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?"

Re:first post

[Anonymous Coward]

naa, slashdot 3.0 already used up all the frosty piss

and it shows....

Gross...

[2Bits]

The MRI imaging requires the patient hold his or her breath for 10 seconds. Instead of just breathing out normally, the patient exhales into a helium-impermeable bag

Note to self: next time doing MRI in the hospital, do not inhale that stuff, don't want to imagine where it came from...

Quite obvious

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:Moon, or harvest from gas giants

[BrokenHalo]

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.