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Helium is hard to replace
- LorenDB 7mo agoIs there any way to actually produce helium other than nuclear fusion? I would assume not, but I'm not an expert in this field.
- adrianN 7mo agoIt can form during radioactive decay of uranium and thorium.
- wat10000 7mo agoAnd that's where all of our helium actually comes from. Any radioactive decay that emits alpha particles generates helium, since alpha particles are just helium nuclei. When that happens underground, the helium can get trapped. It tends to get trapped in the same places that natural gas gets trapped, so natural gas extraction often encounters helium as well. Similar to oil and gas (although a completely different mechanism), it takes deep time to accumulate, but can be extracted much, much faster. So although new helium is being generated underground all the time, we can still run out in a practical sense.
- BobaFloutist 7mo agoDumb question, but is there any world where a fission reactor could reasonably genrate waste with a short enough half-life to produce meaningful amounts of helium as a side-gig?
- wat10000 7mo agoI'd say no, although the amount of helium that's produced is small enough that it's not quite as absurd as I would have thought. Worldwide helium production is something around 25,000 tons/year. A nuclear power plant produces about 25 tons of waste per year. There are about 440 nuclear power plants in the world. If their waste consisted entirely of helium, that would be roughly 44% of total world helium production. More than I guessed! But, of course, only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that waste ever turns into helium, so even if you somehow made it decay all at once, it would be be pretty insignificant on a world scale.
- nsxwolf 7mo agoAtmospheric extraction on Earth would require massive amounts of energy and infrastructure. Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future
- sixhobbits 7mo agoIt's also formed similarly to oil over millions of years underground if I understand correctly so can be a byproduct of natural gas mining.
- daemonologist 7mo agoIt's often found alongside natural gas because the rock structures that can trap methane can also trap other gasses, but the original source is different - thermal decomposition of organic matter for natural gas and radioactive decay, mostly of uranium and thorium, for helium. I agree that the "accumulation over millions of years" is similar (and similarly a potential problem if we burn through all that accumulation).
- fraserphysics 7mo agoHelium will leak out of some structures that hold methane. Shale will trap methane and let helium escape. Layers of salt trap both. Thus horizontal drilling and fracking to recover oil and methane from shale produces very little helium.
- Sharlin 7mo agoWhich is exactly 100% of Earth's helium. Every single helium atom we use is a result of alpha decay, as a very good approximation there isn't any primordial or stellar helium on or in Earth.
- nradov 7mo agoHelium is produced naturally by radioactive decay underground. There is no way to artificially produce it in useful quantities. But we can capture more of it from natural gas wells. Today much helium is just vented off and wasted at wellheads. As the price rises it makes sense to invest in cryogenic helium capture equipment for more wells.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoIf you have something that emits a lot of alpha particles as it decays, you could surround it with a source of electrons, I suppose. The details would have to be left as an exercise, and I doubt you'd get enough helium to be very useful unless you were dealing with large amounts of ridiculously-radioactive substances. Same with fusion. Due to the implications of E=mc^2, fusion yields a lot of energy and a uselessly-small amount of matter. There don't seem to be many good ways to get a lot of helium besides either waiting millions of years for it to show up naturally, or carefully recycling what we already have.
- kergonath 7mo ago> you could surround it with a source of electrons, I suppose Water would be the best for this. The cross-section is good and water can ionise easily. But yeah, you would not get a lot of it.
- jmyeet 7mo agoTerrestial helium isn't produced by nuclear fusion. It's produced by nuclear decay. As you may know, you get alpha, beta and gamma radiation from decay. Gamma rays are just energetic photos. You typically need thick lead and/or concrete to shield you from them. Beta radiation is high energy electrons. A thin sheet of steel will shield you from those. And lastly we have alpha radiation, which is just a Helium nucleus. A sheet of paper will generally block alpha radiation. Some materials are really strong alpha emitters. A good example is Polonium-210 where almost all of its energy from decay is in the form of alpha radiation. This is why Po-210 is so lethal when ingested, which has been used for that purpose [1]. But this means if you produce a lump of Polonium-210, it's basically radiating Helium. The source of almost all of the Earth's Helium is from uranium and thorium decay. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...
- onraglanroad 7mo ago> Gamma rays are just energetic photos They are indeed. The average planet busting Gamma Ray Burst is just a Vogon trying to "get the whole family in".
- throwaway173738 7mo agoI would think that lighting a Vogon family picture would be about as advisable as recording a Vogon speech. That is to say not at all.
- cubefox 7mo agoThe reason helium can't be produced chemically (like hydrogen can be produced e.g. from water) is that there are no natural chemical compounds which contain helium. That's because it doesn't form those compounds in the first place, since it's a noble gas.
- Tangurena2 7mo agoNot at any temperature nor pressure found on Earth: > These could exist in planets like Neptune or Uranus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_compounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_compounds
- adrian_b 7mo agoHelium exists in great quantities in the 4 big planets, which unlike Earth have strong enough gravity to retain it. Others have mentioned that some helium exists on the Moon, where it comes from the solar wind. The use of the helium 3 from there has been suggested for nuclear fusion, if the fusion of helium 3 became possible (it is much more difficult than the fusion of tritium with deuterium, which is the main approach attempted for now). However, for fusion relatively small amounts could still be useful. For other uses the amount of lunar helium might not be enough, even when ignoring how expensive it would be to transport it from there.
- llm_nerd 7mo agoRecently had to deal with radon in a basement, leading me to a fun side trek of learning about uranium decay (it has been a lot of years since chemistry classes). When you hear about alpha decay of radioactive materials, that is the matter spitting off a highly ionized helium nucleus, freshly birthed into this world. That He nucleus rapidly steals electrons from matter, which is how it can be dangerous to human cells if ingested. All of that helium underground is the result of alpha decay, and a single uranium-238 element will birth 8 helium atoms as it transitions through a series of metals and one gas (radon), then finally finding stability as Pb206. U235 will birth 7, becoming Pb207. Anyways, found that fascinating. It's just happenstance that helium often gets blocked exiting the crust by the same sort of structures that block natural gas from escaping, and they are an odd-couple sharing little in common. One other fun fact -- radon only has a half life of 3.8 days. Uranium becomes thorium becomes radium, then radon where it has an average 3.8 days to seep out of the Earth and into our basements, where it then becomes radioactive metals that attach to dust, get breathed in (or eaten) and present dangers. In the scale of things, crazy. Chemistry is fascinating.
- 867-5309 7mo ago> That He atom rapidly steals electrons from matter tfa: > Thanks to its filled outer electron shell, it is inert, and won’t react with other materials
- wat10000 7mo agoBecause it rapidly steals electrons, it becomes inert quickly. Helium you find lying around will be inert. Helium that has just shot out from the radioactive decay of an unstable atom will not be inert.
- chii 7mo agoI would imagine that an alpha particle would still be inert in the sense that it won't cause chemical reactions with other molecules.
- 7mo ago
- Invictus0 7mo agoFun fact, helium was discovered on the Sun nearly 30 years before it was found on earth.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoHence the origin of the name!
- KalandaDev 7mo agoFor a second I thought this was about Helium browser :(
- sixhobbits 7mo agoI really enjoyed this oddlots podcast episode that covered similar points and had a lot of "wat" moments for me, including the US selling off its strategic helium reserves at a loss because politicians labeled it "party baloon reserve", and how long it takes to produce naturally and how hard it is to find, process and transport. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
- parineum 7mo agoPart of the reason there's a shortage is because the US was the main supplier. There was no market incentive for anyone to invest into helium extraction. It'd be like if the US used it's strategic oil reserve to supply the US with oil at a low price at all times. A strategic reserve isn't supposed to be used as a supply. The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. The fact that selling the helium reserve could create a shortage should tell you that it wasn't being used as a reserve but as a supply. The US was, essentially, artificial subsidizing the price of helium. What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.
- actionfromafar 7mo agoExactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone sells the strategic oil reserve.
- rootusrootus 7mo agoDespite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
- senderista 7mo agoI think that's broadly true: both sides want America to fail when the other side is in power in order to prove they're right.
- throw0101d 7mo agoBloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode with a helium producer on the topic recently: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-and-it-affects-more/id1056200096?i=1000757668473 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh... * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-and-it-affects-more-than-balloons https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...
- nisegami 7mo agoI recently began wondering if a planet's helium supply could be the 'great filter'. As in, if a civilization could stall out due to not having access to enough helium to product the technology to access off-world helium.
- actionfromafar 7mo agoThat sounds more like a tiny filter. :)
- jandrese 7mo agoThis presupposes that there are no alternatives to helium for off world exploration. Would be interesting if warp drives were real but required vast amounts of helium to operate with no substitutions possible.
- JuniperMesos 7mo agoPretty much any time there's some kind of problem in the world, someone chimes in to say that maybe not solving this problem is the great filter; and we have exactly the same amount of evidence (none) for all such hypotheses. Why is a shortage of helium more likely to be the great filter than the development of multicellular life, getting absorbed in AI worlds, nuclear war, etc.?
- jmyeet 7mo agoThe US used to have a massive Strategic Helium Reserve [1]. Starting in the 1990s, Congress passed a law to sell down the reserve. This flooded the market with cheap Helium (yay, party balloons?) because the mandated pricing just didn't make any sense. 10-20 years ago there was a lot of talk about how this was foolish because it was depleting and squandering an unrenewable resource. But the thinking has shifted on that because it's an inevitable byproduct of natural gas production. Now natural gas itself is limited but you can still get Helium from alpha decay of radioactive elements. Some elements are particularly strong alpha emitters (eg Polonium-210, Radium-223). They're basiclaly producing Helium constantly. Helium is a known issue in various industries. The article notes (correctly) that MRI Helium use is decreasing because of the rise of so-called "Helium free" or "Helium light" MRI technology. But there are short term supply issues. As noted, Qatar produces ~30% of the world's Helium currently. And that can (and has) been disrupted by recent events. Lithography is a particularly important consumer of Helium for superconducting magnets. That demand is rising with probably no end in sight. Lithography itself is on the cutting edge of technology and engineering so seems harder to replace. I mean, EUV lithography is basically magic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
- nradov 7mo agoShutting down the National Helium Reserve seemed like a good idea at the time. It was originally established when airships were considered essential for national security, largely for maritime patrol. But blimps and dirigibles fell out of favor for most military missions and there wasn't much demand for other uses, so it was politically hard to justify wasting tax dollars to maintain a reserve.
- lostlogin 7mo agoI thought it was stockpiled to block Germany from buying it?
- cubefox 7mo agoThe article briefly touches on insufficient recycling. Though it's not clear for which applications helium recycling is technically/economically feasible and for which it isn't.
- Aboutplants 7mo agoI’m not really worried about any potential helium shortage. We are actually really good at extracting it, the problem is purely economics and as soon as prices get to the point where investment is warranted then there will continue to be adequate supplies. The main issue right now is the proper demand increase forecasts do not align with potential investments costs and helium extraction investment does just not make much economic sense given current forecast Helium costs.
- vlovich123 7mo agoIf demand keeps growing (as it has been), we've got ~40-60 years of "cheap" reserves left. As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain. There's about 40-70 billion cubic meters of economically recoverable (assuming future technology development + price increases). The complete total upper end of known geological reserves is ~60-100 billion cubic meters - that's about correct in terms of order of magnitude even if we find new deposits. Current consumption is 180 million cubic meters/year. At a growth of 3%, you've got 80-140 years before we run out. At 5% growth it's 50-90 years. Saying "I'm not worried about it" is true in the myopically selfish "I personally won't have to care about it". It's conceivable that your children will be dealing with it and definitely grandchildren in a very real existentially meaningful way.
- wongarsu 7mo agoJust in time to start extracting helium on Mars
- cheschire 7mo ago> myopically selfish A standard western personality trait I’ve been confronted with repeatedly over the last… hmm. Well that got depressing real quick.
- dtech 7mo agoIt's very hard if not impossible to do predictions over century timescales. How relevant are 1926 resource problems to today? If you wrote your comment in 1926 you would be talking about rubber, fertilizer, coal, wood or oil, and 4 out of those 5 are mostly solved today. At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.
- nradov 7mo agoFor diving, there has been some experimental use of hydrogen as a partial replacement for helium in breathing gas mixtures. This obviously increases the risk of fires and the physiological effects aren't fully understood. But it might eventually be used in commercial, military, and exploration diving for those cases where we need to send humans really deep and using an atmospheric suit isn't an option. Regular sport divers will probably never breathe hydrogen. https://indepthmag.com/hydrogen-dreamin/ https://indepthmag.com/hydrogen-dreamin/
- snek_case 7mo agoFor divers, we really should be focusing on building better underwater drones. Remove the risk to human life entirely. You don't need AI either, just a remote-controlled machine with a cable that goes up to the surface. I know there is some loss in dexterity with current robot arms, but building more dexterous system seems like it's not an impossible task.
- nradov 7mo agoROVs have already reduced the demand for commercial divers on some types of work. But it's going to take decades (if ever) until they're able to do the full range of human tasks. Some construction work has to be done essentially by feel in near-zero visibility so using an ROV for that would require advanced force feedback mechanisms, maybe imaging sonar and other sensors. Not necessarily impossible, but extraordinarily difficult and extremely expensive with current technology. For sport and exploration divers, going there yourself is kind of the whole point. I'm not interested in watching a video feed from an underwater drone.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoGet back to me when drones or robots are being used for dangerous things on land, such as skyscraper construction. Until then, realize it is in fact not easy but extremely difficult and expensive.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo agodo regular sport divers breathe helium?
- phplovesong 7mo ago[flagged]
- nickff 7mo agoYour post is frustrating to read because of the incorrect spelling and grammar; these errors make it hard to take you seriously. >""The war in Iran" should be called for what it is: >"Its "trumps war", nothing else. Hes the solely to blaim. Israel would never had started it on their own. >"The kicker? MAGA voted for "the no wars president", and so far hes started FIVE." Could be: "The war in Iran" should be called what it is: It's 'Trump's War', and nothing else. He's solely to blame. Israel would not have started it on their own. The kicker is that MAGA voted for the 'no-war' president, and so far, he's started five. Note that in addition to spelling and grammar, I switched "FIVE" to lower-case italics (which are reverted to regular because the block is italicized), as capitalizing for emphasis is against the HN guidelines.
- phplovesong 7mo agonice bot account you have there.
- cineticdaffodil 7mo ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 7mo agoYou'd need investors willing to pay $50,000\kg of helium, for one.
- DonHopkins 7mo ago[flagged]
- ASalazarMX 7mo agoThe biggest obstacle is that planetary extraction has to become too expensive, so space extraction becomes viable. If that were the case, it would probably be safer to mine the Moon, to avoid further messing of the atmosphere with refineries or even more frequent space flights.
- alex_young 7mo ago<10% of natural gas plants recover helium. All of them extract it. The remaining >90% vent it into the atmosphere. This is an engineering / money problem, not a physics problem.
- jandrese 7mo agoIt becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas. I'm not a chemist but are there really no alternatives? Running fusion plants to make helium seems very unlikely to become cost effective, but it would be quite the sci-fi future if we filled party balloons by bombarding hydrogen with free protons. I guess there aren't any easy molecules to break apart to get helium either since its a noble gas. No hydrolyses type solutions because there aren't any molecules that incorporate helium. I guess radioactive decay, but even that is ultimately limited over long enough timescales.
- triceratops 7mo ago> it would be quite the sci-fi future if we filled party balloons by bombarding hydrogen How dangerous are party balloons filled with hydrogen? Not a whole balloon arch obviously.
- jandrese 7mo agoI had a science teacher that did this in class, then taped a match on the end of a yardstick and held it under the balloon. They made quite a bang. I wouldn't want to be right next to it when it went off.
- triceratops 7mo agoYeah I've seen that demonstration in school too. But if the teacher was willing to do it in school, with kids, how dangerous was it really?
- cyberax 7mo ago
- expedition32 7mo agoThe US has made itself reliant on a global market economy that they also constantly disrupt with idiotic mistakes. But for some reason for Americans peace is never the preferred option.
- aeternum 7mo agoHelium luckily is the second most abundant element in the universe. A good reason to go to the stars.
- everdrive 7mo agoWe might find it quite difficult to extract from the stars, that said.
- ASalazarMX 7mo agoIt might be expensive compared to improved Earth mining, but lunar regolite is rich in Helium 3, there would be no need to mine stars. The funny part is, lunar regolite soaks Helium from its exposure to solar wind, so mining it would be an indirect mining of a star, our sun.
- adrian_b 7mo agoIt is pretty much impossible to extract it from stars, but the 4 big planets have large amounts of helium. It would be quite expensive to extract it from there, due to the necessity of escaping from their gravitational field, but not impossible.
- kakacik 7mo agoIf we have such advanced tech, and trip to big planets would seem economically feasible, I think we will be long beyond the point of desperately needing transporting helium to do such crazy trips.
- aeternum 7mo agoOnce we have the tech to cross the world's oceans in luxury, I think we will be long beyond the point of desperately needing to transport oil in ocean liner sized ships to do such crazy trips.
- smegger001 7mo agomostly out of our reach unless you have way of removing it from the sun without your retrieval craft melting or being captured by the suns gravity well or from gas giants without the onboard system being fried by the intense radiation or again captured by the gravitation.
- yyyk 7mo agoIt looks like that by simply reducing use in welding, lifting, and purging gas (all with clear alternatives) and maybe also 'leak detection' and 'other' (not expounded on in the article), they can fill in for the entire Qatari output, and that's without including extra production and recycling which is quiet possible.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoPurging for rocketry really does not have a clear alternative.
- scythe 7mo ago>The vast majority of MRI machines used today use superconducting magnets made from niobium-titanium (NbTi), which becomes superconducting at 9.2 degrees above absolute zero. This is well below the boiling point of any other coolant, making liquid helium the only practical option for cooling the magnets. Well, this is part of it. The other issue is that the superconducting phase diagram has two limits: the transition temperature Tc and the upper critical magnetic field Hc. The magnetic field limit is generally highest at absolute zero and drops steeply with temperature. Even for the superconductors with Tc as high as 120 K the Hc at 20 K will be much less than the Hc at 4 K. So in order to make powerful superconducting magnets you need helium regardless of what superconductor you use, since nothing has broken this pattern.
- tblt 7mo agoDo we know if this pattern is just something we've observed so far, or is it a natural law?
- JohnMakin 7mo agoThe long tail economic ramifications that this disruption to the supply chain will have could be potentially decades, in ways that will most certainly be catastrophic, and what's concerning to me is how small of a percentage of the population (at least in the US) is grasping this.
- tagami 7mo agoQatar produce(s/d) about a third of global helium. With the force majeure in place I won't be launching student HABs anytime soon. (Schools don't like hydrogen)
- Vachyas 7mo agoXenon is very rare too and currently without substitute for certain medical applications, but more interestingly it produces psychoactive effects that could shed light on stuff no other substance apparently can: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11203236/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11203236/
- totalmarkdown 7mo ago[flagged]
- Wistar 7mo agoWaaay back in the early 1980s, I read an Asimov essay, “The Vanishing Element”, about the irreplaceable nature of helium and how badly humankind was wasting it. He pointed out that, once released, it just rises through the atmosphere and lost to space. I guess that chicken is coming home to roost.
- eddythompson80 7mo agoThat’s not true though. Helium doesn’t just rise through the atmosphere and gets lost to space. A helium balloon rises because it’s less dense than air, so air pushes up on it. It rises until the atmosphere is thin enough and stops there. When helium is not in a balloon, it doesn’t rise because it mixes with air and air doesn’t push on it. The atoms are still smaller and move faster than other gases. Some will go up and eventually gain enough speed to hit escape velocity. According to Maxwell-Boltzmann speed distribution of noble gases, only a small fraction of helium should be escaping the earth atmosphere due to that. The actual amount escaping is larger than predicted, but the exact mechanism isn’t fully agreed upon. Solar winds are thought to be responsible, but that’s just one theory. But the important thing is that helium doesn’t just rise when mixed with oxygen or nitrogen a.k.a “air”
- Wistar 7mo agoA quick search seems to show that helium is being lost to space. Wikipedia’s article claims the loss of helium to be at a rate of about 50 grams per second.
- eddythompson80 7mo agoI was talking about the mechanism it’s lost to space by not denying it. It doesn’t simply rise until it escapes like a helium balloon. Solar wind and helium kinetic energy play a bigger role there.
- deIeted 7mo agoOn June 27, 2024, the Biden Administration announced the final sale and transferring of the U.S. government’s remaining helium reserve to Messer LLC, a subsidiary of a German industrial gas business group with operations in China.
- reenorap 7mo agoWe need the price of helium to skyrocket otherwise it won't be valued at all. If another blimp or balloon is never produced again, I wouldn't blink an eye, it should be reserved for medical and scientific purposes since we can't manufacture it in large quantities.
- kuzivaai 7mo agoThe EUV lithography dependency is the one that worries me. MRI can reduce consumption 90%+ with zero-boiloff designs. Semiconductor fabs are moving in the opposite direction.. more helium per wafer as feature sizes shrink. That's not a recycling problem, it's a demand growth problem.
- khuey 7mo agoThe good news (for the EUV fabs) is that they can outbid pretty much every other user of helium.
- MathMonkeyMan 7mo agoI did undergrad in Physics at the University of Florida. Some (many?) labs there did condensed matter experiments involving Helium 3. It's a million times more rare than normal helium. Nonrenewable, all that. There was a dedicated system underground. Vacuum jacketed tubes taking waste helium from the labs to a reservoir across campus. Helium is rare, helium 3 is precious.
- cameolkc 7mo ago[dead]
- metalman 7mo agoHelium is something that industry has become accustomed to wasting, flagrantly and dismissivly as a "byproduct", by industry that of course means the military and governments exercising there "discretion" in the service of money. And it is the custom of bieng dissmissive that may (likely) be behind the many magnificent piles of rubble that litter the ancient world. A short dip into how the soviets went about capturing certain other nobel gases is educational, when "hard" means something entirely else.
- aklemm 7mo agoMy son's life was saved when he had a severe asthma attack and helium treatment helped him recover. The doctor told us about helium scarcity and how much she hated party balloons. ;p It certainly is a precious resource.