[HN Gopher] Helium Is Hard to Replace
___________________________________________________________________
Helium Is Hard to Replace
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 221 points
Date : 2026-04-10 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| LorenDB wrote:
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| It can form during radioactive decay of uranium and thorium.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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?
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'd say no, although the amount of helium that's produced
| is small enough that it's not quite as absurd as I would
| have thought. Worldwide helium production is something
| around 25,000 tons/year. A nuclear power plant produces
| about 25 tons of waste per year. There are about 440
| nuclear power plants in the world. If their waste
| consisted entirely of helium, that would be roughly 44%
| of total world helium production. More than I guessed!
| But, of course, only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that
| waste ever turns into helium, so even if you somehow made
| it decay all at once, it would be be pretty insignificant
| on a world scale.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Atmospheric extraction on Earth would require massive amounts
| of energy and infrastructure.
|
| Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future
| sixhobbits wrote:
| 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.
| daemonologist wrote:
| 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).
| fraserphysics wrote:
| Helium will leak out of some structures that hold methane.
| Shale will trap methane and let helium escape. Layers of
| salt trap both. Thus horizontal drilling and fracking to
| recover oil and methane from shale produces very little
| helium.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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...
| onraglanroad wrote:
| > 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".
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I would think that lighting a Vogon family picture would be
| about as advisable as recording a Vogon speech. That is to
| say not at all.
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| 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
| adrian_b wrote:
| Helium exists in great quantities in the 4 big planets, which
| unlike Earth have strong enough gravity to retain it.
|
| 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.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| > 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
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| chii wrote:
| I would imagine that an alpha particle would still be inert
| in the sense that it won't cause chemical reactions with
| other molecules.
| kergonath wrote:
| Stealing electrons is a chemical reaction.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > *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
| kergonath wrote:
| He2+ is not a helium ion, which is very reactive. It's
| not a helium atom, which is inert.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| You should really have posed that as a "I don't know
| anything about this so I'm confused" question.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| He has risen, He has risen, He has risen,
| Helium is alive.
| KalandaDev wrote:
| For a second I thought this was about Helium browser :(
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Fun fact, helium was discovered on the Sun nearly 30 years before
| it was found on earth.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Hence the origin of the name!
| sixhobbits wrote:
| 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
| parineum wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Exactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone
| sells the strategic oil reserve.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| senderista wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| 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.
| krsw wrote:
| Classic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when
| the other dismantles the institutions that let the
| country work, so both sides are equally bad.
| californical wrote:
| Both bad, and one is more bad than the other. They're not
| equally bad but they are both very bad
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Yes the US is more bad, agreed
| disillusioned wrote:
| This is a bit like saying a hangnail and a gangrenous
| amputation are "not equally bad but they are both very
| bad". One is literally chopping things off to permanently
| alter them. The other is, at times, uncomfortable and
| frustrating.
|
| The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and
| dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute
| wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption
| and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to
| "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It
| allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of
| destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away
| how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's
| borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and
| should be called out as such.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| The enlightened centrist take is not _entirely_ wrong,
| though. The left definitely has some blind spots, among
| them their purist dedication to perfect morals and a
| willingness to tell anyone who does not perfectly agree
| to piss off.
|
| 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.
| cestith wrote:
| There's a bit of a duality about perfect agreement within
| the voters for the party's candidates and somewhat within
| the party membership itself. Yeah, there's a lot of
| telling each other to piss off. There's a lot of
| jockeying for the platform and the primaries. But come
| the general, it's a minority of the voters who will sit
| it out or vote for a minor party. Sometimes it's a large
| enough minority to hand things to the Republicans,
| though.
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so
| they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous
| they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a
| bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested
| in the appearance of helping than in the substance of
| helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way
| as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all,
| they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal
| about how they're the good guys doing all the helping
| more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure
| everyone notices.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others"
| so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and
| righteous they are_
|
| Being awesome because you help those in need? How
| horrible!
|
| _> more interested in the appearance of helping than in
| the substance of helping_
|
| This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue
| signalling". It often comes from people who are less
| helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people
| receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about
| whether something _actually_ helps isn 't authoritative,
| and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.
| ryandrake wrote:
| "Government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely
| popular take in the USA.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I think the actual sentiment is closer to "first, do no
| harm" (a.k.a. the precautionary principle) which is not
| nearly as bizarre!
| watwut wrote:
| The other side actively goes out of their way to be cruel
| and is proud about it. All the while trying to stigmatize
| decency and help.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| There's a fundamental disagreement among people on what
| "help" really is.
|
| Giving money to someone who _could_ otherwise work is
| very different from giving food to a single mother who is
| already working 10 hours a day. Giving needles to a drug
| addict "helps" them in a certain way, yes. But it also
| enables their addiction to continue.
|
| Yea it's easy for everyone to say "I believe in helping
| people!!". But which side of the fence you sit on in the
| US is non-trivially determined by what you believe "help"
| looks like in practice.
| foxglacier wrote:
| It's scary how blind people are to this. The right wing
| wants to help people in the long term and the left wing
| wants to help people in the short term. Both approaches
| seem obviously wrong to adherents of the other because
| they both disadvantage the group that the other wants to
| help.
|
| Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm
| people. That's a characterization both sides use against
| each other because they refuse to understand each other.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| If there are ANY people the right wing wants to help,
| it's rich people and grifters, and "long term" to them is
| like 3 months. Sorry, but the current admin IS "just bad"
| and DOES want to harm people - see ICE.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Try thinking of honest examples. If you can't, you're not
| competent to have thoughts about the topic because you
| will only be able to feel emotions and pretend they're
| thoughts.
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| drowsspa wrote:
| I think the issue is about our not believing what
| religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| God is documented as being rather keen on genocidal
| smiting. That is part of the exact problem. I googled two
| relevant examples: 1: God commands King
| Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that
| belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and
| women, children and infants 2: When the
| Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often
| commanded to carry out total destruction against the
| Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was
| in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox,
| and sheep, and ass"
|
| I'm not into religion, but it has had a massive influence
| on my culture (NZ) so I pay some attention to it.
| GeorgeWBasic wrote:
| Are you aware of what the US regime has done to Iran?
| There's a reason they say that.
| cestith wrote:
| Specifically, the US federal government. Just like most
| Americans don't hate the people of Russia or Iran any
| more than the folks the next town over, I've never met
| someone from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, or
| pretty much anywhere else who hates all Americans. I'm
| sure they exist, but probably as a small minority.
| There's plenty of reason to hate our government though,
| especially if it has threatened to destroy your entire
| civilization.
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, buy Americans are not target of Russian aggression
| and violence. Russia is kinda abstract ennemy far away.
| Feelings get stronger when the country is actual target
| of bombing.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Growing up in the Southern US, I met plenty "Let's bomb
| all the savages in the Middle Easy and take their oil"
| types. Some of them grew up to be self-proclaimed Nazis.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| US government is invoking religion in its justification,
| US military command has prayer meetings, they call the
| attack on Iran "part of gods plan"
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| nradov wrote:
| If Europe has "pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy"
| then why do they have nothing to show for it? They can't
| even protect their own sea lines of communication.
| spookie wrote:
| 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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The American government is a psyop.
|
| I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a
| strong role in the concept of freedom in American
| philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I
| know the real context of this quote), etc.
|
| And so when my government wants to destroy my country,
| its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our
| life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic
| industrial exploitation across the world, through
| colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I
| hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The
| American government has been an enemy to America, and an
| enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our
| treatment of the natives.
|
| You'd do well to separate the land, people and government
| of a nation; confusing them only further serves State
| propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our
| country in school, but it's really to our government.
| It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the
| pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age
| 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional
| abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would
| ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically
| force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my
| guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said,
| the American government is a psyop.
| dave78 wrote:
| About half of the strategic petroleum reserve was sold off
| in 2022.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| j-bos wrote:
| Isn't it like underground? Why would it be expensive?
| atombender wrote:
| 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...
| phil21 wrote:
| It was a penny wise and pound foolish political move to
| pretend to be financially responsible and reduce the
| deficit by some tiny rounding error on top of a rounding
| error amount.
|
| Basically political bike shedding so elected officials
| could avoid making any hard or controversial decisions
| that would have a material impact but maybe upset some
| folks due to raising taxes or reducing spending.
| amelius wrote:
| I'm guessing you can find a supply of helium near the top of
| the atmosphere :)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Turns out -- no, it permanently escapes to space with the
| help of the solar wind
| stvltvs wrote:
| Even if it didn't, collecting it seems wildly expensive.
| subscribed wrote:
| Or free if we managed to run solar powered sails (or so)
| skirting the very top and autonomously sending the
| harvest down.
| krisoft wrote:
| If by "free" you mean "very very expensive" then i agree
| with you. It would cost a fortune to even just attempt a
| pilot project proving feasability. Then we would need to
| send up regular replacements to the "sending the harvest
| down" hardware at the minimum. Just imagining the cost of
| a tank which can be launched into space, autonomously
| dock with the collector sails, then deorbit and land
| makes my head spin. And then doing that at scale, paying
| people to launch it, paying people to operate the system.
|
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Helium is only 5ppm in the atmosphere. Extracting useful
| quantities of it that way will probably never be
| economically viable. In other words, if for some reason
| we can no longer get helium from natural gas wells then
| it will be cheaper to just let patients die instead of
| doing cryogenic distillation of helium from the
| atmosphere to run MRI machines.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| We are already separating out the majority elements from
| air via ASU plants, so we should compare the abundance of
| helium in what is left from typical extraction. And that
| looks quite technically viable, if obviously uneconomic
| at present.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| This is a very good point.
|
| Oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and argon make up 99.94% of the
| atmosphere. The remaining 0.06% has 5ppm is nearly 1%
| helium. That's up 200x from the original concentration
| and is well above the 0.3% that is sometimes quoted as
| the limit for economic extraction of helium (and well
| below the 7% of some natural gas).
|
| Furthermore, the leftover gas is also already cold. It is
| absolutely true that 85K isn't very close to the boiling
| point of helium, it is a lot closer than starting at the
| temperature of gas at the well head.
|
| The gotcha is almost certainly going to be that an ASU
| probably doesn't liquify most of the gas it takes in.
| That means that the exhaust gas will only be slightly
| enhanced.
| XorNot wrote:
| In a world of extremely cheap solar electricity pushing
| grid prices negative, a lot of things might be a lot more
| economical then conventionally thought though -
| particularly when you factor in the desire to get a full
| return on industrial manufacturing of panels.
| dguest wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| 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.
| sfjailbird wrote:
| Helium mines on the sun, pumping out millions of barrels of
| birthday-grade helium.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| At night it's called the moon
| throw0101d wrote:
| 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-...
| nisegami wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That sounds more like a tiny filter. :)
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
| phil21 wrote:
| Ironically exactly now - while we are at or close to peak
| natural gas extraction - would be the best time to fill up
| strategic helium reserves worldwide. If every natural gas well
| was required to capture and store helium for future use we
| could extend that runway by multiple generations.
|
| But instead of our grandparents and great grandparents general
| idea of investing in the future of their societies, we've
| decided to stop doing that and add up all the debt possible to
| pass down to future generations.
|
| It is quite depressing to think about.
| Aboutplants wrote:
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| cheschire wrote:
| > myopically selfish
|
| A standard western personality trait I've been confronted
| with repeatedly over the last... hmm. Well that got
| depressing real quick.
| dtech wrote:
| 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_w wrote:
| We're definitely not mining the moon for helium, but might
| well end up "mining" the gas giants.
| pureliquidhw wrote:
| 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.
| achierius wrote:
| Exactly -- that means that any analysis based on the
| current (as of 1926) 'reserves' or 'production capacity'
| for rubber/fertilizer/coal/wood would have been
| invalidated as soon as we switched to using oil instead.
| Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find
| an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows).
| At that point, what you'd have to have forecasted would
| be the 'reserves' of nitrogen, which are functionally
| infinite.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Just in time to start extracting helium on Mars
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| 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.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Ah, "The Iranian Nuclear Bomb Deadline" ploy.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Maybe we will build chips in space in vacuum?
| nomel wrote:
| > 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?
| nradov wrote:
| 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/
| snek_case wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| 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?
| bigyabai wrote:
| You'd need investors willing to pay $50,000\kg of helium, for
| one.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| The biggest obstacle is that planetary extraction has to become
| too expensive, so space extraction becomes viable. If that were
| the case, it would probably be safer to mine the Moon, to avoid
| further messing of the atmosphere with refineries or even more
| frequent space flights.
| alex_young wrote:
| <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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| > 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| 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?
| cyberax wrote:
| You can get permanent hearing damage from that
| demonstration if you stand right next to that balloon.
| triceratops wrote:
| Makes sense.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Along with the other commenter, I'll add that a classroom
| is usually a lot bigger than a home dining room or other
| domestic party locations. That size also helps things
| dissipate instead of reflect. Not sure by how much but
| I'm sure it does something.
| martin-t wrote:
| My chemistry teacher told us how once when he ignited
| helium in a test tube, the tube broke and he ended up
| with pieces of glass embedded in his skin. The students
| had face masks and he was looking the other way "just in
| case" for this "safe" experiment but he could have easily
| been blinded.
|
| Things can always go wrong. We probably shouldn't strive
| for 100% safety because they we'd spend our lives in a
| padded cell. But we also shouldn't assume things are safe
| because they're common or routine.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Was there an experimental control?
|
| How does that bang compare to the bang from an equally-
| inflated balloon full of ordinary air?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We did this. One balloon with plain air. One with pure
| hydrogen. One with 50/50 hydrogen and air. The one with
| pure hydrogen popped closer in magnitude to the pure air
| than it was to the 50/50 mix.
| invalidator wrote:
| As a kid I took a lot of classes at the Lawrence Hall of
| Science in Berkeley, which was paradise for fledgling
| nerds. On the last day they would have a little closing
| ceremony with some cute little science experiment. One of
| my favorites was "Going Out With A Bang".
|
| The instructors would bring out a helium balloon and a
| candle on a meter stick. The balloon goes pop, huzzah.
|
| Then the twist. "Hey, wanna do it again?" All the kids
| would be like "meh, I guess?" They would then bring out a
| balloon full of hydrogen (maybe some oxygen too?). It
| would look identical to the first one, floating there
| tethered to the lab bench.
|
| When the candle hit the second one, it made a white flash
| and a really sharp BANG. It was an order of magnitude
| louder, and you could hear the transient bouncing off the
| walls and echoing in the halls. It made an impression.
| cubefox wrote:
| > It becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from
| fossil fuels like natural gas.
|
| 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.
| gaze wrote:
| There are NO alternatives. There's nothing else that stays
| liquid at 4 K and absolutely nothing else comes close.
| Eridrus wrote:
| The article itself spells out several alternatives to
| buying continuous amounts of Helium: high temperature
| semiconductors and zero boil-off systems that don't require
| a continual supply.
|
| All these "we're going to run out" stories pretend that
| engineering cannot adapt to changing cost structures, which
| is just total nonsense.
|
| Sure, there is nothing that can be directly substituted for
| how we use Helium today, but clearly we're using Helium
| inefficiently today and the answer is that once markets
| force us to change, we will find more efficient ways.
| kakacik wrote:
| As usual - 'there is scarcity of XYZ' -> price it accordingly,
| and markets will align quickly. Dont expecr private companies
| to have long term thinking, thats not how bonuses for those
| steering the wheel are set up.
| expedition32 wrote:
| 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.
| aeternum wrote:
| Helium luckily is the second most abundant element in the
| universe. A good reason to go to the stars.
| everdrive wrote:
| We might find it quite difficult to extract from the stars,
| that said.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It might be expensive compared to improved Earth mining, but
| lunar regolite is rich in Helium 3, there would be no need to
| mine stars.
|
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| It is pretty much impossible to extract it from stars, but
| the 4 big planets have large amounts of helium.
|
| It would be quite expensive to extract it from there, due to
| the necessity of escaping from their gravitational field, but
| not impossible.
| kakacik wrote:
| If we have such advanced tech, and trip to big planets
| would seem economically feasible, I think we will be long
| beyond the point of desperately needing transporting helium
| to do such crazy trips.
| smegger001 wrote:
| mostly out of our reach unless you have way of removing it from
| the sun without your retrieval craft melting or being captured
| by the suns gravity well or from gas giants without the onboard
| system being fried by the intense radiation or again captured
| by the gravitation.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| A round-trip lasting centuries is not a practical solution.
| Star Trek is fiction.
| yyyk wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >The vast majority of MRI machines used today use superconducting
| magnets made from niobium-titanium (NbTi), which becomes
| superconducting at 9.2 degrees above absolute zero. This is well
| below the boiling point of any other coolant, making liquid
| helium the only practical option for cooling the magnets.
|
| 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.
| tblt wrote:
| Do we know if this pattern is just something we've observed so
| far, or is it a natural law?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| The long tail economic ramifications that this disruption to the
| supply chain will have could be potentially decades, in ways that
| will most certainly be catastrophic, and what's concerning to me
| is how small of a percentage of the population (at least in the
| US) is grasping this.
| tagami wrote:
| Qatar produce(s/d) about a third of global helium. With the force
| majeure in place I won't be launching student HABs anytime soon.
| (Schools don't like hydrogen)
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