Hacker News

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.

I'm guessing you can find a supply of helium near the top of the atmosphere :)

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.

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.

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.

We might find it quite difficult to extract from the stars, that said.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Atmospheric extraction on Earth would require massive amounts of energy and infrastructure.

Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future

> 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

Hence the origin of the name!

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.

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. :)

You'd need investors willing to pay $50,000\kg of helium, for one.