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There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be: There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas. TIL
by westurner 3mo ago
There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be:
There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas.
TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.
- mapsedge 3mo ago> Helium kills Kudzu That right there is reason enough to try to synthesize it in massive quantities.
- idiotsecant 3mo agoWhen you're done with it can I borrow your particle collider capable of mass synthesis of helium
- adrianN 3mo agoAlpha particles are essentially Helium, so by breeding large amounts of highly active alpha emitters you can produce Helium much more effectively than by fusion.
- actionfromafar 3mo agoProbably that's what they did at the rocky exoplanet. How much radiation do they need down there for it to be measurable as helium in the atmosphere?
- pezezin 3mo agoThe proper way to generate helium is to use a deuterium-tritium fusion reactor.
- westurner 3mo agoGiven the neutron radiation from a fusion reactor, it's possible to synthesize Helium (He4) and more Tritium (T) and 3He using Lithium-6 with Boron-10 and Boron-11. An adjacent vertically-aligned (VA-CNT) battery would last for like 20 years and could power safety systems. A Deuterated Vitrimer pipe with Li-6, B-10, and B-11 could be recycled to extract the T, 3He, and 4He. Deuterated Vitrimers could also be disposed of in a waste burner.
- ColdStream 3mo agoIt is the four layers of resources, each one is smaller than the next. 1. What is the total theoretical resource? 2. How much of it do we actually now the location of 3. How much is technically recoverable? 4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable? The last one is really the crux of the problem nowadays, there is a lot of helium but most of it just isn't in a high enough quantity to make the investment to built processing for it. Thus most of it just float off into space. There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.
- tw04 3mo ago> 4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable? But literally the least important factor beyond “should we have started yesterday”. The amount of waste humanity has perpetuated in just the last 100 years because something wasn’t “economically viable” this fiscal quarter makes my head hurt.
- automatic6131 3mo agoDoing economically inviable things is waste. It's pumping resources into something worth less than the sum of its inputs. Apropos of nothing, see one trillion dollars into datacenters.
- actionfromafar 3mo agoThat is exactly it - how do we define economically inviable? There are many answers, very different.
- westurner 3mo agoTotal cost estimates should included unassessed environmental hazard, carbon, energy mix
- tw04 3mo agoWhich is why they pumped fracking waste water into deep aquifers, because it wasn’t “economically viable” to pull that water out of the ground. Fast forward a decade and people are up in arms that those fresh water aquifers are no longer viable sources of drinking water, wondering how anyone could have been so short sighted. Just because something isn’t economically viable today doesn’t mean it never will be. That short term thinking is exactly why China is absolutely decimating the US in renewable energy.
- mmooss 3mo agoThe OP is about helium on an exoplanet. That's unlikely to impact helium supplies on Earth.