Price Shocks May Be Coming For Helium Supply 362
Ars has an update on the potential helium shortage we discussed a couple of years back. A Nobel laureate, Robert Richardson, argues for ending market distortions that are resulting in an artificially low price for helium, which is accelerating the projected exhaustion of the supply. "Richardson's solution is to rework the management of the Bush Dome [so named for reasons that have nothing to do with the politician] stockpile once again, this time with the aim of ensuring that helium's price rises to reflect its scarcity. In practical terms, he said that it would be better to deal with a 20-fold increase in price now than to deal with it increasing by a factor of thousands in a few decades when supply issues start to become critical. But he also made an emotional appeal, stating, 'One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever.'"
Killing Brain Cells to end soon (Score:3, Insightful)
"One generation doesn't have the right to..." (Score:5, Insightful)
One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever.
Like property rights, why should land only be able to be sold by those who got to it first (or bought it from those who did) - I wasn't able to compete with them and doesn't seem fair that my ancestors lack of ability to "win" should deprive me.
And the same thing for all the minerals that have already been mined from the earth. And in fact, every single thing on the entire planet, ever.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
emotional appeal? (Score:2, Insightful)
It sounds more like a sound moral argument to me, but I guess anything which doesn't have a "$", "€", or similar symbol attached to it doesn't count as rational anymore.
Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..." (Score:3, Insightful)
doesn't seem fair that my ancestors lack of ability to "win" should deprive me.
Similarly, your ancestors lack of ability to provide for their offspring shouldn't deprive me.
Re:Health care impact (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the only choices we've allowed ourselves are 1) use it all up now; 2) impose Strict Market Discipline, we're just going to have to go with the latter since the former is clearly nuts.
Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..." (Score:3, Insightful)
So conservation == socialism? Why not, everything else does.
Re:Health care impact (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you don't recover it. At some price for helium, sucking the exhalations into a compressor, bottling it and selling it back to the gas company for reprocessing becomes cost effective. I don't imagine that recovering the helium would be difficult given the difference in densities between helium and other gases.
Re:Lets mine the Moon! (Score:3, Insightful)
But if you would multiply that by the number of all other people doing such experiments / fun and telling themselves (well, OK, mostly just don't know & don't care) that they don't have an impact?
Re:Biomass - a renewable resource (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it is. And hydron is the simply most common ones. Why are we then not all just using hydrogen for power?
Ding Ding Ding. Our planet is not a typical case of "universe", dimwitt.
Our helium sources are _very_ scarce, as it will depart our atmoshpere in quite a short time, geologically speaking. We have to make do with the results of radioactive decay down below, and even then you need something like long-time accumulation in natural gas fields to get usable helium fractions.
Re:Health care impact (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd hardly say that government regulations that are artificially deflating the price of helium is 'libertarian'.
Given the description, the helium is a natural resource 'owned' by the government. A proper libertarian response is that the government should get the maximum price it can get for it. IE the most benefit.
As mentioned, 20X the price might be a little less money in our pocket now, but it's much more later. Fusion plants aren't going to provide sufficient quantities any time soon.
Re:Biomass - a renewable resource (Score:3, Insightful)
"abundant" does not equal "easily available". The Sun for instance, is "relatively" close to us in space, and contains more helium than we could ever use, many million times over. Stars tend to have a lot of that and hydrogen in them. But it's not easy for us to get, obviously.
The problem with helium is it's light enough to escape earth's gravity well, and drift off into space. Because of that, it's not in our atmosphere anywhere in any concentration. So we have to get it from the ground. Looks like the main source is natural gas wells. So all we need to renew our helium supply is more dinosaurs.
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:0, Insightful)
Insightful MY ASS.
Prices rises, lower concentrations become economically viable, util we use all the fucking Earth crust.
This is just a STUPID rant with the all too common "blame the rich". Way more resources are used keeping stupid people like you viable than keeping my humble pleasure boat.
Re:the coming century (Score:5, Insightful)
why is that?
I live in redneckland. It sucks at times and is great at others. But maybe I can give you some insight as a result.
1) Often, "intelligently and prudently" comes across as very condescending, and that doesn't sit well with most people, regardless of their intelligence or social status.
2) People around here have a very high distrust of anyone that doesn't believe the same as them. Yes, that means religion, and their belief that anyone who isn't their particular variety of christian is automatically "wrong" in some manner. Add to that the fact that most people haven't ever lived far from where they grew up, and a distrust of most "big city folk", and a paranoia of those from either the east or west coasts.
3) Most of the things you mention aren't an issue around here, so there's also a big case of "out of sight out of mind". Fishing? That's a way to spend the afternoon drinking beer; not a way of life (though some of the bass fishermen would call those fightin' words). Aquifer depletion? Not a huge deal here (yet). Oil? Again, not produced here, and no one will care until it all goes away.
4) Things that work in the more densely populated area simply won't work here. Small commuter cars are great in cities and suburbs. A better system of public transit and light rail would be completely awesome to have. But they really don't work out in the rural areas. So various proposals that have been made regarding high taxes on gas, or on "gas guzzlers" (specifically light trucks), are seen as directly and unfairly targeting them.
5) Incomes out here are very low compared to the coasts. So while people in Boston or LA may not think much of something that might cost an extra $1000 / year per family, people out here often cannot afford it. When a family of 4 are barely getting by on an income under $30k before taxes are taken out, ANY increase is difficult. Being told "it's worth it" by someone out east making 6 figures, with no kids, and a wife/husband/partner who ALSO makes a nearly 6 figure salary, doesn't go over very well.
6) Lastly, when they try to make any of these points, they're often dismissed with little thought because they often don't come across as terribly educated. So when they find anyone willing to listen, they can be fiercely loyal.
I'm not saying any of these make people around here right (indeed, I often disagree with them on just about everything), just trying to explain part of what's going on.
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:4, Insightful)
The best way to reduce mineral scarcity, eliminate the psychopaths who consume resources beyond all reason, no more mega yachts, mansions, private jets et al. the planet can no longer cope with them.
Wrong. The best way is to develop the world as fast as humanly possible. Why? Because the more resources people consume, the less children they have. If population growth is our enemy, then our friend is economic growth. This is happening in a big way in places like India, which previously was a huge pop growth center. It is still growing, but it is down from 6 births per woman to 2.75 per woman [google.com]. Why? not because of environmentalism, government or anything. It is because of consumerism and capitalism. Why? because women decided that they'd rather have cars then kids. What this means is that if we build, build, build, we end up with less people total. If we conserve and become poorer, more people will be born, and we will end up with a overpopulation catastrophe. Oh, and the mega yachts etc. of the ultra rich aren't the main resource users. It's average people in developed countries. It doesn't really matter though, because we haven't used all that much of the earth's metals.
not only from mining but also from refining (which becomes much worse as you deal with less viable mining resources).
Wrong again, rtb61. A mine in a poorer country that dumps toxic waste into a river is bad news. A modern mine, with all it's emission controls and neutralization processes is not. You really have to understand the difference between an open coal fire and highly emissions controlled one.
The world contains more than enough metal for all the stuff the enviros love to hate. More energy then we could ever find a way to use hits the earth from the sun. However, we need to actually use it. Then all 15 billion of us can live in mansions, and drive flying SUVs. The real psychopaths are people like you who wish to deny people the right to live their lives to fullest. The best way to reduce mineral scarcity (and this is proven over and over) is to allow entrepreneurs and capitalists to find new methods of mining, recycling, and substitution of materials, and sue them if they dump acid down the drain.
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:4, Insightful)
The best way to reduce mineral scarcity, eliminate the psychopaths who consume resources beyond all reason, no more mega yachts, mansions, private jets et al. the planet can no longer cope with them.
So when are you going to kill yourself? I believe that would do more to reduce mineral scarcity than killing off the producers.
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:5, Insightful)
"The best way to reduce mineral scarcity, eliminate the psychopaths who consume resources beyond all reason, no more mega yachts, mansions, private jets et al. the planet can no longer cope with them."
Nice rage, but the above listed uses consume a trivial amount of resources compared to more mundane but widespread consumption.
"the rest of us the majority still should consider all future generations of humanity in the way we use and abuse our mutual resources, not just the next but thousands of years even hundreds of thousands of years into the future."
Precisely why should we do this?
Re:Lets mine the Moon! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, airships should absolutely no longer be allowed to use helium for buoyancy. They ought to use hydrogen, hot-air, or, heck, even nitrogen.
When there are so many alternatives, there's no good reason to use helium, especially when there are medical and scientific uses that practically require helium to be effective. Ever try diving deep on hydrox? Hydrogen plus oxygen plus pressure is not a cocktail one would recommend lightly.
Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..." (Score:4, Insightful)
And the same thing for all the minerals that have already been mined from the earth
Without mining minerals from the earth, we'd be stuck in the Stone Age. It's a tradeoff - our generation gets less minerals to work with, but in exchange we get all our technology. With that in mind, it's reasonable to say that things created by people are the property of their creators, since you have the same (arguably better with all of your aforementioned technology) chance at creating stuff that they did. Since everything on Earth that lasts long enough to be multi-generational and is scarce enough to bother having a property system around is either land, minerals or products, it looks like only land ownership is unfair (a point that can be argued rather convincingly, IMO).
Re:Lets mine the Moon! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, the overlap between common aircraft dopes [wikipedia.org] and "really flammable shit" is an unfortunate one.
Assuming you just use mylar or something, you probably won't be Hindenberging in the living room quite as often...
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:5, Insightful)
Normal minerals don't go anywhere after you use them, they either remain in circulation or end up in a landfill, which we'll eventually mine for resources later. Helium rises through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere.. until the solar wind or a photon, random collisions gives it enough velocity to bounce off into space, never to return.
It's critical to at least attempt to recover helium since we don't really have it in abundance (like hydrogen, locked as it is in the oceans) and it can so easily be lost forever. At the very least, we should try to keep the annual consumption of helium below the annual production, and I don't mean the rate at which we pull it out of the ground, but the rate at which it forms naturally as a decay product of minerals throughout the earth's crust.
Re:Lets mine the Moon! (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why the post above responding to you is at +3 insightful. It is not. Because if you "multiply that by the number of all other people doing such experiments / fun and telling themselves that they don't have an impact" as Sznupi says, you still only end up with a trivial fraction of He use overall, since only 7% of all He production is used in "fill" applications for buoyancy etc. I'm pretty sure the majority of that 7% is going to fill weather balloons and blimps and the like as you note, and the overwhelming majority ISN'T being used as kid's party decoration.
So don't worry, go out, get your kid one of those small $40 tanks and have fun. Better still, use your imagination and take the opportunity to teach your kids about some physics / chemistry. Start with the phenomenon of buoyancy and how that works (look at how a He filled balloon weirdly behaves in a car), show how helium is non-flammable and explain where its inertness comes from (electron valency - It's already "happy" with the number of e- it has), pick up a cheapo $10 vacuum thermos from Wal-mart or wherever and have your local welding supply shop fill it with liquid nitrogen ($5) so you can demonstrate how gasses expand/contract with temperature changes (the air in a balloon that has been manually blown full will liquefy in LN2, but a He filled balloon won't - explain WHY!), show them some videos about liquid helium on youtube and how much colder it is than LN2, explain how breathing it shifts the speed of sound - thereby shifting the pitch of your voice, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Is some of this well beyond the level of your 8yr old? Hell yes, and that's why you should do it! It doesn't matter if kids "get it" 100% all the time as so many stultifying grammar school teachers stupidly seem to believe. It matters much more that they are exposed to new things that make them think about familiar phenomena in new ways. They'll remember how fun and interesting the experience was, and the curiosity bred from that will stick with them forever. [/tangent]
Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..." (Score:2, Insightful)
How would you prefer land ownership to work?
Re:"One generation doesn't have the right to..." (Score:3, Insightful)
He phrases the whole issue in terms of property rights. The idea that some evil liberal-big-government cabal is down on the concept of private property is at the core of all arguments by people fulminating against "socialism."
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:5, Insightful)
I venture to guess that you haven't traveled much. It's easy to rail against environmentalism when
1) You have your own SUV to think about
2) You live in a country with abundant natural resources, trees, land, and relatively low population per area
3) Environmental destruction is an abstract concept that only "left wing wackos" and people who want to take away your "right to consume" rail on about...
4) You consume (or produce) commercially sponsored news/research/propaganda
Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:
1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity
2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)
3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).
4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).
I'm no saint. I own an SUV. I commute. I take international flights. I drink bottled water.
But there's a HUGE difference between not living up to your values and actually BELIEVING that what you do would be good policy if everyone else on the planet did it. The latter may make you feel good, but leads to the election of decision makers who create policies that are far more harmful than the actions (good or bad) of a single individual.
Re:I can't wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean to tell me that Alpha Decay is rare in the universe? I simply don't buy the argument.
Alpha decay generally happens to elements heavier than lead. Those elements are only created as a small side reaction in supernova explosions. Only a fraction of matter is in stars, and only a fraction of stars become supernovas, and only a small fraction of the matter in a supernova becomes heavy elements. Relative to the total matter in the universe, alpha decay is in the parts-per-billion category. In particular, the abundance of helium is NOT due to alpha decay.
The Earth is not so special that we can have zero Helium.
It is pretty special. The only thing that holds helium over the long term is gravity, and earth just doesn't have enough of it. The only place we can get at abundant helium is gas giant planets, and we don't have any technology in the foreseeable future to lift anything out of those gravity wells.
Arguing that helium is abundant in the universe therefore there must be plenty on earth is silly. Using that logic, I could say that a much, if not most, of the planetary mass in our solar system is in the form of metallic hydrogen. Therefore metallic hydrogen is available for us to use here.
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:3, Insightful)
If only the Romans had been more conservative with their wood resource use! If they had carefully controlled the cutting of trees and rationed the wood, they could have theoretically never run out, and we would still be using the burning of wood as our primary energy source today.
The next energy and/or mineral gap is always just around the bend, and while prices are cheap, people never develop (or find) alternatives. I agree that we should not be keeping the helium price artificially low, but don't think that we should go into crisis rationing mode just yet.
There are alternatives on the horizon (using NMR as an example since I am familiar with it): high temperature superconductors exist that some day will be able to make powerful magnetic fields while cooled only by nitrogen. More sensitive detectors and better analysis methods can yield more data from weaker magnets. There are solutions just waiting to be found. If we ran out of helium today, I promise you that organic chemists would still be using NMR in a year.
Friend of mine actually said something similar to me. It's bad when people use that kind of thinking when they're assuming property prices will always go higher just because it has so far. It's just downright scary when you're using the same logic on resources that may or may not be replacable by The Next Big Thing.
Natives on Easter Island would no doubt have come up with a conservation plan if they had indeed come to the conclusion that there was NEVER going to be a replacement for wood. Part of the reason they chopped that island clean of trees is probably due to the same kind of thinking you're doing now.
There are not infinite sources of energy (Score:3, Insightful)
USA based flat earth doom and gloom (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:3, Insightful)
It is just unbelievable that this was modded insightful. Parent couldn't be further off base.
I shudder to think what would happen when the approx. 500 million modern consumers in this world are joined by another 5.5 billion modern consumers. It would probably result in a direct proportional increase in natural resource expenditure and environmental destruction. This planet cannot support the people that are on it now in the way we have been living so far, and you think that transforming those 5 billion poor people into Americans is the solution?
Re:There are not infinite sources of energy (Score:3, Insightful)
solar and alternative energies will never provide more than 10-20% of world consumption.
Why?
You got the wrong message (Score:2, Insightful)
I venture to guess that you haven't traveled much. It's easy to rail against environmentalism...
Read what he wrote again. He's not railing against environmentalism, he's saying let us live our lives to the fullest.
You chose to interpret that as being against environmentalism. Well I have travelled a lot internationally, including to parts of Africa and South America. What I took away from all the things you listed (and I saw all of them in spades) is this - any country with a poor economy is inherently going to suck at environmental care. In part because they do not have the resources, but also in part because poor people care less about the world that surrounds them.
If all 15 million of us lived in mansions and drove flying SUV's, the earth would look like a garden because everyone would have the spare resources and abilities to take care of the environment. So if you REALLY care about the environment, you should be doing everything in your power to boost economies, anywhere you can make a difference. You should be dying to give people that flying SUV so they care that they have beautiful places to visit in it, instead of deforesting the area where they live simply to have heat and cooking fuel.
Re:No Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Even practical nuclear fusion wouldn't generate nearly enough helium to meet today's needs. Fusion creates an incredibly tiny amount of helium. Even if all of the electrical power in the world was generated by fusion there wouldn't be enough helium produced to fill a single Goodyear blimp in a year.
There's already shortages of helium-3 (an isotope that has to be manufactured). The entire world only produces 20,000 liters of helium-3 per year (it takes 368 million liters of helium to fill a blimp).
See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/us/23helium.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=helium%20billions&st=cse [nytimes.com]
Once the natural supply of helium-2 runs out, all helium would have to be produced on earth artificially or somehow imported from other parts of the solar system. It would take billions of years for enough uranium to decay to replenish the earth's supply of helium.
Also, from one of the articles linked to in the story (Sobotka refers to Lee Sobotka, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis):
"When we use what has been made over the approximate 4.5 billion of years the Earth has been around, we will run out," Sobotka said . "We cannot get too significant quantities of helium from the sun — which can be viewed as a helium factory 93 million miles away — nor will we ever produce helium in anywhere near the quantities we need from Earth-bound factories. Helium could eventually be produced directly in nuclear fusion reactors and is produced indirectly in nuclear fission reactors, but the quantities produced by such sources are dwarfed by our needs."
Re:Someone owns stocks in major helium producers (Score:3, Insightful)
Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:
1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity
2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)
3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).
4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).
So in other words, pretty much like America too, until we got rich and instituted environmental regulation? Like how 20 people died and 7,000 grew sick in a 1948 smog incident in Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org]? That and many other incidents in the same vein were what spurred the first air pollution regulations in this country. That we all take clean air for granted today is a testament to their effectiveness.
But when you're poor, you live in lousy conditions anyway, so pollution isn't the most important thing on your mind (vs., e.g., disease or starvation). Plus, pollution controls make things more expensive, and you need that money for necessities. It's completely rational for poorer societies to tolerate more pollution, and that is in fact what happens. None of this is the fault of developed nations – it's due to developing nations' quite sensible lack of pollution regulations. As they grow richer, they'll regulate pollution more, totally independent of us.