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To quote my own answer on that question: No: we will never run out of helium, it's just a question of price (which is likely to go up). There is a method of a

by SRasch 12y ago

To quote my own answer on that question: No: we will never run out of helium, it's just a question of price (which is likely to go up). There is a method of actually producing helium: as a product of nuclear decay, smaller quantities of helium (He) could be made in nuclear power plants. Nevertheless, as @ghshepard says, in the short and medium-term supply will simply come from other natural gas fields if/when the price goes up. The Helium-scarcity misunderstanding is the same as with almost every other historical feared resource depletion. At current prices and production methods, supply is finite, but at higher price points, new production methods become economically viable. A higher helium price means two things: reduced demand by shifting to substitutes and increased production by using more expensive production technologies (and of course, if the price goes up more people will try to innovate cheaper solutions). Today helium is practically free. While we would never run out of Helium, it is not unlikely that at some point prices may go up for a while. That, however, is not really such a big deal. http://www.quora.com/Are-we-really-running-out-of-helium/answer/Sondre-Rasch http://www.quora.com/Are-we-really-running-out-of-helium/ans...

ghshephard 12y ago
...And conservation/re-use. Right now, scientists just let the stuff blow off into the atmosphere during experiments because it's basically free. Increase the price, and it's worth modifying the experiments to reuse their Helium.
omegaham 12y ago
Good ol' Julian Simon to the rescue, again. We will always come up with some alternative. "We're running out of X" is always louder than "We've found another way to extract it, sound the alarms again in forty years." Then we'll come up with some other method, and they'll set back the Malthus Doom Date by another forty years. And eventually, someone will come up with a completely different alternative that doesn't use it at all, and a previously vital resource will only have niche applications. Of course, in some cases, the alternative might require a lot of hardship. I'm sure we'd get by if gasoline was 20 bucks a gallon. It would suck, and all of us would be driving motor scooters and riding bicycles to work, but we would get by.
- mjburgess 12y ago
  You can tell an american when oil crisis implies scooters not public transport.
  - omegaham 12y ago
    Unfortunately, the vast distances required make public transport limited in effectiveness in the US. They're great in the cities, but the very low population density outside of the cities means that it's not going to do very well there. When I lived in Arizona, I was driving about 50 kilometers per day. There was no bus or train, as there just weren't enough passengers to make it worth building. Driving was the only option unless I was going to bike 50 kilometers per day in the heat. Here in Oregon, there are bus routes, but it would take me more than an hour to get to work on the bus. By car, it's about ten minutes. I could definitely bike to work, but it rains a lot here. :) Incidentally, a huge hike in gas prices would probably force a lot of people to move to the cities. They'll need public transport to get to work if they can't drive. But seeing as how city living is so expensive, they'll probably keep driving (smaller cars and motor scooters) for as long as they can.
    - mjburgess 12y ago
      Not doubting the problems of american geography: though esp. the historical choices about how urbanization should proceed which have made most of the problems, rather than anything inherent about the size of the country - I can easily get across Europe on public transport at "american" distances. The point was it was amusing to see someone suggest that private transport was the essential point of oil, so that if prices increased, it would just mean worse private transport. When of course, at those levels, it would mean the end of wide-spread private transportation as such (and the end of american urbanization as its currently known).
    - vidarh 12y ago
      Norway has a population density 1/2 of the US, yet public transport works well for large proportions of journeys even in the rural districts. For comparison, Norway is larger than Arizona, with a smaller population (or a bit larger than New Mexico and a bit smaller than Montana, with a much higher population than those two - so clearly you do have some areas that truly are rural enough for public transport to be hard to do right; then again, California is not that much larger, and most of California still has an atrocious public transit system...). Yes, there certainly are areas where you can't really get by without a car, in Norway, so it's not like I'm expecting public transport to be viable everywhere in Arizona either. But in Norway that's because very few people live there. Just like the US low overall population density is largely down to vast practically empty areas. "Nobody" cares if there's no public transport in the middle of Alaska, or in the rural parts of states like New Mexico and Montana that have low population density to start with, and are pretty much "empty" outside a few cities. And oil is not the explanation - most of Norways public transport system predates the oil exploration, and was built at a time when Norway was far less wealthy than the US. The ten lowest density US states have lower average population density than Norway, but they "only" house about 12 million people. And even for the rest of the country, most of the low density states still have higher density clusters. The top ten states house about 170 million people, with an aggregate population density of around 200 per square mile - far above places like Norway. It other words: Distance is an excuse. It's down to politics and a culture centered around the car. Sure, public transport will never cover 100% of journeys, but that's not the point.
DennisP 12y ago
Pretty sure the amount of helium we could get from nuclear reactions would be quite small. I haven't run the numbers for fission, but I did for fusion, and the helium that would be produced even if the whole world ran on fusion came out to a tiny fraction of our current usage. It's true that we won't run out completely, but reducing the supply by orders of magnitude could well be a big deal. We'll have plenty for a while from natural gas, but at some point we're going to have to stop extracting all that fossil fuel, and that will interfere with helium production too.
- mark-r 12y ago
  I wonder if one could extract the helium produced by our otherwise unusable fission waste?

by SRasch 12y ago

ghshephard 12y ago

...And conservation/re-use. Right now, scientists just let the stuff blow off into the atmosphere during experiments because it's basically free. Increase the price, and it's worth modifying the experiments to reuse their Helium.

omegaham 12y ago

Good ol' Julian Simon to the rescue, again. We will always come up with some alternative. "We're running out of X" is always louder than "We've found another way to extract it, sound the alarms again in forty years." Then we'll come up with some other method, and they'll set back the Malthus Doom Date by another forty years. And eventually, someone will come up with a completely different alternative that doesn't use it at all, and a previously vital resource will only have niche applications. Of course, in some cases, the alternative might require a lot of hardship. I'm sure we'd get by if gasoline was 20 bucks a gallon. It would suck, and all of us would be driving motor scooters and riding bicycles to work, but we would get by.

mjburgess 12y ago
You can tell an american when oil crisis implies scooters not public transport.
- omegaham 12y ago
  Unfortunately, the vast distances required make public transport limited in effectiveness in the US. They're great in the cities, but the very low population density outside of the cities means that it's not going to do very well there. When I lived in Arizona, I was driving about 50 kilometers per day. There was no bus or train, as there just weren't enough passengers to make it worth building. Driving was the only option unless I was going to bike 50 kilometers per day in the heat. Here in Oregon, there are bus routes, but it would take me more than an hour to get to work on the bus. By car, it's about ten minutes. I could definitely bike to work, but it rains a lot here. :) Incidentally, a huge hike in gas prices would probably force a lot of people to move to the cities. They'll need public transport to get to work if they can't drive. But seeing as how city living is so expensive, they'll probably keep driving (smaller cars and motor scooters) for as long as they can.
  - mjburgess 12y ago
    Not doubting the problems of american geography: though esp. the historical choices about how urbanization should proceed which have made most of the problems, rather than anything inherent about the size of the country - I can easily get across Europe on public transport at "american" distances. The point was it was amusing to see someone suggest that private transport was the essential point of oil, so that if prices increased, it would just mean worse private transport. When of course, at those levels, it would mean the end of wide-spread private transportation as such (and the end of american urbanization as its currently known).
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Norway has a population density 1/2 of the US, yet public transport works well for large proportions of journeys even in the rural districts. For comparison, Norway is larger than Arizona, with a smaller population (or a bit larger than New Mexico and a bit smaller than Montana, with a much higher population than those two - so clearly you do have some areas that truly are rural enough for public transport to be hard to do right; then again, California is not that much larger, and most of California still has an atrocious public transit system...). Yes, there certainly are areas where you can't really get by without a car, in Norway, so it's not like I'm expecting public transport to be viable everywhere in Arizona either. But in Norway that's because very few people live there. Just like the US low overall population density is largely down to vast practically empty areas. "Nobody" cares if there's no public transport in the middle of Alaska, or in the rural parts of states like New Mexico and Montana that have low population density to start with, and are pretty much "empty" outside a few cities. And oil is not the explanation - most of Norways public transport system predates the oil exploration, and was built at a time when Norway was far less wealthy than the US. The ten lowest density US states have lower average population density than Norway, but they "only" house about 12 million people. And even for the rest of the country, most of the low density states still have higher density clusters. The top ten states house about 170 million people, with an aggregate population density of around 200 per square mile - far above places like Norway. It other words: Distance is an excuse. It's down to politics and a culture centered around the car. Sure, public transport will never cover 100% of journeys, but that's not the point.

DennisP 12y ago

Pretty sure the amount of helium we could get from nuclear reactions would be quite small. I haven't run the numbers for fission, but I did for fusion, and the helium that would be produced even if the whole world ran on fusion came out to a tiny fraction of our current usage. It's true that we won't run out completely, but reducing the supply by orders of magnitude could well be a big deal. We'll have plenty for a while from natural gas, but at some point we're going to have to stop extracting all that fossil fuel, and that will interfere with helium production too.

mark-r 12y ago
I wonder if one could extract the helium produced by our otherwise unusable fission waste?