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Medicine Earth

The World Is Running Out of Helium. Why Doctors are Worried (nbcnews.com) 130

Posted by EditorDavid from the ballooning-costs dept.
NBC News reports: A global helium shortage has doctors worried about one of the natural gas's most essential, and perhaps unexpected, uses: MRIs.

Strange as it sounds, the lighter-than-air element that gives balloons their buoyancy also powers the vital medical diagnostic machines. An MRI can't function without some 2,000 liters of ultra-cold liquid helium keeping its magnets cool enough to work. But helium — a nonrenewable element found deep within the Earth's crust — is running low, leaving hospitals wondering how to plan for a future with a much scarcer supply.... [F]our of five major U.S. helium suppliers are rationing the element, said Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. These suppliers are prioritizing the health care industry by reducing helium allotments to less essential customers.

Hospitals haven't canceled patients' MRIs or shut down machines yet. They have seen helium costs rise at an alarming rate, though — possibly up to 30%, guessed Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. But without an end in sight for the helium shortage, the future of MRI remains uncertain.... The problem is that no other element is cold enough for the MRI. "There's no alternative," said Donna Craft, a regional construction manager for Premier Inc. who contracts with helium suppliers for some 4,000 hospitals. "Without helium, MRIs would have to shut down...."

GE and Siemens are both developing MRIs requiring less liquid helium. Siemens recently introduced one requiring just 0.7 liters, and, according to Panagiotelis, GE rolled out a machine that's "1.4 times more efficient than previous models." These technologies aren't widely available, though, and replacing the country's 12,000 MRI machines — each weighing up to 50,000 pounds — is anything but a quick fix. Meanwhile, hospitals keep installing additional conventional MRI machines to meet demand for diagnostic scans.
The article notes some scientists are already shutting down research projects that require helium.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Wildbear for submitting the article!
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The World Is Running Out of Helium. Why Doctors are Worried More

The World Is Running Out of Helium. Why Doctors are Worried

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  • Liquid Nitrogen (Score:4, Funny)

    by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @02:23PM (#63010753)
    Liquid nitrogen says "Yo! Hold my beer. [google.com]"
  • Hopefully fusion reactors wil become a reality before we run out of helium.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by irving47 ( 73147 )

      It might take enormous amounts of power if the fusion process isn't self-sustaining, but can't we just keep dumping power and fuel into it? How much helium can be produced via... not sure what to call it... "subsidized" fusion?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        It might take enormous amounts of power if the fusion process isn't self-sustaining, but can't we just keep dumping power and fuel into it? How much helium can be produced via... not sure what to call it... "subsidized" fusion?

        Perhaps capturing alpha particles and letting them turn into Helium might be the right way to do this (is that possible?). Trying to make anything at industrial scales with fusion is probably far off into the future.

    • The amount of helium that these will make will be negligible.

      • DT fusion produces about 28 MeV per helium atom emitted. That is about 26,000 kwh per mole (4 grams).

        We'll assume the process is 50% efficient. So that means to net 26,000 kwh, we need to emit two moles (8 grams) of helium.

        America consumes 4 trillion kilowatts of electricity annually. So that means 4e12/26,000 * 8 = 1.23 billion grams of helium = 1230 metric tonnes.

        America consumes 40 million cubic meters of helium. The density of helium is 180 grams/m^3.

        40,000,000 m^3 * 180 g/m^3 = 7200 metric tonnes.

        1230

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      The helium shortage is nothing new. But like the families that build homes next to forests, then are surprised when Climate Change produced wild fires so fierce that grandma canâ(TM)t escape, the deniers have squandered a pre ious resource.

      Yes, there may be some magicks that save us. Carbon sequestration. Build in a Dyson sphere. Fusion reactors. All these things are happening. But we donâ(TM)t know if any of them will be the silver bullet, the free lunch

      Fusion in fact will produce increasing

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

        Yes, there may be some magicks that save us. Carbon sequestration. Build in a Dyson sphere. Fusion reactors. All these things are happening.

        Ok, I'll buy that carbon sequestration and fusion reactor research are ongoing, but who the fuck is working on a Dyson sphere?

  • Said the same thing a few days ago (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @02:28PM (#63010763)

    In response to someone asking about airborne clutter as it relates to UFOs, I replied that it could be those mylar balloons people are filling with our depleting stores of helium [slashdot.org].

    How long before stores are prohibited from using helium to fill balloons? When will the Macy's Day Parade balloons [livescience.com] stop flying?

  • I was worried at first, but was good with it when I realized they were generating a bunch of hot air.

  • Whatever happened to the artificial Helium shortage caused by suppliers?

    Also, when an MRI is decommissioned, why do they vent it to the atmosphere and not recapture the Helium if it is allegedly so scarce anymore?

  • Not news (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @02:41PM (#63010807)

    I wrote about this back in 2007 [aardvark.co.nz]. Nothing new here, nothing to see, move along

    • It was a restless night mulling-over topic for me around 1978. This old article is informative in helium production at Amarillo, Texas: TSHA: Helium Production [tshaonline.org]. My last physics lab time was in 2009, and there was already word that university labs were installing helium recapture equipment. We had the sickening experience of having an expensive transport Dewar of liquid helium go to waste when a cryostat suffered a nitrogen boil explosive failure in one layer of containment and insulation during recommiss
      • We had He recapture lines in labs all over Europe since forever, US had cheap Helium from their national Helium Reserve which was being drawn down and sold off, so labs found it cheaper to just boil off the He into the air.

        A He liqufication plant isn't cheap to maintain and probably not economical for a hospital with just one or a few NMR machines, as would be transporting He gas back to a commerical plant.

        The "dirty Helium" argument is likely baloney, as you cool it down any other gases are freezing out

  • Forget MRIs, what about Donald Duck ? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Sunday October 30, 2022 @03:01PM (#63010849) Homepage

    Will Disney be able to buy enough helium for him to speak ?

  • to the trend of getting high of it.

  • Helium manufacturing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @03:19PM (#63010879)

    Few things wrong with the clickbait summary -- helium is being created continuously in the Earth's crust from radioactive decay, it is not "non-renewable". It collects in gas domes close to the surface where we can get at it and there's lots of gas domes we can tap to recover helium, including "spent" oil and natural gas wells which will fill with helium and other radioactive decay product gases like radon over time.

    Worst case there's about 5ppm helium in Earth's atmosphere, about two billion tonnes in total which could be concentrated using cryogenic distillation and/or high-pressure filtration using the convenient fact that He is the smallest molecule around. Adding to that possible source, each tonne of spent nuclear fuel produces about 20 grams of He every year due to radioactive decay.

    Helium may become more expensive but it's not going to run out during the Anthropocene at current rates of consumption (ca. 15,000 tonnes a year according to market reports).

    • Re:Helium manufacturing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @04:18PM (#63010973)

      That kind of "harvest the atmosphere" is much like "refining gold from sea water". It's very expensive and doesn't scale well. If we want bulk helium, let's go straight to solar mirrors and harvesting solar wind, which is about 8% helium.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nojayuk ( 567177 )

        Gases like xenon and krypton are already refined cryogenically from atmosphere, as a side-process of oxygen liquefaction for industrial processes. Krypton is rarer in the atmosphere than helium and, yes, it is considerably more expensive but it is available to buy.

        Helium refined from natural gas wells around the world is cheaper than cryogenic distillation so there has been no real effort to make that process cheaper. If the demand is there then expect the engineering to improve and the cost to come down. N

        • Re:Helium manufacturing (Score:4, Interesting)

          by demonlapin ( 527802 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @06:09PM (#63011171) Homepage Journal
          Helium leaves the atmosphere and is stripped off by solar wind over time. Xenon and krypton, being denser than air, are not.

          Xenon actually can be used as an anesthetic gas. There's not very much of it, but since none of it (practically speaking) leaves the atmosphere, it's practicable to pull it out of the air as needed, release into the atmosphere, and recapture.

          • Re:Helium manufacturing (Score:4, Informative)

            by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @08:49PM (#63011419)

            Looking at the accessible references about loss of helium from Earth's atmosphere they all seem to derive from a single theoretical paper (Ferguson et al, 1964) which gives a value of 50g/second due to ionisation of helium atoms in the upper atmosphere via cosmic rays and X-rays with the polar magnetic field then accelerating the ionised He atoms out into space. There doesn't seem to be anything later than that 60-year-old paper and nothing I can find that depends on physical observations and/or actual sampling.

            The density of particular gases doesn't make that much difference to loss rates, according to other papers I've noted in passing. I think He is supposed to be mostly immune to the "Jensen tail" statistical effect since the nucleus is a lot smaller than the much larger noble gas atoms like Xe and Kr which have a greater cross-section hence the increased loss rates into space. I am no expert on this though.

    • I suspect that if net zero is actually going to be achieved, we are really a couple decades before a huge supply crunch.

      Being able to gather it at many orders of magnitude more cost is irrelevant, at that point you might as well just dump all the hundreds of billions worth of equipment in the landfill the moment they need a refill and switch to high temperature superconductors.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Don't be stupid [acs.org].

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by johnnys ( 592333 )

      Absolutely agree. I have been waiting for someone to make this point.

      Here in NA, there is an ongoing problem in many houses with too much radon in the basement, caused by better air sealing around windows in an effort to improve energy efficiency. And when radon decays, it commonly (but not always) decays by by emitting an "alpha particle". And an alpha particle is simply the nucleus of a helium atom. So helium is continually being created in well-sealed basements!

      The reason this is useful info is that it d

  • Again? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CaptainLugnuts ( 2594663 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @03:39PM (#63010915)
    This story comes up every year or so ever since the US got rid of the national helium reserve. Since there's aren't a guaranteed buyers, most wells just vent it now.

    • Grammar Nazi Party Time (Score:4, Funny)

      by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @04:04PM (#63010951)

      Since there's aren't a guaranteed buyers, most wells just vent it now.

      I have to give you credit. It only took one sentence and you've probably given male grammar Nazis the biggest boner they've had in years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Yeah, there was a potential for a real shortage when the reserve went away - the reserve was created by radioactive decay, and that ran out a few years ago and there was a real honest worry about it.

      But it turns out we found new sources of helium to the point it's not actually a worry - natural gas contains a lot of helium in it, and is produced as a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Of course, the next worry is we want to leave the natural gas (fossil fuel) in the ground, but it turns out helium can sep

  • Minable helium is the product of radioactive decay, as alpha particles capture electrons. Any place mining natural gas can, and should, use fractional distillation to capture helium as they store the methane it accompanies, for that buried methane picks up helium from the uranium (a common element) and thorium (even more common) as well as other radioactives. Helium can also be collected from the atmosphere. In short, we don't efficiently save what we waste.

  • sounds familiar (Score:4, Insightful)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @04:04PM (#63010949)
    Back when I became involved in developing superconducting accelerators there was concern that the world would run out of Helium and I remember being concerned. If we run out, the nearest source (in terms of energy) was Saturn. etc etc That was in 1986

    That said, there is some risk. There is NO substitute for helium for low temperature cryogenics. No other element or compound has such a low boiling point and because of the way chemistry works, nothing else will be discovered.

    So running out would be bad, but I don't know how to evaluate claims that we are in fact runnign out.

    • Where "warm" means liquid Nitrogen temperatures.

      • Re:Warm superconductors should solve that (Score:5, Interesting)

        by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @10:24PM (#63011527)
        Even the high TC superconductors work at much higher fields and currents when cooled to liquid helium temperature rather than liquid nitrogen (or even liquid hydrogen) temperatures. For example the high field fusion experiments are using high TC superconductors but operated at He temperatures.

        There are lots of other applications for low temperature. Almost all supercondudting quantum systems (quantum computers, quantum detectors) operate well below 1 degree Kelvin (often milli-degree kelvin), and rely on liquid helium to get below 4K, and frequenty Helium 3 / Helium 4 dilution refrigerators to get to below 100mK.

        Keep in mind that in absolute units (which is what counts here) Liquid nitrogen is almost 20X warmer than liquid helium, but only 4x colder than room temperature. From a low temperature physics / engineering point of view, LN2 is barely even cryogenic.

  • Helium... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Grog6 ( 85859 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @04:14PM (#63010969)

    The whole amount in the reserve, is what we've been using the last ~80 years or so; there was one plant built to capture it, in california, iirc.
    It's still there, we just need to fire it up again.

  • This is a real and major issue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mz721 ( 9598430 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @04:35PM (#63011021)

    Most of the He in the world has traditionally come from the US, where it's associated with oil deposits. I used to work in a lab in Australia, and when we used He we piped off the boil-off, recompressed it, liquefied it if we had to, and used it again. It needed substantial infrastructure, but we did it. I was shocked and disappointed when we went to the USA and found our colleagues letting it boil off. It always seemed to me that of all groups scientists should have been able to plan ahead, but I guess not. Short-termism is everywhere. People who think 100 years is a long time are our single biggest problem.

    The problem of course, as noted, is that the special properties of He are not something you can readily find in any other material. Its low boiling point, the isotope ratio between 4He and 3He, these are things that are hard, if not impossible, to replace.

    It has been known about for a long time, it's been coming for a long time. No amount of ingenuity changes the laws of physics. It will be interesting to see what if any alternatives we come up with.

  • Ask Disney? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @04:45PM (#63011041)
    Apparently, Disney uses a lot of helium in it balloons at its theme parks & shops. Maybe ask them to stop wasting helium & polluting the planet with plastic balloons?

    • What goes into balloons is not the same grade helium that is cooling superconducting magnets.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        However given that helium is a none renewable resource then using for none essential purposes is morally reprehensible. Helium can be purified.

  • most helium is still just vented from nat gas wells, and it can be cryogenically recovered from air too but at greater cost. I've even seen b.s hysteria about atmospheric helium being lost to space but that is over geological timescales. There is no problem, more helium will be recovered, we can't run out.

    • Serious question - do you have a source for good information on the rate of helium loss? I was always told that it just escapes into space quickly (which wikipedia says too), and I just believed that. However, some other searches say the He4 concentration in the atmosphere is about 5ppm and rising. This seems contradictory with rapid escape.

      On a side note, lots of low-temperature researchers are moving away from liquid He and are using various "dry" techniques instead. Closed cycle cryogenic coolers

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by evanh ( 627108 )

        Once Helium is out in the atmosphere it's lost. What iggymanz means is we can capture more of the active losses at the wells if we wanted to. My guess is recent market turmoil (Long Covid you could say) is the likely cause of the shortages. What's more, once fusion power comes online we'll be literally creating Helium at will.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by evanh ( 627108 )

          Okay, maybe the fusion process won't produce much, it's far too miniscule relatively. But there's no limit to the amount the Earth creates by fissile processes and is still captured by even the spent oil wells.

  • So .. recycle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @04:58PM (#63011075)
    MRIs can recapture 2 weeks of bleed off in a single industrial T cylinder at 1000psi. Helium is incredibly inefficient to compress, but it can be done on-site at every medical facility. The reason this is not already done is because the cost of Helium has not risen to the point that paying the electric bill for re-capture has made it worth it. There is certainly some tradeoff at lower pressure with more cylinders, but I'm sure that can be figured out quite precisely on some total cost basis. The real problem is that we are not charging enough for Helium.

  • History+Republican establishment=FAIL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Sunday October 30, 2022 @05:41PM (#63011135)

    First, the history: The US was long ago discovered to have to vast majority of the planet's Helium. The stuff leaks out of the oil deposits in the south-western US and is not found in the same concentrations in other global oil deposits. During WWI, Germany was operating rigid air ships (commonly called "Zeppelins" even though Zeppelin was one of two manufacturers involved, the other being Schutte-Lanz) as long-range scouts and strategic bombers - airplanes of that era were quite incapable, so the rigid airship looked like the future of long-range air transport and aerial warfare. Other countries, like the US and the UK were also building their own rigids, and everybody knew the primary weakness was that the lift gas (hydrogen) had an eagerness to burst into flames. It was in this context that the US realized that its rare Helium supply had some real value (previously, people just found the stuff interesting, but it had no serious (and thus monetizable) value). The Helium did not lift as well as hydrogen, but it would not burn. US airships were designed to have more gas volume per unit of structure and payload weight to allow them to fly with Helium, and thus this current situation was born - because Helium suddenly became a strategic military asset of the USA and laws were written to require US drillers to capture the Helium and move it to a "national Helium reserve" where it would be stored and be available to fill the massive new American airships that were flown during the years between WWI and WWII (Google for USS Los Angeles, USS Shenandoah, USS Akron, USS Macon, and ZMC-2 for more on these)

    During WWII the US no longer operated rigid airships, but operated a large fleet of Navy blimps, including using them for convoy escorts, and they flew in the early Cold War as airborne early warning radar platforms. Then came the age of rockets, where it was discovered that super-cold liquid helium was an ideal source of gas to pressurize rocket tanks in flight (colder than anything else in the rocket, it could be converted back to helium gas to fill the void in a tank created as the engines sucked fuel or oxidizer out (preventing the rocket body from imploding) while not being in danger of re-forming into a liquid by the cold temps of the LOX or other chilled tank contents, since Helium stays a gas at lower temps than those other substances). The Unites States kept its massive helium reserves, which proved to be very useful, even in a post-airship world.

    Then came 1994

    In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected President, and some of what he did energized the average Republican voter like nothing before and they turned-out in large enough numbers to flip the US House from Democrat to Republican for the first time in over 40 years. This was a problem for "establishment" (often called "country club" - people like the Bushes) Republicans because many of them had, for decades, campaigned on ideas they knew were popular with Republican VOTERS, but often not with Republican DONORS; normally not a problem because it got them votes, but they were powerless to carry out the promises and had a good seemingly permanent excuse: they had no political power. Being suddenly in charge of the part of government that controls the nation's purse strings, posed a problem for them and their voters KNEW the Constitution gave the US House control of spending .. so they had no excuses and needed to cut SOMETHING, so they started looking. Cut the Department of Education? They'd long promised to cut this then-only-20-years-old agency Jimmy Carter had created and which did not educate anybody... but the establishment types were too scared to finally actually cut it. Cut the Department of Energy? They'd long promised to cut that one, which always sounded like a good one to cut since, despite it's name, never generated or facilitated the generation of any energy.... but no, the establishment types had donors who would not support that. After struggling for over a year, they could find nothing in government they were

    • Well thank god this decision was reversed immediately by the infinite righteous morality of the Democrats when they regained control of the House over a decade ago, right? /s

  • So if they crack that nut properly before we run too short on helium it shouldn't be a problem...

  • Hospitals haven't canceled patients' MRIs or shut down machines yet. They have seen helium costs rise at an alarming rate...

    Very Funny. I really got a rise from that.

  • but within the last few weeks I saw tanks of the stuff being sold at retail for inflating balloons. I was surprised and a bit disturbed, but in the back of my mind I assumed that somebody must have found a new source or otherwise solved the problem somehow.

    With helium being a critical element in short supply, I would have expected the force of law to prevent frivolous uses such as making floating balloons for birthday parties.

    • You can inflate some 250k balloons with the amount of helium needed for a single MRI (and then we haven't even considered the quality difference since you cannot use that retail helium for the MRI:s, it's simply not pure enough) so it will probably take quite some time before any shortage for the medical field trickles down to the retail side.

  • The world is NOT running out of Helium. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @01:34AM (#63011665) Journal
    What is running out is the STORED helium that we America obtained so long ago and had in storage.
    Sadly, the GOP figured there was no reason for the government to continue to store it and that private industry could do it better.
    Ppl like Cox in the house and Senator Trent Lott (R) created and pushed these through the house and senate on VOICE VOTE ONLY.
    Why Voice vote? So as to not have it recorded. Several gas separation private companies that wanted control of this were all good buddies with GOP, which the house and senate were BOTH GOP controlled in 1996. Funny thing is, the reason for doing this was that the helium had been expensive to acquire and the GOP claimed to want to get taxpayer's investment. However, the formula's that the GOP set in there, were designed to sell it off for about 1/2 of what taxpayers paid, and only 1/8 of what the market was paying for it. Yes, these companies made out like bandits.

    Now, is this non-renewable? No. Actually, it IS renewable.
    First, we have the ability to separate the helium from nat gas fields like we did in 1925. I really think that America (and Europe) needs to order this and re-start the saving of it.
    Secondly. the common fusion is to use hydrogen, which is cheap to obtain. Basically fuse 2 hydrogen (specifically D and T) together and what do you get? A helium atom and energy.
    We are close to having that in operation in multiple places. So, the 'waste' product, will be Helium. LOTS of Helium.
    Of course, this is only 30 years away. :)
  • First google result for "high-temperature mri": https://www.medicaldesignandou... [medicaldes...urcing.com] (from 2016).

  • time to ban the stupid disney balloons

  • Journalists, the geniuses of our time. MRI used to be done by magic; now for some reason it requires helium.

  • in an MRI device that _loses_ helium in the process of cooling! Like an earlier response said, you catch the spill-off, recompress it, reuse it. _NOTHING_ "uses" helium: the stuff is too inert! All they do is waste it.

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