I really enjoyed this oddlots podcast episode that covered similar points and had a lot of "wat" moments for me, including the US selling off its strategic helium reserves at a loss because politicians labeled it "party baloon reserve", and how long it takes to produce naturally and how hard it is to find, process and transport.
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.
The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive).
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.
It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper.
It was a penny wise and pound foolish political move to pretend to be financially responsible and reduce the deficit by some tiny rounding error on top of a rounding error amount.
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.
Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation.
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
Specifically, the US federal government. Just like most Americans don’t hate the people of Russia or Iran any more than the folks the next town over, I’ve never met someone from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, or pretty much anywhere else who hates all Americans. I’m sure they exist, but probably as a small minority. There’s plenty of reason to hate our government though, especially if it has threatened to destroy your entire civilization.
I don't know about the percentage of the population, but everyone who leaves Iran and learns English (or German) is much less likely to be a fan of the Iranian regime than those who never left Iran in the first place, so you'll definitely have a sampling bias.
Yeah, buy Americans are not target of Russian aggression and violence. Russia is kinda abstract ennemy far away. Feelings get stronger when the country is actual target of bombing.
Growing up in the Southern US, I met plenty "Let's bomb all the savages in the Middle Easy and take their oil" types. Some of them grew up to be self-proclaimed Nazis.
Just because someone hates you and calls you the devil (or loves you and calls you an angel) doesn't mean they think you're literally the physical embodiment. Especially when you're not even a living being but a country or a government. I'm pretty darn sure you can assume it's a metaphor and that your coworker doesn't have evidence to the contrary.
Literally the devil. Not metaphorically a bunch of bastards, the actual devil. And not as performed by Tom Ellis.
There's a reason why I asked the guy.
And I asked him a few years ago now, so "what the US did" that the regime found objectionable has more to do with the US support for Israel and all the consequences of that than it has to do with any direct attacks by the USA against Iran; for direct action I think you might need to look at the 1979 revolution to undo the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup?
God is documented as being rather keen on genocidal smiting. That is part of the exact problem. I googled two relevant examples:
1: God commands King Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants
2: When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often commanded to carry out total destruction against the Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass"
I'm not into religion, but it has had a massive influence on my culture (NZ) so I pay some attention to it.
It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests.
But this problem is not exclusive to America.
> sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
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.
Would like to add Vox is nowhere near the other's popularity, and has received substantial donations from... Hungary. A total of 6.5 million euros during the 2023 elections.
> 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.
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.
If Europe has "pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy" then why do they have nothing to show for it? They can't even protect their own sea lines of communication.
There are a lot of metrics, take your pick. But if you can't obtain reliable supplies of energy and other critical resources then none of the other metrics matter.
I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc.
And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives.
You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
The pledge is not to some painted cloth or the current government but the community of people you are part of and the decision of who leads them, made thru free and fair elections.
At least that's my view as someone that chose to come here and join this community out of my own free will.
I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.
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.
There's a fundamental disagreement among people on what "help" really is.
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.
It's scary how blind people are to this. The right wing wants to help people in the long term and the left wing wants to help people in the short term. Both approaches seem obviously wrong to adherents of the other because they both disadvantage the group that the other wants to help.
Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people. That's a characterization both sides use against each other because they refuse to understand each other.
> The right wing wants to help people in the long term
That sounds overly generous. It seems more like the right believes in social darwinism and feels like it benefits society overall by ridding us of lower quality people. The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.
If there are ANY people the right wing wants to help, it's rich people and grifters, and "long term" to them is like 3 months. Sorry, but the current admin IS "just bad" and DOES want to harm people - see ICE.
Try thinking of honest examples. If you can't, you're not competent to have thoughts about the topic because you will only be able to feel emotions and pretend they're thoughts.
> The right wing wants to help people in the long term
> Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people
Garbage. Mitch McConnell was on-record as saying during the Obama years that Republicans would be blocking any legislation from his administration that they could "even if it benefited the American people in any way" (his words, not mine) just so they could say it was a "do-nothing Presidency".
Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.
> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are
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.
That might be the noble aspiration that lives only inside their head, while outwardly the sentiment seems to look more like "make the government harmful so we can justify making it smaller."
This is a bit like saying a hangnail and a gangrenous amputation are "not equally bad but they are both very bad". One is literally chopping things off to permanently alter them. The other is, at times, uncomfortable and frustrating.
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.
The enlightened centrist take is not entirely wrong, though. The left definitely has some blind spots, among them their purist dedication to perfect morals and a willingness to tell anyone who does not perfectly agree to piss off.
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.
There’s a bit of a duality about perfect agreement within the voters for the party’s candidates and somewhat within the party membership itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of telling each other to piss off. There’s a lot of jockeying for the platform and the primaries. But come the general, it’s a minority of the voters who will sit it out or vote for a minor party. Sometimes it’s a large enough minority to hand things to the Republicans, though.
observe that where Helium becomes a significant percentage, there is also Hydrogen and (monoatomic) Oxygen.
if one were driven by purism or vanity for stoichiometric exactness, then at a height of 1000 km theres 2 Hydrogens per Oxygen atom, so this could be reacted to water, and the energy used to power compression of the Helium, the water would freeze.
without this vanity, helium becomes a significant fraction at much lower heights... and thus higher densities.
The energy to compress becomes nearly insignificant at low pressures.
if humanity ever builds space elevators, this will be one of many benefits of having space elevators.
The overall amount of helium in the atmosphere is still more than enough for the foreseeable future, and it could be extracted (albeit at high energy cost) by augmenting existing air separation units (ASU's). Of course natural gas wells currently provide an easier to extract source, seeing as the concentration there is way higher.
Helium is only 5ppm in the atmosphere. Extracting useful quantities of it that way will probably never be economically viable. In other words, if for some reason we can no longer get helium from natural gas wells then it will be cheaper to just let patients die instead of doing cryogenic distillation of helium from the atmosphere to run MRI machines.
We are already separating out the majority elements from air via ASU plants, so we should compare the abundance of helium in what is left from typical extraction. And that looks quite technically viable, if obviously uneconomic at present.
Oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and argon make up 99.94% of the atmosphere. The remaining 0.06% has 5ppm is nearly 1% helium. That's up 200x from the original concentration and is well above the 0.3% that is sometimes quoted as the limit for economic extraction of helium (and well below the 7% of some natural gas).
Furthermore, the leftover gas is also already cold. It is absolutely true that 85K isn't very close to the boiling point of helium, it is a lot closer than starting at the temperature of gas at the well head.
The gotcha is almost certainly going to be that an ASU probably doesn't liquify most of the gas it takes in. That means that the exhaust gas will only be slightly enhanced.
In a world of extremely cheap solar electricity pushing grid prices negative, a lot of things might be a lot more economical then conventionally thought though - particularly when you factor in the desire to get a full return on industrial manufacturing of panels.
For me personally, this is one of the most promising aspects of solar that I hope to see in the future. There are many, many things we could do but currently do not because the energy cost is not worth it. Push the energy cost to zero, or even below, and it will be interesting to see what new things become abundant.
If by “free” you mean “very very expensive” then i agree with you. It would cost a fortune to even just attempt a pilot project proving feasability. Then we would need to send up regular replacements to the “sending the harvest down” hardware at the minimum. Just imagining the cost of a tank which can be launched into space, autonomously dock with the collector sails, then deorbit and land makes my head spin. And then doing that at scale, paying people to launch it, paying people to operate the system.
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.
<10% of natural gas plants recover helium. All of them extract it. The remaining >90% vent it into the atmosphere. This is an engineering / money problem, not a physics problem.
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.
The article itself spells out several alternatives to buying continuous amounts of Helium: high temperature semiconductors and zero boil-off systems that don't require a continual supply.
All these "we're going to run out" stories pretend that engineering cannot adapt to changing cost structures, which is just total nonsense.
Sure, there is nothing that can be directly substituted for how we use Helium today, but clearly we're using Helium inefficiently today and the answer is that once markets force us to change, we will find more efficient ways.
There are many cases in the news of accidents with sometimes a large number of party balloons filled with hydrogen or other flammable gases.
One of the larger episodes was in 2012 in Armenia, where thousands of balloons exploded during a meeting, injuring 154 people, of which 4 seriously (the video is of poor quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWEm2sS7Dw8
I had a science teacher that did this in class, then taped a match on the end of a yardstick and held it under the balloon. They made quite a bang. I wouldn't want to be right next to it when it went off.
Pure hydrogen in a balloon produces a low, loud, very satisfying bang. Completely different from a sound of an air balloon popping. Here is a video from a very good Royal Society of Chemistry demonstration series on various unusual combustion process:
Hydrogen mixed with air or with oxygen produces an ear piercing supersonic detonation, exceedingly loud and unpleasant. Not recommended for demonstrations.
We did this. One balloon with plain air. One with pure hydrogen. One with 50/50 hydrogen and air. The one with pure hydrogen popped closer in magnitude to the pure air than it was to the 50/50 mix.
ETA: I may be misremembering, the more I think about it, the more I recall that we did not use air, we did use pure oxygen. Not like it was hard to get (and we had lots more interesting stuff than that in the lab, this was the 80s...). But the outcome I do remember. The entire point of the experiment was to examine the difference between the individual pure elements and the mix. We expected the pure hydrogen to be far more interesting than it turned out.
As a kid I took a lot of classes at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, which was paradise for fledgling nerds. On the last day they would have a little closing ceremony with some cute little science experiment. One of my favorites was "Going Out With A Bang".
The instructors would bring out a helium balloon and a candle on a meter stick. The balloon goes pop, huzzah.
Then the twist. "Hey, wanna do it again?" All the kids would be like "meh, I guess?" They would then bring out a balloon full of hydrogen (maybe some oxygen too?). It would look identical to the first one, floating there tethered to the lab bench.
When the candle hit the second one, it made a white flash and a really sharp BANG. It was an order of magnitude louder, and you could hear the transient bouncing off the walls and echoing in the halls. It made an impression.
Along with the other commenter, I'll add that a classroom is usually a lot bigger than a home dining room or other domestic party locations. That size also helps things dissipate instead of reflect. Not sure by how much but I'm sure it does something.
My chemistry teacher told us how once when he ignited helium in a test tube, the tube broke and he ended up with pieces of glass embedded in his skin. The students had face masks and he was looking the other way "just in case" for this "safe" experiment but he could have easily been blinded.
Things can always go wrong. We probably shouldn't strive for 100% safety because they we'd spend our lives in a padded cell. But we also shouldn't assume things are safe because they're common or routine.
> It becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas.
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.
As usual - 'there is scarcity of XYZ' -> price it accordingly, and markets will align quickly. Dont expecr private companies to have long term thinking, thats not how bonuses for those steering the wheel are set up.
I’m not really worried about any potential helium shortage. We are actually really good at extracting it, the problem is purely economics and as soon as prices get to the point where investment is warranted then there will continue to be adequate supplies. The main issue right now is the proper demand increase forecasts do not align with potential investments costs and helium extraction investment does just not make much economic sense given current forecast Helium costs.
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.
It's very hard if not impossible to do predictions over century timescales. How relevant are 1926 resource problems to today? If you wrote your comment in 1926 you would be talking about rubber, fertilizer, coal, wood or oil, and 4 out of those 5 are mostly solved today.
At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.
I agree century timescales are tough, I'm not convinced 4 of 5 of your listed things have been solved.
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.
Exactly -- that means that any analysis based on the current (as of 1926) 'reserves' or 'production capacity' for rubber/fertilizer/coal/wood would have been invalidated as soon as we switched to using oil instead. Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows). At that point, what you'd have to have forecasted would be the 'reserves' of nitrogen, which are functionally infinite.
Isn’t those calculations pretty unreliable? It’s like those predictions we only have 5 or 10 years of oil left. And then we find more oil or better extraction process and we got another 10 years and so on.
It looks like that by simply reducing use in welding, lifting, and purging gas (all with clear alternatives) and maybe also 'leak detection' and 'other' (not expounded on in the article), they can fill in for the entire Qatari output, and that's without including extra production and recycling which is quiet possible.
For diving, there has been some experimental use of hydrogen as a partial replacement for helium in breathing gas mixtures. This obviously increases the risk of fires and the physiological effects aren't fully understood. But it might eventually be used in commercial, military, and exploration diving for those cases where we need to send humans really deep and using an atmospheric suit isn't an option. Regular sport divers will probably never breathe hydrogen.
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.
ROVs have already reduced the demand for commercial divers on some types of work. But it's going to take decades (if ever) until they're able to do the full range of human tasks. Some construction work has to be done essentially by feel in near-zero visibility so using an ROV for that would require advanced force feedback mechanisms, maybe imaging sonar and other sensors. Not necessarily impossible, but extraordinarily difficult and extremely expensive with current technology.
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.
Xenon is very rare too and currently without substitute for certain medical applications, but more interestingly it produces psychoactive effects that could shed light on stuff no other substance apparently can: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11203236/
The long tail economic ramifications that this disruption to the supply chain will have could be potentially decades, in ways that will most certainly be catastrophic, and what's concerning to me is how small of a percentage of the population (at least in the US) is grasping this.
mostly out of our reach unless you have way of removing it from the sun without your retrieval craft melting or being captured by the suns gravity well or from gas giants without the onboard system being fried by the intense radiation or again captured by the gravitation.
If we have such advanced tech, and trip to big planets would seem economically feasible, I think we will be long beyond the point of desperately needing transporting helium to do such crazy trips.
Qatar produce(s/d) about a third of global helium. With the force majeure in place I won't be launching student HABs anytime soon. (Schools don't like hydrogen)
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.
Helium exists in great quantities in the 4 big planets, which unlike Earth have strong enough gravity to retain it.
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.
And that's where all of our helium actually comes from. Any radioactive decay that emits alpha particles generates helium, since alpha particles are just helium nuclei. When that happens underground, the helium can get trapped. It tends to get trapped in the same places that natural gas gets trapped, so natural gas extraction often encounters helium as well.
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.
Dumb question, but is there any world where a fission reactor could reasonably genrate waste with a short enough half-life to produce meaningful amounts of helium as a side-gig?
I'd say no, although the amount of helium that's produced is small enough that it's not quite as absurd as I would have thought. Worldwide helium production is something around 25,000 tons/year. A nuclear power plant produces about 25 tons of waste per year. There are about 440 nuclear power plants in the world. If their waste consisted entirely of helium, that would be roughly 44% of total world helium production. More than I guessed! But, of course, only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that waste ever turns into helium, so even if you somehow made it decay all at once, it would be be pretty insignificant on a world scale.
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.
It's often found alongside natural gas because the rock structures that can trap methane can also trap other gasses, but the original source is different - thermal decomposition of organic matter for natural gas and radioactive decay, mostly of uranium and thorium, for helium.
I agree that the "accumulation over millions of years" is similar (and similarly a potential problem if we burn through all that accumulation).
Helium will leak out of some structures that hold methane. Shale will trap methane and let helium escape. Layers of salt trap both. Thus horizontal drilling and fracking to recover oil and methane from shale produces very little helium.
Which is exactly 100% of Earth's helium. Every single helium atom we use is a result of alpha decay, as a very good approximation there isn't any primordial or stellar helium on or in Earth.
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.
Recently had to deal with radon in a basement, leading me to a fun side trek of learning about uranium decay (it has been a lot of years since chemistry classes).
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.
The particle that is emitted from an alpha decay isn't actually called a He atom (I edited my root comment so this isn't misleading, apologies) -- I was being loose with terminology -- though it has the right number of protons and neutrons. It's called an alpha particle. Once it steals two electrons -- it carries a +2 charge and is extremely successfully at slicing electrons off of other molecules it comes across -- it is then considered the helium that we know and love, and is now stable with the properties we know.
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.
Because it rapidly steals electrons, it becomes inert quickly. Helium you find lying around will be inert. Helium that has just shot out from the radioactive decay of an unstable atom will not be inert.
The US used to have a massive Strategic Helium Reserve [1]. Starting in the 1990s, Congress passed a law to sell down the reserve. This flooded the market with cheap Helium (yay, party balloons?) because the mandated pricing just didn't make any sense.
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.
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.
Ironically exactly now - while we are at or close to peak natural gas extraction - would be the best time to fill up strategic helium reserves worldwide. If every natural gas well was required to capture and store helium for future use we could extend that runway by multiple generations.
But instead of our grandparents and great grandparents general idea of investing in the future of their societies, we’ve decided to stop doing that and add up all the debt possible to pass down to future generations.
> But instead of our grandparents and great grandparents general idea of investing in the future of their societies, we’ve decided to stop doing that and add up all the debt possible to pass down to future generations.
This is even true at a genetic level, the human genome is rich in fitness, but with healthcare we are lifting natural selection pressure and feasting on the fitness we inherited as if it can be taken for granted, at the cost of future generations genetic fitness.
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.
>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.
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.
I recently began wondering if a planet's helium supply could be the 'great filter'. As in, if a civilization could stall out due to not having access to enough helium to product the technology to access off-world helium.
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.
Your post is frustrating to read because of the incorrect spelling and grammar; these errors make it hard to take you seriously.
>""The war in Iran" should be called for what it is:
>"Its "trumps war", nothing else. Hes the solely to blaim. Israel would never had started it on their own.
>"The kicker? MAGA voted for "the no wars president", and so far hes started FIVE."
Could be:
"The war in Iran" should be called what it is:
It's 'Trump's War', and nothing else. He's solely to blame. Israel would not have started it on their own.
The kicker is that MAGA voted for the 'no-war' president, and so far, he's started five.
Note that in addition to spelling and grammar, I switched "FIVE" to lower-case italics (which are reverted to regular because the block is italicized), as capitalizing for emphasis is against the HN guidelines.
So how hard would it be for elon to build a gas raffinery sattelite that captures helium while skimming the top layer of the atmosphere, dropping filled canisters by parachute?
The biggest obstacle is that planetary extraction has to become too expensive, so space extraction becomes viable. If that were the case, it would probably be safer to mine the Moon, to avoid further messing of the atmosphere with refineries or even more frequent space flights.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
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.
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.
[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
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.
Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
The same Russia that Trump can’t get enough of.
There's a reason why I asked the guy.
And I asked him a few years ago now, so "what the US did" that the regime found objectionable has more to do with the US support for Israel and all the consequences of that than it has to do with any direct attacks by the USA against Iran; for direct action I think you might need to look at the 1979 revolution to undo the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup?
All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
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.
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 comparison is stark.
I wish my country had achieved half as much in terms of infrastructure.
And in terms of protecting themselves, if the US stopped protecting Russia, the situation there would be a lot tidier.
It couldn’t open the straits and begged for help from is ‘weak’ ‘allies’.
Europe wouldn’t have been all that impressed.
I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc.
And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives.
You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
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.
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.
Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people. That's a characterization both sides use against each other because they refuse to understand each other.
That sounds overly generous. It seems more like the right believes in social darwinism and feels like it benefits society overall by ridding us of lower quality people. The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.
> Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people
Garbage. Mitch McConnell was on-record as saying during the Obama years that Republicans would be blocking any legislation from his administration that they could "even if it benefited the American people in any way" (his words, not mine) just so they could say it was a "do-nothing Presidency".
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.
That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.
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.
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.
the density is low though
observe that where Helium becomes a significant percentage, there is also Hydrogen and (monoatomic) Oxygen.
if one were driven by purism or vanity for stoichiometric exactness, then at a height of 1000 km theres 2 Hydrogens per Oxygen atom, so this could be reacted to water, and the energy used to power compression of the Helium, the water would freeze.
without this vanity, helium becomes a significant fraction at much lower heights... and thus higher densities.
The energy to compress becomes nearly insignificant at low pressures.
if humanity ever builds space elevators, this will be one of many benefits of having space elevators.
Oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and argon make up 99.94% of the atmosphere. The remaining 0.06% has 5ppm is nearly 1% helium. That's up 200x from the original concentration and is well above the 0.3% that is sometimes quoted as the limit for economic extraction of helium (and well below the 7% of some natural gas).
Furthermore, the leftover gas is also already cold. It is absolutely true that 85K isn't very close to the boiling point of helium, it is a lot closer than starting at the temperature of gas at the well head.
The gotcha is almost certainly going to be that an ASU probably doesn't liquify most of the gas it takes in. That means that the exhaust gas will only be slightly enhanced.
GP ain't wrong, but the phrasing implied we'd have it closer by than it actually is.
But, I'm also confident they were making a silly joke.
http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/atmos...
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.
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.
We use a lot in our MR scanners.
The tech is changing and magnets are using far far less.
Super-conduction at higher temperatures has made progress too.
So while you are right that nothing else stays liquid at those temps, we won’t be needing nearly as much helium in radiology in the next few years.
The new generation use something like 700ml of helium, where the standard was hundreds of litres. https://magneticsmag.com/siemens-healthineers-gets-fda-clear...
All these "we're going to run out" stories pretend that engineering cannot adapt to changing cost structures, which is just total nonsense.
Sure, there is nothing that can be directly substituted for how we use Helium today, but clearly we're using Helium inefficiently today and the answer is that once markets force us to change, we will find more efficient ways.
How dangerous are party balloons filled with hydrogen? Not a whole balloon arch obviously.
One of the larger episodes was in 2012 in Armenia, where thousands of balloons exploded during a meeting, injuring 154 people, of which 4 seriously (the video is of poor quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWEm2sS7Dw8
A smaller, more recent episode in India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH5JwHeKnZo
How does that bang compare to the bang from an equally-inflated balloon full of ordinary air?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwbyl7ywfhk&list=PLLnAFJxOjz...
Hydrogen mixed with air or with oxygen produces an ear piercing supersonic detonation, exceedingly loud and unpleasant. Not recommended for demonstrations.
ETA: I may be misremembering, the more I think about it, the more I recall that we did not use air, we did use pure oxygen. Not like it was hard to get (and we had lots more interesting stuff than that in the lab, this was the 80s...). But the outcome I do remember. The entire point of the experiment was to examine the difference between the individual pure elements and the mix. We expected the pure hydrogen to be far more interesting than it turned out.
The instructors would bring out a helium balloon and a candle on a meter stick. The balloon goes pop, huzzah.
Then the twist. "Hey, wanna do it again?" All the kids would be like "meh, I guess?" They would then bring out a balloon full of hydrogen (maybe some oxygen too?). It would look identical to the first one, floating there tethered to the lab bench.
When the candle hit the second one, it made a white flash and a really sharp BANG. It was an order of magnitude louder, and you could hear the transient bouncing off the walls and echoing in the halls. It made an impression.
I would.
Things can always go wrong. We probably shouldn't strive for 100% safety because they we'd spend our lives in a padded cell. But we also shouldn't assume things are safe because they're common or routine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process
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.
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.
At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.
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.
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.
* 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-...
https://indepthmag.com/hydrogen-dreamin/
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.
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.
It would be quite expensive to extract it from there, due to the necessity of escaping from their gravitational field, but not impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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...
They are indeed. The average planet busting Gamma Ray Burst is just a Vogon trying to "get the whole family in".
I agree that the "accumulation over millions of years" is similar (and similarly a potential problem if we burn through all that accumulation).
> These could exist in planets like Neptune or Uranus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_compounds
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.
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.
Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future
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.
tfa:
> Thanks to its filled outer electron shell, it is inert, and won’t react with other materials
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.
“Because they are identical to helium nuclei, they are also sometimes written as He2+…” [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
But instead of our grandparents and great grandparents general idea of investing in the future of their societies, we’ve decided to stop doing that and add up all the debt possible to pass down to future generations.
It is quite depressing to think about.
This is even true at a genetic level, the human genome is rich in fitness, but with healthcare we are lifting natural selection pressure and feasting on the fitness we inherited as if it can be taken for granted, at the cost of future generations genetic fitness.
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.
>""The war in Iran" should be called for what it is:
>"Its "trumps war", nothing else. Hes the solely to blaim. Israel would never had started it on their own.
>"The kicker? MAGA voted for "the no wars president", and so far hes started FIVE."
Could be:
"The war in Iran" should be called what it is:
It's 'Trump's War', and nothing else. He's solely to blame. Israel would not have started it on their own.
The kicker is that MAGA voted for the 'no-war' president, and so far, he's started five.
Note that in addition to spelling and grammar, I switched "FIVE" to lower-case italics (which are reverted to regular because the block is italicized), as capitalizing for emphasis is against the HN guidelines.