Helium, sure. That's cheap enough to fill party balloons with! Well, it shouldn't be! When we run out, it will cost 10,000 times as much to extract it from air. And it isn't just helium. We're running out of a LOT of resources, many of which are not renewable and have exorbitant costs that are masked until it's too late.
I thought this was pretty funny at first. Now I think it's pretty scary. Given that we need it for things like MRI machines, what other technologies will we come up with in the future that might require helium? We all need to be a lot more conscious of how much of everything we waste every single day because you never know what we might wish we had in the future. No, really.
A renowned expert on helium says we are wasting our supplies of the inert gas helium and will run out within 25 to 30 years, which will have disastrous consequences for hospitals and industry.
Professor of physics, Robert Richardson from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, won the 1996 Nobel prize for his work on superfluidity in helium, and has issued a warning the supplies of helium are being used at an unprecedented rate and could be depleted within a generation.
Liquid helium is vital for its use in cooling the superconducting magnets in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. There is no substitute because no other substance has a lower boiling point. Helium is also vital in the manufacture of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and fiber optics.
In MRI scanners the helium is recycled, but often the gas is wasted since it is thought of as a cheap gas, and as such is often used to fill party balloons and as a party trick distorting people's voices when it is inhaled.
Professor Richardson warned the gas is not cheap because the supply is inexhaustible, but because of the Helium Privatisation Act passed in 1996 by the US Congress. The Act required the helium stores held underground near Amarillo in Texas to be sold off at a fixed rate by 2015 regardless of the market value, to pay off the original cost of the reserve. The Amarillo storage facility holds around half the Earth's stocks of helium: around a billion cubic meters of the gas. The US currently supplies around 80 percent of the world's helium supplies.
Richardson said it has taken 4.7 billion years for the Earth to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will have exhausted within about a hundred years of the US's National Helium Reserve having been established in 1925. The reserve is a collection of disused underground mines, pipes and vats extending over 300 km from north of Amarillo into Kansas. He warned that when helium is released to the atmosphere, in helium balloons for example, it is lost forever.
There is no chemical way of manufacturing helium, and the supplies we have originated in the very slow radioactive alpha decay that occurs in rocks. It costs around 10,000 times more to extract helium from air than it does from rocks and natural gas reserves.
Helium is the second-lightest element in the Universe. Among helium's other uses include airships, air mixtures used in deep-sea diving, cooling nuclear reactors and infrared detectors, and in satellite and spacecraft equipment, and solar telescopes. NASA also uses massive amounts of helium to clean fuel from its rockets, and because the helium is so cheap, it makes no effort to recycle the gas. As the isotope helium-3, helium is also used in nuclear fusion research.
Professor Richardson was co-chair of a US National Research Council inquiry into the coming helium shortage. The report recommends the US reconsider its policy regarding selling off the helium.
Just use a Hybrid MRI scanner. It's slower and doesn't give the promised results, but it uses less Helium. What are YOU doing to reduce YOUR Helium footprint?
I worked on Mass Spectrometers and helium is required in them to slow down the ions. We had to check for leaks too often, showing me that all supplies should have a map of where the distribution lines go. We kept checking manufacturing and the leak was in engineering.
Maybe ... maybe not. There are natural gas wells in the field stretching from the Texas panhandle to southwestern Kansas with so much helium in the gas that it will not burn. Increasing natural gas exploration and production means more helium production, too. The problem for the short term is storing all the excess helium extracted from natural gas before it goes into the pipelines. I'm confident, though, that we (or the Chinese) will surely find a way to waste it all.
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02:23 AM
MJ Member
Posts: 214 From: Punxsutawney Registered: Jun 2008
A balloon is filled with Helium, and a couple of days later the thing is laying on the floor about empty. Where does that Helium go? Does it leak through the balloon into the atmosphere? Or does it just disappear?
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04:55 AM
MidEngineManiac Member
Posts: 29566 From: Some unacceptable view Registered: Feb 2007
Just use a Hybrid MRI scanner. It's slower and doesn't give the promised results, but it uses less Helium. What are YOU doing to reduce YOUR Helium footprint?
I just replace the helium I use with the Methane I produce
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06:39 AM
Formula88 Member
Posts: 53788 From: Raleigh NC Registered: Jan 2001
A balloon is filled with Helium, and a couple of days later the thing is laying on the floor about empty. Where does that Helium go? Does it leak through the balloon into the atmosphere? Or does it just disappear?
Professor Richardson warned the gas is not cheap because the supply is inexhaustible, but because of the Helium Privatisation Act passed in 1996 by the US Congress. The Act required the helium stores held underground near Amarillo in Texas to be sold off at a fixed rate by 2015 regardless of the market value, to pay off the original cost of the reserve. The Amarillo storage facility holds around half the Earth's stocks of helium: around a billion cubic meters of the gas. The US currently supplies around 80 percent of the world's helium supplies.
Go Congress!! Really, go.
Brad
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08:54 AM
jaskispyder Member
Posts: 21510 From: Northern MI Registered: Jun 2002
And how did we wind up with so much, if it can't be collected somehow?
We don't "make" He in the since of a refinement or chemical compound. We recover existing He from underground stores. He can be "made" from Alpha particle decay from Uranium and Thorium (and some others). As those particles decay, they bond with free electrons to form He. The He we recover from underground is the result of this process.
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11:50 AM
tesmith66 Member
Posts: 7355 From: Jerseyville, IL Registered: Sep 2001
A balloon is filled with Helium, and a couple of days later the thing is laying on the floor about empty. Where does that Helium go? Does it leak through the balloon into the atmosphere? Or does it just disappear?
Rubber is a very porous storage vessel, especially to "smaller" atoms like Hydrogen and Helium....
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12:40 PM
PFF
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Marvin McInnis Member
Posts: 11599 From: ~ Kansas City, USA Registered: Apr 2002
I'd better go buy a bottle and sell it to retire in 30 years.
In 30 years your bottle will probably be empty. Helium will diffuse through almost any barrier. It's quantum behavior is unlike any other matter, especially at very low temperatures.
quote
Originally posted by MJ:
Helium is very common in welding gas mixtures, I believe in some plasma cutting operations too.
It's mostly argon or argon mixtures these days.
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PhysOrg.com:
Liquid helium is vital for its use in cooling the superconducting magnets in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. There is no substitute because no other substance has a lower boiling point.
Advances in superconducting materials continue, and will eventually obviate the need for extremely low temperatures. The "holy grail" is to achieve room-temperature superconductivity in cheap and easy-to-manufacture materials. The research labs are rapidly closing in on that goal, but superconducting electrical wires, including long-distance transmission lines, are probably still far in the future.
[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 07-28-2011).]
And how did we wind up with so much, if it can't be collected somehow?
when an hydrogen bomb goes off it fuses hydrogen into helium they are trying to use fusion in a reactor to make power now the waste product of hydrogen fusion is helium we can make helium out of hydrogen now but it takes more power in then they can get back out
that is the same power source thar runs our sun the sun is making helium as it shines
[This message has been edited by ray b (edited 07-28-2011).]
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01:33 PM
htexans1 Member
Posts: 9110 From: Clear Lake City/Houston TX Registered: Sep 2001
