According to the article, Helium is sourced from natural gas fields but few other details - Oh, and there is a discovery of a potential helium supply field in Tanzania not much information .
What? they didn’t blame Trump or global warming?
Every couple of years the MSM runs one of these “we’re running out of helium” stories.
At least when there’s a Republican in the Oval, they do.
Party City, isn’t that right next door to Spatula City.
Now we come to find out that it is a critical substance? Uh ... I don't think so.
National Helium Reserve - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve The resulting "Helium Privatization Act of 1996" (Public Law 104273) directed the Department of the Interior to start selling off the reserve by 2005. By 2007, the federal government was reported as auctioning off the Amarillo Helium Plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
Here's the Government Manual
The problem is that Helium is a commodity, but it is managed by the US government - where have we heard this before. The US government Bureau of Land Management - where did I hear that name before - operates a thing called the National Helium Reserve and has historically set Helium prices at level required to repay the debt on building the facility. There are now moves to privatize this and in the process the NHR has in the last few years been auctioning off Helium in tranches. Prices have been rising. In the 2019 auction all tranches were bought by one purchaser thus creating a high priced private monopoly vs a low priced public monopoly.
It will take a number of years for this to settle out. The problem of course is that He production is largely from extraction from natural gas, but it must be extracted and stored, which is expensive - and at the old pre auction rate the price was too low to recover such costs.
With the government out of the business of setting the price for a commodity (remember Nixon, Carter price controls rationing and gas lines) there is some hope for some more reasonable stability as production investment, supply and demand are brought into some sort of alignment by the market process.
Not to worry. Once the Chinese get their fusion reactors going there will be an endless supply of helium.
“The direct “waste products” are Helium-4 and the neutron. The Helium-4 is nothing to be concerned about - it’s ordinary stable Helium.’
Reference https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/nuclear-fusion-waste-products.121166/
It’s much more fun to fill balloons with water.
Helium actually is a commodity/resource that should be conserved. Unlike old growth redwood, helium doesn’t grow on trees, and is a vital strategic resource for high tech and military. We got cocky with billions of cubic feet of the stuff sitting on salt domes accumulated over millions of years ripe for the taking, but now it’s getting scarce, and no, the chinese ain’t coming to the rescue.
/ liberal science explanation, "We're the party of science"
Magnets supercooled with Helium is what makes MRIs work ...
Plenty of He around Jupiter.
Helium is a by-product of hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant fuel in the universe. The Sun converts billions of cc’s of hydrogen into helium virtually every second. I think we could figure something out about doing that here on Earth. Call AOC. She’s a genius on all thing related to climate science.
It’s not just the cold, liquid helium also ‘magically’ transfers quantum properties, both necessary to making superpowered supercooled magnets.
Each MRI machine takes enough helium to fill about 56,000 party balloons. And there’s about 50,000 MRI machines in the world. Makes for about 3 billion balloons worth of helium. Not enough for even half the people on earth to have one balloon on their next birthday.
Save the MRI machine! Ban birthdays!
Not this sh@# again? As long as parents can keep paying for balloons for their kids, there is no shortage.
Party City could always switch to hydrogen. Kids’ parties would be way more interesting.
Helium has been one of the primary shielding gases used in welding. Lots of fabrication now done with argon instead because of the ongoing helium shortage.
When aren’t scientists concerned about their made up crap? The only thing that really scares them is government getting smart and cutting off their funds for their made up crap!
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