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.
I actually remember a similar problem from some compound that was mainly formed as a byproduct of some old Canadian nuclear reactor design. As the tech gets phased out, the material is no longer available in significant quantities, with consequences for a projects that need it (like Iter).
Some things can be cheap if they are produced as a byproduct, but very expensive if they have to be obtained directly.
How dangerous are party balloons filled with hydrogen? Not a whole balloon arch obviously.
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.
At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.
Rubber has been replaced with oil.
Fertilizer has been replaced with Natural Gas that comes from the same place as oil.
Coal usage has been replaced/displaced primarily by natural gas, see above.
Wood, or deforestation, was a real problem in the 1920's, but many uses were replaced by plastics (oil) and natural gas. Sustainable forestry helped a ton here too once it hit the paper industry's bottom line.
Oil is certainly not solved, so we solved 4 out of 5 with the 5th.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...
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.
It would be quite expensive to extract it from there, due to the necessity of escaping from their gravitational field, but not impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree that the "accumulation over millions of years" is similar (and similarly a potential problem if we burn through all that accumulation).
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_Litvine...
They are indeed. The average planet busting Gamma Ray Burst is just a Vogon trying to "get the whole family in".
> These could exist in planets like Neptune or Uranus.
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.
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.
tfa:
> Thanks to its filled outer electron shell, it is inert, and won’t react with other materials
And by stealing those electrons from other molecules it sets off other chemical reactions, which in things like DNA is highly suboptimal. This all generally happens at the birth of the He atom, presuming it isn't in deep space or something with no electrons to cleave from neighbours, and is only an instantaneous state.
“Because they are identical to helium nuclei, they are also sometimes written as He2+…” [1].
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.
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.
But for some reason for Americans peace is never the preferred option.
>""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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
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.
There were several announcements, a lot of discussion, and a long process before they started selling it. It was also a temporary action, with a well known end-date (that TBH, I never looked at). It had a known and constant small pressure over investments, it wasn't something that destabilized a market.
[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.
While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency.
Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.
That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.
At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests.
And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.
I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old.
I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals.
Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.
GP ain't wrong, but the phrasing implied we'd have it closer by than it actually is.
But, I'm also confident they were making a silly joke.
It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.