sixhobbits3 hours ago
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.
parineum2 hours ago
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.
marcosdumay2 hours ago
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.
actionfromafar2 hours ago
Exactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone sells the strategic oil reserve.
rootusrootus2 hours ago
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.
ben_w17 minutes ago
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.
elzbardico29 minutes ago
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.
senderista2 hours ago
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.
gcanyon16 minutes ago
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.
krsw11 minutes ago
Classic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when the other dismantles the institutions that let the country work, so both sides are equally bad.
mschuster9111 minutes ago
> 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.
dave78an hour ago
About half of the strategic petroleum reserve was sold off in 2022.
ameliusan hour ago
I'm guessing you can find a supply of helium near the top of the atmosphere :)
dmitrygran hour ago
Turns out -- no, it permanently escapes to space with the help of the solar wind
zozbot23442 minutes ago
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.
stvltvs43 minutes ago
Even if it didn't, collecting it seems wildly expensive.
alex_young33 minutes ago
<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.
Aboutplants2 hours ago
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.
vlovich123an hour ago
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.
dtechan hour ago
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.
ben_w13 minutes ago
We're definitely not mining the moon for helium, but might well end up "mining" the gas giants.
victorbjorklund39 minutes ago
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.
wongarsu41 minutes ago
Just in time to start extracting helium on Mars
elzbardico27 minutes ago
Maybe we will build chips in space in vacuum?
cheschirean hour ago
> myopically selfish
A standard western personality trait I’ve been confronted with repeatedly over the last… hmm. Well that got depressing real quick.
throw0101d3 hours ago
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-...
nradov2 hours ago
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.
snek_case2 hours ago
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.
nradovan hour ago
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.
LorenDB3 hours ago
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.
nradov2 hours ago
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.
adrianN3 hours ago
It can form during radioactive decay of uranium and thorium.
wat100002 hours ago
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.
sixhobbits3 hours ago
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.
daemonologist3 hours ago
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).
Sharlin2 hours ago
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.
jmyeet2 hours ago
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...
onraglanroad2 hours ago
> 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".
cubefox2 hours ago
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.
Tangurena2an hour ago
Not at any temperature nor pressure found on Earth:
> These could exist in planets like Neptune or Uranus.
CamperBob22 hours ago
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.
kergonath2 hours ago
> 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.
nsxwolf3 hours ago
Atmospheric extraction on Earth would require massive amounts of energy and infrastructure.
Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future
llm_nerd3 hours ago
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.
867-53093 hours ago
> 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
llm_nerd2 hours ago
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.
JumpCrisscrossop2 hours ago
> *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].
onraglanroadan hour ago
You should really have posed that as a "I don't know anything about this so I'm confused" question.
kergonath2 hours ago
He2+ is not a helium ion, which is very reactive. It’s not a helium atom, which is inert.
[deleted]an hour agocollapsed
DonHopkinsan hour ago
He has risen,
He has risen,
He has risen,
Helium is alive.wat100002 hours ago
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.
chii2 hours ago
I would imagine that an alpha particle would still be inert in the sense that it won't cause chemical reactions with other molecules.
kergonath2 hours ago
Stealing electrons is a chemical reaction.
cineticdaffodilan hour ago
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?
bigyabaian hour ago
You'd need investors willing to pay $50,000\kg of helium, for one.
DonHopkinsan hour ago
[flagged]
Invictus03 hours ago
Fun fact, helium was discovered on the Sun nearly 30 years before it was found on earth.
CamperBob23 hours ago
Hence the origin of the name!
KalandaDev3 hours ago
For a second I thought this was about Helium browser :(
jmyeet2 hours ago
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.
nradov2 hours ago
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.
cubefox2 hours ago
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.
nisegami2 hours ago
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.
actionfromafar2 hours ago
That sounds more like a tiny filter. :)
phplovesong2 hours ago
[flagged]
nickff2 hours ago
Your post is frustrating to read because of the incorrect spelling and grammar; these errors make it hard to take you seriously.
>""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.