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Rare earth metals were talked about in a similar manner very recently. Other sources were found, and as a result, the alarm eased. One thing about rare earth

by tomlock 12y ago

Rare earth metals were talked about in a similar manner very recently. Other sources were found, and as a result, the alarm eased. One thing about rare earth metals is that they can be a byproduct of metal production, but this process is often ignored because the cost of the additional step can be more expensive than the resulting output. One thing people seem to not know is that helium is a common discarded byproduct of oil extraction. Nuclear fission in the earth's core produces it, and it gathers in porous underground oil reservoirs. I'd bet my life that as prices of helium go up, these deposits get more attention paid to them. I'm not convinced that a shortage of helium will be a crisis.

alephnil 12y ago
Rare earth metals are not that rare. Most of them are about as abundant as copper. The problem is their extraction. While copper is present in relative high concentration in sulfide ores that are easy to extract, rare earths are usually present in dilute concentration in many rocks, making it less economical to extract, and is hard to extract even when there is a significant portion of it, leaving behind much toxic chemicals. Furthermore, the rare earths are very similar to each other and often present together, which makes it hard to separate them. In addition, such ores often contain thorium and its decay products, which makes tailings radioactive. The shortage of rare earths has been because it has been uneconomical to extract with any sort of environmental regulation in place. China has almost none of them and has obtained a near monopoly for that reason. Here the "there is no shortage ever" arguments from economists make sense. For helium, the situation is different. The helium that is there is relatively easy to extract (it is a certain percentage in some natural gas fields), but once it is gone it is gone forever.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  Exactly. It's hard to grasp, but most other elements have gradual scaling solutions, i.e. worst case we have to resort to some more expansive extraction method. With helium this scaling is abrupt: reserves become orders of magnitude more expansive. It makes total sense to let the market create a gradual scaling of prices in anticipation for depletion. Basically all other elements we can do some recycling and recapturing somehow; once leaked helium is just gone forever.
_rpd 12y ago
> Nuclear fission in the earth's core produces [Helium] This is quite an interesting hypothesis for those interested ... Deep-Earth reactor: Nuclear fission, helium, and the geomagnetic field http://www.pnas.org/content/98/20/11085.full http://www.pnas.org/content/98/20/11085.full

by tomlock 12y ago

alephnil 12y ago

Rare earth metals are not that rare. Most of them are about as abundant as copper. The problem is their extraction. While copper is present in relative high concentration in sulfide ores that are easy to extract, rare earths are usually present in dilute concentration in many rocks, making it less economical to extract, and is hard to extract even when there is a significant portion of it, leaving behind much toxic chemicals. Furthermore, the rare earths are very similar to each other and often present together, which makes it hard to separate them. In addition, such ores often contain thorium and its decay products, which makes tailings radioactive. The shortage of rare earths has been because it has been uneconomical to extract with any sort of environmental regulation in place. China has almost none of them and has obtained a near monopoly for that reason. Here the "there is no shortage ever" arguments from economists make sense. For helium, the situation is different. The helium that is there is relatively easy to extract (it is a certain percentage in some natural gas fields), but once it is gone it is gone forever.

darkmighty 12y ago
Exactly. It's hard to grasp, but most other elements have gradual scaling solutions, i.e. worst case we have to resort to some more expansive extraction method. With helium this scaling is abrupt: reserves become orders of magnitude more expansive. It makes total sense to let the market create a gradual scaling of prices in anticipation for depletion. Basically all other elements we can do some recycling and recapturing somehow; once leaked helium is just gone forever.

_rpd 12y ago

> Nuclear fission in the earth's core produces [Helium] This is quite an interesting hypothesis for those interested ... Deep-Earth reactor: Nuclear fission, helium, and the geomagnetic field http://www.pnas.org/content/98/20/11085.full http://www.pnas.org/content/98/20/11085.full