I 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.
Part 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.
The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive).
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.
It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper.
Despite 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.
Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation.
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests.
But this problem is not exclusive to America.
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.
I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.
> sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
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.
Would like to add Vox is nowhere near the other's popularity, and has received substantial donations from... Hungary. A total of 6.5 million euros during the 2023 elections.
> 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.
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.
The overall amount of helium in the atmosphere is still more than enough for the foreseeable future, and it could be extracted (albeit at high energy cost) by augmenting existing air separation units (ASU's). Of course natural gas wells currently provide an easier to extract source, seeing as the concentration there is way higher.
<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.
It 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.
I 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.
It 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.
I’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.
If 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.
It'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.
I agree century timescales are tough, I'm not convinced 4 of 5 of your listed things have been solved.
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.
Isn’t those calculations pretty unreliable? It’s like those predictions we only have 5 or 10 years of oil left. And then we find more oil or better extraction process and we got another 10 years and so on.
For 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.
For 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.
ROVs 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.
Helium 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.
And 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.
Dumb 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?
It'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).
Which 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.
Terrestial 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.
The 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.
If 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.
Recently 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.
The particle that is emitted from an alpha decay isn't actually called a He atom (I edited my root comment so this isn't misleading, apologies) -- I was being loose with terminology -- though it has the right number of protons and neutrons. It's called an alpha particle. Once it steals two electrons -- it carries a +2 charge and is extremely successfully at slicing electrons off of other molecules it comes across -- it is then considered the helium that we know and love, and is now stable with the properties we know.
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 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.
The 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.
Shutting 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.
The 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.
I 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.
This 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.
So how hard would it be for elon to build a gas raffinery sattelite that captures helium while skimming the top layer of the atmosphere, dropping filled canisters by parachute?
I 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
Part 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.
The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive).
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.
Isn't it like underground? Why would it be expensive?
It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper.
[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
Exactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone sells the strategic oil reserve.
Despite 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.
Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation.
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
Are you aware of what the US regime has done to Iran? There's a reason they say that.
I think the issue is about our not believing what religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning
God's angels typically don't bomb your little girl's school.
All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests. But this problem is not exclusive to America.
I 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.
Strong disagree.
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.
I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.
Classic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when the other dismantles the institutions that let the country work, so both sides are equally bad.
Both bad, and one is more bad than the other. They’re not equally bad but they are both very bad
> sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
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.
Would like to add Vox is nowhere near the other's popularity, and has received substantial donations from... Hungary. A total of 6.5 million euros during the 2023 elections.
> 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.
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.
About half of the strategic petroleum reserve was sold off in 2022.
I'm guessing you can find a supply of helium near the top of the atmosphere :)
Turns out -- no, it permanently escapes to space with the help of the solar wind
Space is at the top of the atmosphere right? That place is full of stars producing helium by the teragram.
GP ain't wrong, but the phrasing implied we'd have it closer by than it actually is.
No, they're entirely incorrect because they used the word "near". There is no practically usable helium near the top of the atmosphere.
But, I'm also confident they were making a silly joke.
The overall amount of helium in the atmosphere is still more than enough for the foreseeable future, and it could be extracted (albeit at high energy cost) by augmenting existing air separation units (ASU's). Of course natural gas wells currently provide an easier to extract source, seeing as the concentration there is way higher.
Even if it didn't, collecting it seems wildly expensive.
<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.
It 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Yeah 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?
It 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.
I’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.
If 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.
It'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.
I agree century timescales are tough, I'm not convinced 4 of 5 of your listed things have been solved.
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.
We're definitely not mining the moon for helium, but might well end up "mining" the gas giants.
Isn’t those calculations pretty unreliable? It’s like those predictions we only have 5 or 10 years of oil left. And then we find more oil or better extraction process and we got another 10 years and so on.
> As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain.
No shock at all if the price is relative to what's left. Shouldn't boring market pressures guarantee this, unless the government gets involved?
Just in time to start extracting helium on Mars
Maybe we will build chips in space in vacuum?
> myopically selfish
A standard western personality trait I’ve been confronted with repeatedly over the last… hmm. Well that got depressing real quick.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode with a helium producer on the topic recently:
* 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 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/
For 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.
ROVs 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.
Helium luckily is the second most abundant element in the universe. A good reason to go to the stars.
We might find it quite difficult to extract from the stars, that said.
Is there any way to actually produce helium other than nuclear fusion? I would assume not, but I'm not an expert in this field.
Helium 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.
It can form during radioactive decay of uranium and thorium.
And 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.
Dumb 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?
It's also formed similarly to oil over millions of years underground if I understand correctly so can be a byproduct of natural gas mining.
It'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).
Which 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.
Terrestial 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_Litvine...
> 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".
The 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.
Not at any temperature nor pressure found on Earth:
> These could exist in planets like Neptune or Uranus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_compounds
If 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.
> 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.
Atmospheric extraction on Earth would require massive amounts of energy and infrastructure.
Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future
Recently 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.
> 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
The particle that is emitted from an alpha decay isn't actually called a He atom (I edited my root comment so this isn't misleading, apologies) -- I was being loose with terminology -- though it has the right number of protons and neutrons. It's called an alpha particle. Once it steals two electrons -- it carries a +2 charge and is extremely successfully at slicing electrons off of other molecules it comes across -- it is then considered the helium that we know and love, and is now stable with the properties we know.
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.
> *particle that is emitted from an alpha decay isn't actually called a He atom”
“Because they are identical to helium nuclei, they are also sometimes written as He2+…” [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle
You should really have posed that as a "I don't know anything about this so I'm confused" question.
He2+ is not a helium ion, which is very reactive. It’s not a helium atom, which is inert.
Because 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.
I would imagine that an alpha particle would still be inert in the sense that it won't cause chemical reactions with other molecules.
Stealing electrons is a chemical reaction.
Fun fact, helium was discovered on the Sun nearly 30 years before it was found on earth.
Hence the origin of the name!
For a second I thought this was about Helium browser :(
The 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
Shutting 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.
The 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.
I 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.
This 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.
That sounds more like a tiny filter. :)
The 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.
So how hard would it be for elon to build a gas raffinery sattelite that captures helium while skimming the top layer of the atmosphere, dropping filled canisters by parachute?
You'd need investors willing to pay $50,000\kg of helium, for one.