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Will We Run Out of Helium?
- coldtea 7y agoRunning out of helium doesn't sound funny!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- royjacobs 7y agoTom Scott did an interesting video on the topic recently: https://youtu.be/mOy8Xjaa_o8 https://youtu.be/mOy8Xjaa_o8
- fishnchips 7y agoSo, if helium is light enough to escape Earth's gravity, why don't we use helium balloons to go to space? I mean, these guys [0] are trying to take a rocket to the edge of space using a helium balloon, but there's still a good old-fashioned rocket involved. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-49827415 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-49827415
- mcv 7y ago"Going to space" is a lot more than merely getting out of the atmosphere. You need to get orbital velocity, and a balloon isn't going to do that. For an individual helium atom it's possible to pick up enough velocity to escape Earth's gravity. When they're all tied together in a balloon, that's not going to happen.
- topher515 7y agoWhen you say humans "goto space", you're probably talking about going to orbit. As such, the problem isn't that space is "up high", it's that fast is "very fast". This "XKCD What If?"[0] explains this concept pretty clearly. [0] https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
- nkrisc 7y agoYou pretty much can take a balloon to space. You'll pretty soon fall back to Earth though, as you'll be nowhere near orbital velocity. Getting to space is easy. Staying there is hard. For example, if the ISS passed directly overhead of you, it's only 250 miles away. I've driven three times that in a day. The trick of the whole thing is that while it's only 250 miles away vertically, it's moving at 4.7 miles per second laterally. It goes around the Earth (roughly 25,000 miles) in 90 minutes. It's going to be hard to get your balloon to those kinds of speeds.
- dbtx 7y agoIANAP but I imagine this for a worst case: we are forced to find a way to painstakingly harvest it from vast arrays of solar-powered Hirsch-Farnsworth fusors. Then later on the question will be, "Will we run out of deuterium?"
- jelliclesfarm 7y agoAn argument for advancing fusion energy tech...maybe? Helium producing reactors can fill the gap. Between space travel and MRIs and everything in between, we might be running out of helium which is non renewable.
- dbtx 7y agoIt's not the kind of tech which people are largely interested in when they say fusion energy. But fusors are already built and used commercially, consuming energy to produce something else. Helium could just be another derived product, along with fast neutrons, radioactive isotopes, etc. You could "renew" all you needed, if you had no choice... it wouldn't be cheap, or as cheap, just like he says in the video about dwindling supplies. You don't really run out, it just gets really expensive.
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoSpeaking of harvesting, I was randomly wondering what kind of minerals could be mined from the moon the other day, apparently it’s packed with helium. (figures it’s dun floating overhead all the time)
- jansan 7y agoAre you thinking of a tube made of nanofibers dangling from the moon into the atmosphere, through which helium will be pumped? Sounds intriguing. Jeff Bezos, are you listening?
- DagAgren 7y agoThe amounts of helium produced by any nuclear reactions are absolutely miniscule. Filling a balloon with nuclear fusion is a mammoth task.
- alex_young 7y agoThis is fear mongering. Helium production is a byproduct of natural gas production. If we're not running out of natural gas we're not running out of helium. There are plenty of reasons to quit extracting natural gas, but that's a separate matter.
- saagarjha 7y agoIt’s not quite separate if there are clear signs we may be begin curtailing our natural gas extraction sometime in the future.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoDevils advocate but if all natural gas use was made obsolete by nuclear or some magic renewable... we’re still going to mine natural gas for the helium then as the primary product. Just like imo we’re going to use every drop of oil for plastics, lubricants, composites, military and legacy applications.
- OJFord 7y ago> if all natural gas use was made obsolete by nuclear or some magic renewable... Helium is a by-product of nuclear fusion. Magic indeed!
- marcosdumay 7y ago> Helium is a by-product of nuclear fusion. Fission too. Yet we are not collecting it. It's not clear if the same problems will apply to collecting it from fusion.
- tapland 7y agoHelium is a by-product of fission, but the product of fusion. The formation from alpha-particles around fission reactions (and the amount being like 100g/year?) makes it not very worthwhile to collect.
- onion2k 7y agoWe can always 'make' more. We just need to invent fusion reactors.
- Beltiras 7y agoThose are a thing already. Everyone is searching for the fusion reactors that produce more energy than they consume.
- colechristensen 7y agoNo we can't. To match the yearly consumption of helium we would create so much energy that the Earth wouldn't be habitable. Just the waste heat would be about the same as the heat we get from the sun.
- onion2k 7y agoIf we have fusion reactors we will get more helium. That is indisputable. Helium is a byproduct of hydrogen fusion. We might not be able to make enough to continue our current level of helium usage, but that's a completely different problem.
- Jeff_Brown 7y agoIt's the problem being discussed in the article and this thread.
- willis936 7y agoDo the numbers. You’re off by several orders of magnitude. In case you don’t want to bother: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21816395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21816395
- kennyadam 7y agoTake your low effort puns back to reddit thanks :)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pwdisswordfish2 7y agoAs if this place were any less inane.
- Iv 7y agoI hope so! And I hope we find several more critical uses of it! Then we have finally an economic incentive to do gas giants "mining" stations.
- DagAgren 7y agoLifting anything out of the gravity well of a gas giant is pretty much impossible. We struggle to lift anything off Earth because our gravity well is so deep, and those of gas giants are more than an order of magnitude worse.
- adrianN 7y agoA significant problem is that you also have to lift out all your fuel. If you want to mine gases from the atmosphere you could imagine a device plunging into the atmosphere, collecting gases and getting out of the atmosphere while only needing to replace energy lost to friction with the atmosphere and lifting the collected gases out. That seems like a much easier task, because you can get a lot of your kinetic energy from going down the gravity well first.
- joosters 7y agoIsn't the main problem causing the shortage of helium that it doesn't struggle to be lifted off the Earth, in fact it floats away quite effectively on its own?
- wyattpeak 7y agoYes, but this won't help with gas giants - the reason they have a large amount of helium is that their gravity is sufficient to keep it in.
- gridlockd 7y agoHas the math been done on that? Gravity falls off quickly, wouldn't there be a relatively small amount of Helium at the edge, where gravity is just about strong enough to keep it from escaping? If so, would it be impossible to withstand that pull?
- Lagogarda 7y agoWill we run out of Sun energy?
- rimliu 7y agoNot before Sun scorches the Earth (and Mercury and Venus on the way).
- colechristensen 7y agoThis keeps coming up. We won't run out of helium, it will just become much more expensive, like neon. You can distill helium out of the atmosphere, but it's a few orders of magnitude more expensive than separating from natural gas, which will remain a source for a very long time. Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, wherever it is to be found, we'll find it. It just won't be very affordable for birthday parties.
- peterburkimsher 7y ago"keeps coming up", pun intended? I agree that it's unaffordable for birthday parties, but the side effect of littering rubber waste for birds to choke on is arguably a more serious reason to forego party balloons. What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling. CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. Helium's a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be for supercooling when there's no helium?
- iSnow 7y ago>What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling. CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. The LHC uses just roughly 100t He (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Design), I don't resplenishing this going to be a problem, even if He becomes more scarce.
- willis936 7y agoThere has been a massive push in scientific communities to recycle helium used in cryogenics. It’s happened in the past ten years from market forces. In truth, if we’re frugal, we don’t need very much helium.
- gridlockd 7y ago> What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling. CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. Helium's a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be for supercooling when there's no helium? Is that really a big concern? What's expected to come out of CERN that will help humanity face the challenges of the next 1000 years? It's an honest question, perhaps I'm missing something.
- nickik 7y agoThis comes up again and again. No we want. Humans don't run out of non-renewable resources, the price just goes up. At worse we stop using if for party ballons. Humans actually are far better at using up renewable resources, like whales.
- nickik 7y agoThose people who downvote should come up with an example that contradicts my statment.
- wnkrshm 7y agoHumanity has hunted all kinds of megafauna (wooly mammoth and co.) to extinction. Also the ongoing mass extinction [0]. The problem is that what is useful to us in second or farther removed degree, we don't value much. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoYou supported his statement. Megafauna are a renewable resource. GP is saying that we run through renewable resources much easier than we do non-renewable.
- kilo_bravo_3 7y ago>Humans don't run out of non-renewable resources, the price just goes up. How much for a live passenger pigeon?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gridlockd 7y ago> "Why would such a valuable resource be squandered? Basically, it's because the price of helium does not reflect its value. Most of the world's supply of helium is held by the United States National Helium Reserve, which was mandated to sell off all of its stockpile by 2015, regardless of price" This doesn't make sense to me. If the market price doesn't reflect its value, why wouldn't somebody just buy up all the artificially cheap helium and stockpile it, to sell it at its "true" market value later? We're still putting Helium in party balloons, after all. Why aren't all the "high value" users of Helium hedging for a time when Helium becomes more scarce? Is this really a market failure, or is there something missing from this narrative?
- dmurray 7y agoIt's expensive to store, and it may not be worth building the storage facilities if you only get to use them once. So the market is not perfectly efficient here. But yes, this argument explains why the "running out of helium" narrative is overblown.
- gridlockd 7y agoThe market has vehicles for this, e.g. purchasing rights to the helium while leaving it underground. Perhaps that's not what the law allows for, however.
- reportgunner 7y ago> Why would such a valuable resource be squandered? Basically, it's because the price of helium does not reflect its value. The whole paragraph doesn't make sense to me. The article doesn't answer the question asked in the title. I am not really sure about the message of the article, perhaps it was about the US helium reserve being decommissioned but not actually ?
- Jeff_Brown 7y ago> > the price of helium does not reflect its value > doesn't make sense Indeed. Unless there are externalities, a free market by definition brings a price into line with the current value of a good.
- learnstats2 7y agoIt's an externality that future Earth won't have Helium.
- Jeff_Brown 7y agoBy that logic the consumption of any nonrenewable resource at all imposes the same externality. We can't know what the future value of helium will be, but our best guess is incorporated into the current price. I should admit that the concept of externality is subtle, and I don't know that I've ever seen a precise definition. A taxi driver should not consider the existence of a competing driver an externality, for instance, but a definition that avoids such implications is not obvious.
- karimmaassen 7y agoTom Scott explained it well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8
- danbr 7y agoTom Scott made a great video about this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sixothree 7y agoThis is a channel worth subscribing to.
- United857 7y agoI'm curious to see how much helium is being used for "recreational" purposes (e.g. party balloons) vs. medical/industrial uses. Has anyone attempted to quantify/estimate this breakdown? I haven't found anything online on this topic.
- simcop2387 7y agoAs far as I'm aware the stuff used recreationally is impure enough that it's not really useful for much else so it's not terribly important to curb it's use like it might seem at first. The stuff used for Scientific, Medical, or even Industrial uses needs to be much more pure from other gasses and contaminants to work properly.
- darksaints 7y agoFor the most part, if you need something a lot lighter than air, Hydrogen works. If you need something inert, there are better and more commonly available noble gases (including neon which is lighter than air, but only slightly). I can't imagine any sort of application where you would need something significantly lighter than air and inert. I'm curious as to which uses actually require helium and only helium.
- njarboe 7y agoA lot of helium use is for machines that need to have parts around 0 Kelvin for superconductivity. It is the only liquid at those temperatures besides Hydrogen and Hydrogen is much more dangerous and reactive.
- solotronics 7y agosometimes its used as a mix in welding shielding gas (because its inert and lighter than air), typically argon is used but its much heavier than air and certain situations you need to mix with helium
- dr_orpheus 7y agoOne of the other reasons helium is used besides being inert and lightweight is its use in cryocooling. That it is why it is used in MRI machines to cool the superconducting magnets. The melting point of helium is 0.95 Kelvin (-458 Farenheit), and is used to cool the superconducting magnets to below 10 K [1]. The other most commonly used liquid for crycooling is liquid nitrogen. But Nitrogen freezes at 63 K (-320 F) so you can not get it cold enough for all applications. Liquid helium is also used in the Aerospace industry for testing or running spacecraft hardware that will be at those extremely cold temperatures. For example the optics of the James Webb Space Telescope need to be that cold in order to measure the weak infrared signals, else the thermal noise from the instrument itself would overwhelm the signal [2] [1] https://www.lindeus.com/en/industries/medical/_mri/liquid_helium.html https://www.lindeus.com/en/industries/medical/_mri/liquid_he... [2] https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html#temps https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html#temps
- miguelmota 7y agoPlanet Money has a good podcast on how the US government started stockpiling helium https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-the-helium https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-th...
- jessant 7y agoIf it gets rare enough, it will incentivize space industry in order to mine it from the moon.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoMost of the helium on the moon is a different isotope than terrestrial helium, are Helium-3 and Helium-4 interchangeable for the various industrial uses?
- fuzzfactor 7y agoI'm trying hard not to. Now stockpiling an extra 50 tanks as a buffer for a half-tank-a-day habit. Sadly I did not build the lab I'm at now or we could be getting more done with less than 10 percent of what we use presently, and we're quite a bit better than average already. Lots of technical debt for helium users consists of old systems which were built when helium was way less expensive and leaked a lot but was not significant dollars compared to other commonly known corporate waste so nobody cared. It may be surprising to some, but there are many high-tech organizations you would expect to be able to handle their helium as tightly as possible, but that capability is truly not in house nor within reach even from contractors who appear to have the capability because they have actual satisfied customers. Not everybody can do it the NASA way and that's what you need. Otherwise continued helium reduction efforts do not reduce expenditures like they do at first, once you get far enough below the overall leak rate. As to whether the Earth or maybe just gas users will run out or have to give up, Kornbluth probably knows as much as anybody: http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/ http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/