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.
* 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-...
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.
But for some reason for Americans peace is never the preferred option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future
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.
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.
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...
How dangerous are party balloons filled with hydrogen? Not a whole balloon arch obviously.
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.
[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
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?
A standard western personality trait I’ve been confronted with repeatedly over the last… hmm. Well that got depressing real quick.
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.
I agree that the "accumulation over millions of years" is similar (and similarly a potential problem if we burn through all that accumulation).
tfa:
> Thanks to its filled outer electron shell, it is inert, and won’t react with other materials
At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.
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.
They are indeed. The average planet busting Gamma Ray Burst is just a Vogon trying to "get the whole family in".
GP ain't wrong, but the phrasing implied we'd have it closer by than it actually is.
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.
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
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.
But, I'm also confident they were making a silly joke.
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.
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.
All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
He has risen,
He has risen,
He has risen,
Helium is alive.> These could exist in planets like Neptune or Uranus.
“Because they are identical to helium nuclei, they are also sometimes written as He2+…” [1].
It would be quite expensive to extract it from there, due to the necessity of escaping from their gravitational field, but not impossible.
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.
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.
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 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 war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore. Every day we get some new story about some good or service that depends on Middle East petroleum and the production of which has been disrupted by the war. Fertilizer production, plastics, aluminum, the list goes on.
One such supply chain that’s suddenly getting a lot of attention is helium. Helium is produced as a byproduct of natural gas extraction: it collects in the same underground pockets that natural gas collects in. Qatar is responsible for roughly 1/3rd of the world’s supply of helium, which was formerly transported through the Strait of Hormuz in specialized containers. Thanks to the closure of the strait, helium prices have spiked, suppliers are declaring force majeure, and businesses are scrambling to deal with looming shortages. (For many years the US government maintained a strategic helium reserve, but this was sold off in 2024.)
What I find interesting about helium is that in many cases, it’s very hard to substitute for. Helium has a unique set of properties — in particular, it has a lower melting point and boiling point than any other element — and technologies and processes that rely on those properties can’t easily switch to some other material.
Helium is the second lightest element in the periodic table (after hydrogen), and the second most common element in the universe (also after hydrogen). But while helium is very common on a cosmic scale, here on earth it’s not so easy to get. Because helium is so light, it rises to the very top of the atmosphere, where it eventually escapes into space.1 So essentially all helium used by modern civilization comes from underground.
Helium is produced via the radioactive decay of elements like uranium and thorium, and it collects in underground pockets of natural gas. This source of helium was first discovered in the US in 1903, when a natural gas well in Kansas produced a geyser of gas that refused to burn. Scientists at the University of Kansas eventually determined that this was due to the presence of helium. Like petroleum, helium has collected in these pockets over the course of millions of years, and thus (like petroleum) there’s a limited supply of underground helium that can be extracted. As with petroleum, people are often worried that we’re running out of it.
Because helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction, and because only some natural gas fields have helium in appreciable quantities, a small number of countries are responsible for the world’s supply of helium. The US and Qatar together produce around 2/3rds of the world’s helium supply. Russia, Algeria, Canada, China, and Poland produce most of the remaining balance.
Elemental helium has a few different useful properties. The most important one is that, thanks to the small size and completely filled outer electron shell of helium atoms, helium has a lower boiling point than any other element. Liquid helium boils at just 4.2 kelvin (-452 degrees Fahrenheit). By comparison, liquid hydrogen boils at 20 K, and liquid nitrogen boils at a positively balmy 77 K.
Its low boiling point makes helium very useful for getting something really, really cold. When a liquid boils, it transforms into a gas, and during this process it will pull energy from its surroundings due to evaporative cooling. This is why your body sweats: to cool you down as the liquid evaporates. When a liquid has a very low boiling point, this heat extraction happens at a very low temperature. Helium also stays a liquid at much lower temperatures than other elements. Nitrogen freezes solid at 63 K, and hydrogen freezes at 14K, but at atmospheric pressure helium stays a liquid all the way to absolute zero. If you need to cool something to just a few degrees above absolute zero, liquid helium is essentially the only practical way to do that.
Helium also has a few other useful properties. As we noted, helium is very light: it will naturally rise in the atmosphere, which makes it useful as a lifting gas. Thanks to its filled outer electron shell, it is inert, and won’t react with other materials. Helium also has high thermal conductivity — at room temperature, helium can move heat about six times better than air.
The world uses around 180 million cubic meters of helium each year. (This sounds like a lot, but it’s just 0.11% of the 159 billion cubic meters of nitrogen the world uses each year, and 0.004% of the over 4 trillion cubic meters of natural gas that the world uses each year.) But while it’s not used in enormous quantities compared to some other gases, helium is nevertheless quite important. Different industries make use of helium’s properties in different ways, and while in some cases there are reasonable substitutes for helium, in most cases helium has no practical replacement.
Some of the biggest consumers of helium are MRI machine operators, which consume around 17% of the helium used in the US. MRI machines work by creating very strong magnetic fields, which change the orientation of hydrogen atoms in tissues in your body. A pulse of radio waves is then sent into your body, which temporarily disrupts this orientation. When the pulse stops, different types of tissue return to their alignment with the magnetic field at different rates, and that rate of change can be measured and converted into a picture of the interior of the body. The strong magnetic fields in MRI machines are created by superconducting magnets: when some materials get cold enough, they drop to zero electrical resistance, which makes it possible to put enormous amounts of electrical current through them and create extremely strong magnetic fields.2 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. A handful of MRI machines have been built using higher-temperature superconductors that don’t require helium cooling, but the vast majority of the 50,000 existing MRI machines in the world require helium.
The helium consumption of MRI machines has fallen drastically over time. Early MRI machines would lose helium at a rate of around 0.4 liters per hour, requiring large tanks of 1000-2000 liters that needed to be refilled every few months. (It’s notoriously difficult to prevent gaseous helium from leaking out of containers, which is why helium is also often used for leak detection.) But modern MRI machines are “zero boil-off,” which essentially never need to be recharged with helium. As these machines take up more market share, the helium requirements of MRI machines can be expected to fall. But for the foreseeable future, MRI will remain a substantial source of demand.
Another major consumer of helium is the semiconductor industry, which uses around 25% of the helium worldwide, and around 10% of the helium in the US.3 As with MRI machines, helium is used to cool superconducting magnets, which are used to increase the purity of silicon ingots grown using the Czochralski method. Helium is also used as a coolant in some production processes, as well as a non-reactive gas to flush out some containers, for leak detection, and for a variety of other uses. A 2023 report from the Semiconductor Industry Association noted that helium was used “as a carrier gas, in energy and heat transfer with speed and precision, in reaction mediation, for back side and load lock cooling, in photolithography, in vacuum chambers, and for cleaning.” The same report notes that for many of these uses, helium has no substitute.
Unlike MRI machines, which have used less and less helium over time, helium usage in the semiconductor industry seems to be trending up: some sources claim that helium consumed by the semiconductor industry is expected to rise by a factor of five by 2035. This seems to be in part due to the development of DUV and EUV semiconductor lithography machines, which require helium to function. Unlike many other gases, helium absorbs almost no EUV radiation, which (as I understand it) makes it hard to substitute for helium in EUV machines.
Helium is also used in the manufacturing of fiber optic cable. Optical cable is made with an inner core of glass, surrounded by an outer “sleeve” of glass with a different index of refraction. This keeps photons within the inner core via the phenomenon of total internal reflection. During the manufacturing process, helium is used as a coolant when the outer “sleeve” is being deposited onto the core — with any other atmosphere, bubbles form between the two layers of glass. Roughly 5-6% of helium worldwide is used for the production of optical fiber, and there’s no known alternative.
Other than semiconductor manufacturing, other industries (particularly the aerospace industry) use helium as a “purge gas” to clean out containers. Cleaning out a tank of liquid hydrogen, often used as a liquid rocket fuel, requires a gas with a boiling point low enough that it won’t freeze when it contacts the hydrogen. Cleaning a tank of liquid oxygen doesn’t require a gas with quite as low a boiling point, but it is best to use an inert gas to reduce the chance of it reacting with the highly reactive oxygen. Aerospace purging makes up around 7% of US helium consumption. Around half of that is used by NASA, which is the single biggest user of helium in the US.
Because helium is lighter than air, it’s also used as a lifting gas in balloons and lighter-than-air airships as an alternative to the highly flammable hydrogen. Each Goodyear Blimp, for instance, uses around 300,000 cubic feet of helium. Around 18% of the helium consumed in the US is as a lifting gas.
Helium is also widely used in scientific research. Much of this is for keeping things cold: superconducting magnets, such as those used in the Large Hadron Collider, typically require helium, as do the superconducting elements in SQUIDs, which are highly sensitive magnetic field detectors. Helium is also used in mass spectrometers, which are used for, among other things, detecting microscopic leaks in containers.
This is a major category of use in the US; roughly 22% of its helium consumption goes to “analytical, engineering, lab, science, and specialty gases.”
In the US, helium is also used for welding: its high thermal conductivity and its inertness make helium an excellent shielding gas, which prevents the pool of molten metal from being contaminated before it cools. In the US, welding makes up roughly 8% of helium use, but elsewhere in the world, it’s more common to use other shielding gases like argon.
Helium is also used for breathing gas in deep sea commercial diving. At depths beyond 30 meters, breathing nitrogen (which makes up 78% of normal air) causes nitrogen narcosis, and diving beyond this depth is done using gas mixes that replace part of the nitrogen for helium. Roughly 5% of helium consumed in the US goes towards diving.
Helium for diving is difficult to substitute for. Virtually every other breathable gas except for possibly neon causes some degree of narcosis, and neon is heavier than helium, making breathing more difficult.
For some of these applications, it’s possible to substitute helium with other materials. There are other shielding gases, such as argon, that can be used for welding, and other lifting gases, such as hydrogen, that can be used for balloons or airships. In other applications, it’s possible to dramatically reduce the consumption of helium via recycling systems or other methods designed to reduce its use. As we’ve noted, this has occurred with MRI machines, where modern ones use far less helium than their predecessors. And it seems to have happened with aerospace purging. A 2010 report from the National Academies of Sciences notes that if NASA and the Department of Defense were sufficiently motivated, they could dramatically reduce their helium consumption by recycling it. Since then, aerospace use of helium has fallen from 18.2 million cubic meters (26% of total US consumption) to 4 million cubic meters (7% of total US consumption). But the United States Geological Survey notes that most helium in the US is still unrecycled, and there’s lots of opportunity to dramatically reduce helium usage with various recapture and recycling systems. Many of these systems are capable of reducing helium consumption by 90% or more.
But “reducing” doesn’t mean “eliminating,” and it’s interesting to me how in so many cases there doesn’t seem to be any good substitute for helium.
Though thanks to circulation in the air, the helium concentration below the turbopause is roughly constant, about 5 parts per million.
If the magnets get too warm, the sudden loss of superconductivity, called a “quench,” can damage or destroy the magnets due to the heat generated from the now-present electrical resistance.
I estimated this by subtracting the 5-6% of helium used globally by the fiber optic industry from the 15% of helium used by “semiconductors and fiber optics” from the United States Geological Survey report on helium.
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.
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.
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.
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.