, yet what is the net result going to be if left to the market? The helium reserves (according to the article, and I will proceed with its assumptions, as I have no view of my own on this matter) will be mostly depleted relatively shortly.
What's the cause of this? It's true, owners have an incentive to leave it in the ground if it'll become valuable in the future. However, this only works perfectly in a world of perfectly rational abstracted actors. In the real world, owners also have an incentive to eat today, rather than starving now on the hope of a big payday in the future. Once the large capital investment has been made to install helium extractors, infrastructure, etc. on the wells, it is highly improbable an owner would let that all depreciate into nothing as you wait for a highly speculative payday in the future. It is only when the shortage is actually imminent, and the payday less speculative, that owners will realistically start holding off on pumping. It would be more realistic in the real world that owners would let it stay in the land if they hadn't already tapped it, but it does not appear from the article that this is the case.
Regarding your quibble about my use of the word externality, as I understand it, an externality is an impact upon a party not involved in a given transaction, and this understanding is supported by Wikipedia. Here, the transactions in question are between helium extractors and helium buyers. Yet the negative impact is felt by future generations, who are not current parties to this, yet will have to live in a world with insufficient helium for scientific and engineering usages, if the premise of the article is to be believed. Hence, negative externality.
Re:No more helium? (Score:5, Interesting)