So says
this article sent to me by the ever-vigilant Tiffani.
I did not know this before last week, but we (as a planet) are apparently running out of helium gas. Yes, that's right: We're running out of helium, the
second most abundant element in the universe. As I learned while "researching" this story, helium is not very easy to extract and collect (here on Earth), and there are only a few methods of gathering the gas that are economically viable. One would think, then, that helium would be fairly expensive to obtain, but at the moment it is not. It is rather cheap, in fact, and people are using it willy-nilly as a consequence. And wouldn't you know it, all of this is the fault of some meddling by the United States government. For the past ten or so years, the U.S. government has been keeping the price of helium artificially low by selling off its vast helium stockpiles at "fire sale prices."* If it keeps this up, the U.S. is going to have to start importing helium within the next ten to fifteen years.
You might think this isn't a very big deal (isn't helium just used for making balloons float?) but you'd be as misguided as I was before I cursorily looked into the matter. Helium is apparently necessary for sciencey things like MRIs and "probing the structure of matter." It was a surprise to me too, but
less than 7% of helium use in the U.S. is for "lifting." The main use of helium in the U.S., in fact, is to cool things down, both for industrial purposes (welding) and non-industrial purposes like "fundamental science" and magnetic resonance imagining.
If we run out of helium, then, we won't be able to have MRIs, and we won't be able to "probe the structure of matter" (we will be able to weld, we'll just have to do it like the Europeans and use argon). One can debate the relative problems the lack of MRIs and basic research would cause, but I think we can all agree it wouldn't be good to lose the ability to see inside our bodies or figure out how the universe works. We'll probably all die as a result.
The Guardian recently reported on the impending helium shortage, explaining the problem as follows:
[Helium gas is] used to cool atoms to around -270C to reduce their vibrations and make them easier to study. ...[It] is now becoming worryingly scarce...[and] research facilities probing the structure of matter, medical scanners and other advanced devices that use the gas may soon have to reduce operations or close because we are frittering away the world's limited supplies of helium on party balloons.
According to the Guardian, scientist Oleg Kirichek is pretty upset about the whole thing. He's the leader of a research team at the
Isis neutron beam facility at the UK's
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory...and also a giant
buzzkill.
"It costs £30,000 a day to operate our neutron beams, but for three days we had no helium to run our experiments on those beams," said Kirichek. "In other words we wasted £90,000 because we couldn't get any helium. Yet we put the stuff into party balloons and let them float off into the upper atmosphere, or we use it to make our voices go squeaky for a laugh. It is very, very stupid. It makes me really angry."
I might dismiss Mr. Kirichek as a dude justifiably angry over not being able to do his fancy science for a few days were it not for the fact that his concerns have been echoed by other scientists, including at least one who won the Nobel prize (Robert Richardson) AND works at Cornell (holla Ithaca) and who therefore has a good deal of credibility (in my eyes, anyway). Richardson, who co-chaired an
NRC committee on the helium scarcity problem
has been quoted as saying that existing helium supplies are currently being "squandered." The report issued by his committee says that the world might
run out of helium in 40 years if it continues to be used as it is today.
How on earth (no pun intended) are we running out of helium? Despite what
I one may think (and what the
Guardian clearly wishes to imply), it's not all party balloons and funny voice-making. The real culprit is the current price of helium, which has been kept artificially low over the past 10+ years and is thus being used unnecessarily in large quantities for things like welding. The price is low due to a
1996 act of Congress that dictated that a certain amount of surplus U.S. helium must be sold every year, to deplete the federal helium reserves and pay off the debt associated with said reserves with interest. Or something like that. Here's how
Science explains the matter.
In 1960, Congress told the now-defunct Bureau of Mines to stockpile helium piped from gas fields in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas in a rock formation called the Bush Dome Reservoir near Amarillo, Texas. By 1973, the dome held 1 billion cubic meters of gas. But the bureau’s helium sales were weaker than expected, and the reserve was losing money. So 13 years ago, Congress told the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which had taken control of the helium, to sell almost all of it by 2015. Congress required BLM to sell the gas for enough money to pay off the reserve’s debt—$1.66 per cubic meter with increases for inflation. At the time, BLM’s price for crude helium was above the market price for refined helium. Since 1995, however, global demand for helium has increased by nearly 70%, and BLM’s current price of $2.29 per cubic meter is below the price from private sources. The 60 million cubic meters pumped from the reserve each year make up half the crude helium brought to market in the United States and a third of the total worldwide. So, the report says, the low price, which BLM sticks to as a matter of policy, drives the market and spurs needless consumption, such as the 15 million cubic meters used annually by welders in the United States. (Europeans use argon.)
...
In 1996, the U.S. Congress decided to sell the1 billion cubic meters of gaseous helium—specifically the heavier isotope, helium-4—that the country had stockpiled. But conditions it imposed on the sales are keeping the price of helium artificially low and encouraging waste of a substance indispensable for numerous scientific and technological applications, says a National Research Council report released last week. “Helium is being sold at fire-sale prices, and low prices are not going to encourage the recycling, conservation, and substitution that might prolong the existing supply,” says Charles Groat, a geologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report. Produced in radioactive decay, helium collects in the same rock formations that trap other gases and is primarily a byproduct of the natural gas industry. It is the only element that remains a liquid at absolute zero, making it an unparalleled cooling agent, or “cryogen.” Without helium, the superconducting magnets in MRI machines won’t work and myriad lines of physics research would grind to a halt. Helium is also essential to purge the tanks and lines in rockets that burn liquid hydrogen
The situation is really not good. We're running out of helium! Egad! (If you are interested in this issue, the
NRC report is really quite readable (or at least skimmable). Check it out.)
So there you have it. It's probably time to write your congressperson and tell them that if they don't stop with their damn party balloons, science will be RUINED FOREVER. And then you can come over and help me eat these cupcakes; there are too many for just one person.
*Obviously I cannot get away without embedding this video:
