Helium is again in short supply | Hacker News Reader

Helium is again in short supply

physicstoday.scitation.org

20 pointsmoelf13 comments

How do these people not have reclamation systems yet? Helium supply has been constrained for years upon years and is not really going to get fundamentally different in the future, so reclamation is kind of a no-brainer. And helium is gone forever if you don't catch it on its way out the door: it does actually escape the atmosphere. It's not like other resources that can be theoretically later reclaimed from landfills and the like.

Now I am starting to see why the high vacuum/helium greybeards back in grad school thought there should be criminal penalties for wasting helium... the incentives here are just misaligned.

Actually Helium is what alpha particles become after they acquire 2 electrons. And alpha particles is what Radon radiates [1]. There’s plenty of Helium being produced every moment on this planet. Some gets trapped underground in pockets of natural gas. There is such a case in Arizona, where the natural gas contains 8.3% Helium [2].

[1] https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclide-basics-radon

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...

Of course it's still being produced, and of course it's truly lost when vented.

The question is, how do production rates, exploitable production rates, and usage rates compare? And what are our options should production fall sharply for whatever reason?

350k for a university that uses NMRs is pocket change, no excuses. In the article it mentions that one of the universities that use the recycling system has managed to collect 5000 liters of helium, which would power one of the other universities’ equipment for 50 months without any further recovery.

The short answer is that there aren't enough funding dollars, and the ones that are there are too hard to win.

Reclamation systems are a one-time large expense and a small maintenance expense thereafter. Helium is a medium-sized expense... forever.

If you're grant funded and your lab doesn't have a huge amount of discretionary cash or a flagship experiment that justifies a reclamation system, welp, all that helium's gonna get vented.

Thankfully, a lot of systems have switched to dry cryostats. If you can survive the vibrations, cryopumped systems are way more pleasant to work on.

If you have one apparatus using LHe, sure, fine, I can see why venting the He might make sense. (The greybeards can still be furious, but that's on them.) But when you have twenty-eight... I kind of feel like that's somewhat past the point where reclamation starts to be a win for everyone (except the LHe suppliers).

I mean, the youngbloods don't like venting helium either. Reclamation would be a huge win, but who is going to pay for it? We would like to pay for it, but we also want to continue working which means getting new grants and not going to federal prison.

Did the US government decide to vent a huge supply of helium that it was sitting on some years ago? I remember hearing anguish about that. It had been recovered from decades of oil well operations and saved til someone decided that it wasn't likely to be useful, as the story went. So poof, gone.

I recall hearing that the national stockpile was being sold off. I don't think even the US government would consider straight up venting it.

With all these fusion companies popping up... The energy in - energy out might not work out (yet?) but why can't they supply helium? I assume the reason is economics?

If you think about it, the quantities of helium that will be produced by fusion reactors are necessarily extremely small. E=mc^2 and all that.

The beamline at the LHC is "powered" by a hydrogen bottle the size of a small fire extinguisher, as an example of the scales involved.

My (layman's) understanding of nuclear reactions is that the m in the equation is the difference in mass before and after the reaction, so if two 2H make one 4He, somehow there is a small change in the total mass that gets converted to energy. Depending on how small this mass actually is, you may still make a fair amount of helium.

Do I have the idea right, and its just that there is so much energy in the mass difference that it really ends up making very little? Or am I way off base somehow?

Yes, you have the right idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy#Fission...

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