Researchers Find Game-Changing Helium Reserve In Tanzania (cnn.com) 190
An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNN: Helium is an incredibly important element that is used in everything from party balloons to MRI machines -- it's even used for nuclear power. For many years, there have been global shortages of the element. For example, Tokyo Disneyland once had to suspend sales of its helium balloons due to the shortages. The shortages are expected to come to an end now that researchers from Oxford and Durham universities have discovered a "world-class" helium gas field in Tanzania's East African Rift Valley. They estimate that just one part of the reserve in Tanzania could be as large as 54 billion cubic feet (BCf), which is enough to fill more than 1.2 million medical MRI scanners. "To put this discovery into perspective, global consumption of helium is about 8 billion cubic feet (BCf) per year and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world's largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 BCf," said University of Oxford's Chris Ballentine, a professor with the Department of Earth Sciences. "Total known reserves in the USA are around 153 BCf. This is a game-changer for the future security of society's helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away," Ballentine added.
Just two words (Score:4, Funny)
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How is an extra 7 years supply a 'game changer'?
To me a 'game changer' would mean we can stop worrying about helium supply, not "it'll still run out in my lifetime".
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I figured it out: It's game-changing in the sense that people won't have to go to the USA with cap in hand to beg them for some Helium.
Re:Just two words (Score:5, Informative)
In a single deposit, that's pretty huge.
Regardless, the "running out of helium" thing is a bit of hyperbole. For one, right now we waste most of our helium (in industry, not balloons - balloons and aircraft are only a tiny fraction of the total). We could reduce consumption by an order of magnitude by better recycling. Even concerning aircraft, new fabrics like vectran are significantly less permeable than old ones, and new techniques (hybrid airships, phase-change ballast, etc) help avoid the need for venting.
Helium can't "run out" on Earth because it's part of our atmosphere. Now, chilling it out of the air would be significantly more expensive than recovering from ground reserves - no question there. But from a concentration perspective, neon is about 3,6 times as common as helium, which is in turn about 57 times as common as xenon (by volume). Neon is about [google.is] $70/kg, xenon about $3500. So it's not linear, but helium would probably slot in at around $150, about an order of magnitude more expensive than it is today. Some back of an envelope calculations show that a party balloon contains around 2 grams of helium, meaning that the helium would cost about $0,30. Hardly world changing, from that perspective at least.
Furthermore, we're not going to be switching to recovering from the atmosphere simply because there will always be more in the ground. We'll move from one deposit to the next, richest to next richest (a downward trend, offset by the upward trend of new finds and the advancement of new technology driving down recovery costs). So long as there's gases in the Earth of any kind, they're going to be more helium-rich than the air. They're also going to be easier to extract the helium from - dilutant gases like CO2, for example, are much easier to freeze out than O2/N2/Ar.
Lastly, the costs of cryogenic refrigeration are only set to go down. Right now, low temperature refrigeration not only has low thermal efficiency, it also has low carnot efficiency. That is, to say, physics says we can be far more efficient than we actually are. But new refrigeration systems, like AMR (magnetic), allow for much higher efficiencies at cryogenic temperatures.
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It should also be added that we're far from knowing where all of the good helium reserves are - actually it's not gotten nearly as much attention as oil and natural gas, and we're still finding giant deposits of them. We're only just beginning to understand how helium concentrates in certain reserves and not others - a key aspect to locating future deposits.
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Whoops, correction: those prices were per cubic meter, not per kg. And per-volume is a better measure for party balloons anyway. So a party balloon full of neon would be about $1 and one full of xenon about $50. So helium would slot in closer to xenon, perhaps around $3-4.
Now factor in the future potential of more efficient refrigeration of the atmosphere, the use of low-quality ground sources rather than atmospheric, etc.... even wasteful uses like party balloons are going nowhere, even if we find no mo
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Ugh, can't write straight today. Helium would slot in closer to *neon*, perhaps around $3-4.
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Helium can't "run out" on Earth because it's part of our atmosphere.
Except that it's the lightest component of our atmosphere, so it naturally diffuses upwards and eventually heads off into space (I can't remember whether that's escape or being stripped off by the solar wind, but it certainly does go). The helium in ground level atmosphere is a balance of atmospheric helium loss against the seepage of helium deposits from rocks combined with new helium generated as a result of radioactive decay. Sequestration of atmospheric helium would shift the equilibrium point slightly.
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And it's also part of the uranium and thorium decay series, so it's constantly produced.
Insignificantly. The atmosphere loses 50 grams of helium per second and gains 50 from the ground (1.6MT/year). The mass of Earth's atmosphere is 5e15 tonnes. Helium is 5ppmv. You don't have to take the time to run
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Lets ban Helium in party balloons and use Hydrogen instead, it would be far more fun that way, at least for the pyro kids.
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Virtually all kids toys are "wasteful products". Why not just ban children?
Well, in the long term, that would solve all problems with over-consumption of resources.
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This is a relatively huge deposit, agreed. We do waste a whole lot of helium. In fact, it may be that most of what's wasted is actually from natural gas fields not capturing the helium "byproduct".
I think you grossly understate that chilling it out of the air would be "signficantly" more expensive than recovering from ground reserves, it's far more expensive than that. A small helium recovery system for NMR/MRI instruments costs on the order of $200k installed, ignoring ongoing maintenance. We looked into o
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IMHO, it would be interesting if one could use the magnets from the MRI hardware itself for AMR cooling. The magnet is the lion's share of the cost of an AMR system. And AMR is much more efficient at cryogenic temperatures than compression/expansion cycles.
You know, it's funny, I've read a lot of papers on AMR, including cost analysis studies, and I've never come across anyone considering that possibility yet.
Oh the horror for mouse land. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh the horror for mouse land. (Score:5, Informative)
Why the f*ck are we still wasting this gas on such stupid things as party balloons. Why wasn't this completely verboten years ago.
Much of the helium used for balloons is recycled (captured from devices using liquid helium) and the gas in party balloons is actually a very small sector of the helium market. What I don't understand is why the United States is dumping helium from its reserve. This is causing prices to be unnaturally low and there is going to be a massive price shock when the reserve is finally empty. What motivation is there for that?
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I think you answered your own question.
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If it can be recycled and sold for party balloons, it can also be recycled and used for another medical device/other important thing
Unless you want to tell how it is that "virgin" helium is somehow superior to "recycled" helium, despite both of them being noble gases no matter how many times you use them -- especially when we're running out of the former, and keep letting Little Johnny make chipmonk noises with the latter before releasing it into the atmosphere (or beyond?).
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there is going to be a massive price shock when the reserve is finally empty.
Then why don't you buy up the helium now, while it is cheap, and then get rich when the price skyrockets?
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there is going to be a massive price shock when the reserve is finally empty.
Then why don't you buy up the helium now, while it is cheap, and then get rich when the price skyrockets?
Because very few people have vast caverns at their disposal in which to store sequestered gas.
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Isn't that what futures are for? To allow you to speculate to your heart's content without ever providing any kind of benefit to society, just price fluctuations which hinder the real economy.
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Wish I had mod points...
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You are part of the problem with your blind hatred of Republicans, you have failed to notice that the Democrats are no better.
Re:Oh the horror for mouse land. (Score:5, Informative)
Why are we using it on:
Cryogenics (32%)
Pressurizing and purging (18%)
Welding (13%)
Controlled atmospheres (18%)
Leak detection (4%)
Breathing mixtures (2%)
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Your list isn't very good, as it doesn't break out use as a lifting gas, and it's not at all clear where that is buried in those categories. I have seen the claim that a total of 7% is used in party balloons, weather balloons, scientific balloons, and a very few airships.
The USGS statistics are the very definition of insanity. In 2015 the US produced from natural gas 76 million m^3, withdrew from storage 24 million m^3, imported for consumption 10 million m^3, and AT THE SAME TIME EXPORTED 67 million m^3. P
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Can't weather/scientific balloons use hydrogen?
They only go up once and burst. Why do you need Helium for that?
Re:Oh the horror for mouse land. (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is exactly the kind of thing that the government should control. We're talking about an element that is consumed at a rate much faster than it is produced naturally, and which escapes the atmosphere if released. Wasting it on silly things today means that important things that actually need it are going to be more expensive tomorrow.
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Likely so, but I don't think anyone knows what is the rate of natural helium generation in the earth by nuclear decay.
That's not a meaningful concept. Helium is constantly being released by the earth into the atmosphere, and constantly escapes the atmosphere, but the concentration in the atmosphere is quite constant, any amount released by humans is a fart in the wi
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No; only to the one that is not renewable and doesn't have alternatives.
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You can extend this argument to any commodity.
No you can't. The GP poster was talking about something that escapes the atmosphere if released. Gold does not diffuse through the atmosphere and drift off through space. Parts of crude may volatilise and drift through the atmosphere, but none of them will ever reach a high enough altitude to escape Earth's gravity. I don't know if even methane is light enough to escape the Earth. Helium is very much a special case.
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Nobody ever said Government was smart and foreword thinking about what it does. In fact, most thinking people understand that it's quite the opposite, government is usually stupid, slow, costly and inefficient, a set of traist that gets worse as government gets bigger.
I want our government slow and inefficient (Score:4, Insightful)
> Nobody ever said Government was smart and foreword thinking about what it does. In fact, most thinking people understand that it's quite the opposite, government is usually stupid, slow, costly and inefficient, a set of traist that gets worse as government gets bigger.
I HOPE my government remains slow and inefficient. Holding public hearings, referendums, etc. is slow and inefficient. Giving the minority opinion a chance to speak their mind is slow and inefficient. It's much more faster and more efficient for a dictator to just declare government policy. Publishing proposed laws before for several days before they are voted on slows things down.
It took from 1993 to 2010, seventeen years, to pass HillaryCare. I like that way much better than the alternative, which can be seen in North Korea, Cuba, and Syria. They don't bother with transparency laws, public bidding on government contracts, etc. That stuff is inefficient.
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They could also do more to protect our helium reserves or reserve them for science, rather than dumping it on the market wholesale.
Why would I want the next generation to have anything nice? I can be rich today!
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Can't control your grammar.
Apparently your grammar is in need of control as well...LOL..
Please excuse my improper use of "too" where "to" was supposed to be. Now to be moving on to more important things... Where is my fingernail clipper?
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Where is my fingernail clipper?
Sorry, I borrowed it, do you want it back?
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They want lots of control in the bedroom and of peoples sex lives in general
Being against opening up "Marriage" to homosexual couples is nothing like trying to control what you do in your bedroom. Please, I would love for you to point to anyone trying to pass modern anti sodomy laws.
You ignored the big one and got it wrong (Score:2)
"Conservatives" really like to fuck with laws around that.
There were still people going to jail for that when I started university. Many of the "conservatives" pushing various bedroom red tape are much older than I am.
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I'm sorry, but even Conservatives don't write the laws of nature, no matter how many times a guy pegges another guys ass, they will not get pregnant.
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The problem here is that the government *is* controlling this, requiring the sale of helium at below-market prices and forbidding new production even as reserves fall and usage increases for the sake of "privatization".
But hey, I'm sure if we just privatized a little harder it would work out, right?
It's a ridiculous state of affairs. Let's assume that they are correct, and that the state-owned helium reserve does indeed hamper the development of private helium sequestration and storage industry. OK. How are we going to encourage the private helium industry to increase their capacity? I would say that dumping large volumes on gas on the market and undercutting all their commercial competitors is highly unlikely to encourage competition. If they really want to achieve their stated goal, they should inc
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Why the f*ck are we still wasting this gas on such stupid things as party balloons. Why wasn't this completely verboten years ago.
Verboten by whom? There is no worldwide helium police force.
Re:Oh the horror for mouse land. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, technically, the party balloon helium is quite impure, and it often is economically unviable to refine it for scientific usage.
That's the only reason why it's still around - it costs more to make it useful than to use what we have in the reserves that are usable.
Contrary to popular belief, the party balloon folks are just as price sensitive, and a bottle of the good He is much too expensive, so they buy the crappy impure He.
Once supplies dwindle to the point refining party balloon He to lab grade is economically viable, then we won't have He balloons anymore.
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Sure, but by that time all that impure helium that is being spent today is already gone and cannot be recovered. So once we get to the point where impure helium becomes valuable, we'll have a smaller reserve of it than we would have otherwise had.
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This just goes to show (along with numerous other examples) that the market forces are notoriously limited in their perspective, and we should not rely on them for long-term planning.
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The second part, after the "and", is complete and utter nonsense. All currently economically viable helium starts out at about 1-7% purity in the selected natural gas fields. It is refined from there to Grade A (99.995% purity). Actually that has been superseded, and nowadays you can obtain helium refined to anywhere from balloon grade, which is anything from 80-99.98%, throug
Re:Oh the horror for mouse land. (Score:4, Funny)
It's a proven fact that fully 1/3 of all helium production in the world each year goes to making people talk like chipmunks.
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Though the shitty Skype audio algorithms might start making inroads into that market. I know I sound like a chipmunk more often on Skype than I do huffing balloons nowadays.
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Because it uses up a limited non-renewable resource that doesn't have a good replacement for many important applications.
Driving around for no reason is kinda sorta comparable in that it uses up oil, but it can be replaced with something else in most applications.
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And if there isn't, and we can't, say, make new MRI machines, then what? Do we at least get to dig out your corpse and hang it as a warning to future generations?
Sorry, but I'm not going to trust the nebulous predictions of "we're just going to science and engineer shit out of it eventually". Not unless you have very specific figures to back up those assertions, and reasonably conclude that, yes, by the time helium shortage will impact critical applications, we will definitely have other cheap sources of it
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It is so funny how people get worked up about one element and ignore the giant oceans of waste flowing by constantly. No biggie though, at l
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The reaction is short-lived, but I don't want to see Little Johnny's pants on fire because of it. [youtube.com]
Otherwise, having the a vent above the filling station
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Gee, I wonder about that, too [youtube.com].
Thank god, we are saved, for 6 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, click bait much? Yes, it is a large find, but at 8 BCF/year it is about 6 or 7 years of supply, that is NOT a game changer for humanity, that is a game changer for the people that will make a fortune rationing it out until we run out of helium.
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It's a game-changer for Tanzania, though.
Ot it could be, at least. A significant source of foreign investment capital, which can be (but probably won't be) used to help lift the country into the 21st century (or at least late 20th).
Now, if they have enough sense to build some power plants, highways/railroads/factories with some of that income, they could be in good shape by and by
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It is just stupid journalism: "game-changer" "breakthrough" "revolutionary" "unheard of" bullshit. Apparently, the masses like it that way.
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Sorry, but you're way off, and the people who you modded up just don't know any better or also have no idea how far off this is.
Let's run some numbers. The power output of the surface of the Earth is about 40 TW, which is a good proxy overestimating how much radioactive decay into helium there is in the whole Earth (some small amount of that power is primordial heat, a pretty significant amount of it is potassium decay and other beta sources, but we're going to be conservative). At roughly 5 MeV per alpha
We're saved! (Score:2)
The shortages are expected to come to an end
The inability of human beings to think in a term longer than a few months has always amazed me. This doesn't solve the problem, it merely postpones it. Helium escapes unless recaptured. If the rate of generation of helium from alpha decay is less than the rate of consumption, we will run out of helium one day - it's only a question of when.
It's also amazing that we could have a shortage of a material when there are giant balls full of the stuff in the sky. But hey, that's how the cosmos works.
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Learn 2 math? Your fusion reactors are off by several orders of magnitude compared to consumption. So to answer your question: Fusion reactors produce a tiny, tiny amount of helium - certainly not enough to even cover the cost of collecting it, let alone hoping to commercialize it. So yeah, we will eventually run out.
Non sequitor. Sure, getting helium from fusion reactors is probably a futile exercise, but that doesn't mean we'll run out.
Although there's some evidence that helium can come from alpha particle emitters (and we have a pretty much endless supply of radioactive rocks), apparently this research ignores the original source of the helium and simply postulates that volcanic activity can release helium stored in deep rocks where it can be dissolved in water and transported to the same types of formations that na
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and we have a pretty much endless supply of radioactive rocks
And it has taken those rocks billions of years to build up the current stockpiles of Helium, which we will deplete in 100 years or so. In fact, there were more of those rocks in the beginning. Now there's a lot of lead and iron and other products of decay. So the maximum rate of production of Helium is long over.
Sure, Helium will be produced effectively forever. But again, it's a rate thing. While isotopes can be decaying all over the planet all the time that doesn't mean you'll be able to harvest it - it
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No, the helium is leaking out the faster the more of it there is, so the reservoirs fill until they reach their balance point and then stay there. From empty to full could take a billion years, or it could take 2 hours. It would probably be better to think of them as springs than reservoirs, in terms of production rate rather than storage volume.
Handy for my future airship (Score:2)
That's going to be really useful once I finally win the lottery and buy an airship.
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Well just to be safe you should paint it in thermite
Soon to be a non-issue (Score:3)
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Fusion consumes very little fuel, and therefore creates very little helium. If we converted the entire planet to 100% fusion energy it would still be several orders of magnitude short of our helium demand. https://www.reddit.com/r/asksc... [reddit.com]
Good news but (Score:2)
Not a game changer.
Helium like any other rarer materials should be handled more careful.
There will never be a shortage of helium (Score:2)
There will never be a shortage of helium. Only a shortage of really cheap helium.
Helium is continuously produced by alpha decay of radioactive materials inside the earth. It exists in various concentrations in all natural gas reserves.
Some of those reserves (e.g. some wells in Texas or the one now found in Tanzania) have unusually high helium concentrations, making production costs much lower. The U.S. government used the Texas wells to set up a strategic reserve in the early to mid 20th century (when zeppe
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
That's hot air. I can see how you could be confused, though, as they both make balloons fly.
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Re:"Researchers from Oxford and Durham" (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice rant about the US and UK pillaging the innocent locals. You seem to have missed the most obvious choice: Local Tanzanian officials will vastly enrich themselves and send their families to the US and UK while leaving nothing for the people.
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To be fair, they're only trying to be good capitalists.
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Nice rant about the US and UK pillaging the innocent locals. You seem to have missed the most obvious choice: Local Tanzanian officials will vastly enrich themselves and send their families to the US and UK while leaving nothing for the people.
OK, so the fact that they get rich by collusion with white-country-based multinationals and the tacit approval of white-country governments is all incidental, and we can absolve the white money machine of all culpability? Do you really reckon it's OK to give bribes, and the only people in the wrong are those that accept them?
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Bribes are the only way to get things done, it's part of their culture(s) and they see nothing wrong with it.
Which is why they look so surprised when they get caught out, because as far as they are concerned it's business as usual, which it usually is.
So a very select few get super filthy rich, while the rest continue living in abject poverty.
Welcome to Africa!
Although to be fair, it happens elsewhere as well, it's not just in Africa, Russia is apparent
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You seem to think that exploitation by foreign corporations and corruption of local officials are mutually exclusive. What basis have you for this assumption?
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Technique to find it is the game changer (Score:5, Interesting)
Up to now helium was found by chance when drilling for something else. This time they worked out a geological model of where to look, and sure enough they found a huge amount the first place they looked based on that model.
That's the "game changer", knowing where to look for helium.
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We're all playing tiddlywinks now!
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Common in the universe perhaps.. But not so much on the surface where we generally work out our existence...
No worries though.. There are generally other workable replacements to be had for most of He's uses. Just ask Zeppelin about that... Don't worry about that little mishap in Lakehurst...
Re:A shortage of the second most common element... (Score:5, Funny)
There are generally other workable replacements to be had for most of He's uses. Just ask Zeppelin about that.
We can't just replace He with Pb, idiot.
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There are generally other workable replacements to be had for most of He's uses. Just ask Zeppelin about that.
We can't just replace He with Pb, idiot.
Perhaps not, but it seems we can replace meaningful dialog with stuff that's not all day long on Shashdot. LOL...
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OK, I asked Zeppelin about global supplies of Helium, and this was the response:
https://youtu.be/DBzuYNK95sM [youtu.be]
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Seems kind of dumb.
'In the universe' is not the same as 'on Earth'.
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Yea, nobody remembers that they fire bombed London using those Zeppelin things during WW1 and killed a bunch of people, at least on this side of the pond. Londoners tend to remember that and what happened to them during WW2. All we have is the B&W news reel footage of the incident in Lakehurst NJ and a simple little sign that shows where it took place because not that many Americans died.
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Hydrogen, combined with a rather flammable paint scheme. Mythbusters did this. http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... [discovery.com]
No Helium involved, which if you'll remember your high school Chemistry class, is a Noble Gas (doesn't burn, doesn't react)
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Re:REMEMBER THE HINDENBURG! (Score:5, Informative)
He seems to know a great deal more about it than you do. The Germans used hydrogen because the US had a monopoly on helium and wouldn't sell them any, thanks to their using zeppelins in WW1. Verstehen Sie?
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At $1/cu foot, this could turn Tanzania into a developed country.
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At $1/cu foot, this could turn Tanzania into a developed country.
BUT - I'm sure that the press conference was hilarious.
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At $1/cu foot, this could turn Tanzania into a developed country.
Ah, don't be silly. It's better for the country if the money goes to private enterprise. The government will benefit much more if the gas is extracted and sold by a company that pays practically zero tax than if it was owned and sold by the people of the country. If Shell get to extract it for a pittance, they'll be far better off than a "developed country", they'll be a developing country. See the difference?
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Somebody marked this -1!? Mod parent up, please! Notate as "funny."
Some people just don't understand completely appropriate humor. That said, the parent is wrong: there will not be even a few Tanzanians that make money from this. The management of the mining company will be American. The life-threatening labor will be performed by Tanzanians not in exchange for money, but in exchange for not being killed, and if they're lucky, for a portion of bread per day, of which the worker will eat a bite and send
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Wow--a bit overly-serious much?