Huh, the video does mention they were in the process of privatizing it (at around 4:10 [1]) planning to be "stepping out of the helium activity and transferring it to private entities" by 2021 (guess it got delayed due to COVID?).
The Wikipedia page for the Helium Act of 1925 [3], which created the National Helium Reserve, does mention USA was the only important source of helium at the time, and amongst other things the act banned Helium exports. Given the rarity of Helium, this sounds like a good idea.
This privatization effort seems to be part of the Helium Privatization Act of 1996 [2], passed under Bill Clinton, and I couldn't quickly find any reasoning for its implementation (perhaps I'm not Googling the right question?). I wonder why they decided it'd be better to privatize it, considering the USA (at least as of 2018) still accounted for over half of worldwide helium exports [4]. It does still sound like a strategic and rare resource worth keeping under tight control, IMO.
Clinton famously said "the era of big government is over" [1] I can absolutely see privatizing a reserve as being one of many bills meant to cut back on the size and scope of the government.
This is the entire system including the facility, hundreds of miles of pipeline, helium rights for many helium producing wells, existing storage and delivery contracts, and 800 million cubic feet of helium.
I know that the info can probably be found elsewhere, but it never stop to blow my mind when I see the gov selling off something extremely expensive with nothing more than a few lines of description and a picture of the front sign. I looked at the pdf document, almost all of it is legal stuff that doesn't describe the actual facility. It feel like they already got interest (lobbying?) buyers and the auction is just a formality.
> 3. INSPECTION
No one will be allowed access to the Property without the presence of a BLM employee or designee. Bidders are invited, urged, and cautioned to inspect the Property prior to submitting a bid. Photos provided by the Government may not represent the condition or existence of any improvements of the Property and are NOT to be relied upon in place of the Bidder's own inspection. Any maps, illustrations or other graphical images of the Property are provided for visual context and are NOT to be relied upon in place of the Bidder's own inspection. The failure of any bidder to inspect, or to be fully informed as to the condition of all or any portion of the Property, will not
constitute grounds for any claim or demand for adjustment or withdrawal of a bid after the auction.
A potential buyer is expected to do their own due diligence before submitting a bid. This collection of assets and contracts is likely worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, any potential buyer will have a team doing due diligence.
>A potential buyer is expected to do their own due diligence before submitting a bid.
If they were trying to get the highest bid possible, wouldn't it make sense to provide more info to potential buyers?! The way they present it, you shouldn't even bother if you aren't already in the know.
This facility was paid with public dollars, we all paid for it. There is no national secrets to protects or dangerous weapons, leaking photos and technical documentation has no downsides if we assume they aren't trying to scam buyers.
> but it never stop to blow my mind when I see the gov selling off something extremely expensive with nothing more than a few lines of description and a picture of the front sign.
This is typical of government auctions, large and small. I suspect part of it is to not mislead the buyer with rosy pictures/descriptions, and part of it is their basic MO: "you take everything whether you want it or not".
If you've ever bid on pallets of surplus gear it is not unusual to have a few interesting items like computers or test equipment mixed in with absolutely useless crap like giant bolts. This is not an accident, nobody would bid on a bunch of giant bolts if they weren't mixed with stuff people want. You are required to take everything on the pallete with you when you win.
I was looking at ground based inflatable satcom rigs - these things run 250k+. All the descriptions are a model number and _maybe_ what bands it targets.
I don't understand why you'd measure the amount of a gas in volume units (e.g. cubic feet) given that any gas is "elastic" in volume, i.e. can take pretty much any volume depending on the pressure.
> Standard cubic foot (SCF) means the volume of gaseous helium occupying one cubic foot at a pressure of 14.7 psia and a temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit. One liter of liquid helium is equivalent to 26.63 scf of gaseous helium. One U.S. gallon of liquid helium is equivalent to 100.8 scf of gaseous helium. One pound of liquid helium is equivalent to 96.72 scf of gaseous helium. If BLM approves, you may use appropriate gaseous equivalents of volumes of helium mixtures different from these figures.
I hate it when people don't add the word "standard" to gas quantity units like this, but that is almost always what they mean. A "standard cubic foot" has the same dimension as moles; that is, it's actually a count of the number of atoms or molecules.
If it’s anything like SCUBA tanks, then the 800M cu ft is specified at 1 atm at room temperature. It’s a actually an intuitive way to express how much gas you’re getting. Specifying it by N would be borderline incomprehensible to most people.
10 years ago, Congress decided we needed to transition off of it. Large amounts of the stockpile were sold off from 2013-2018 and this is the final part of the plan.
Yes. MRI machines need it, although I guess that kind of falls into the superconductor category. But I call that use case out because it's probably a good idea to have the government, or some trusted caretaker, look after at least two strategic stockpiles.
(Tritium (3H) decays into 3He with a 12 year half life. Before 12*n years, tritium is radioactive and denser than water and so it will pool and concentrate in ocean cavities for example at the seafloor. Tritium also probably has affinity for certain types of trash floating in the ocean, which Seabin and The Ocean Cleanup are addressing.)
Is laser-based nuclear transmutation of e.g. He4 into He3 easier with the high heat of a nuclear fusion reaction?
Cynical take: People in congress have wealthy contacts that want to buy and profit from this, and likely include the congress member as part of the profit sharing in some concealed manner
Generous take: congress recognizes government entities are inefficient and do a poor job at things like properly pricing and providing goods and services, which is explicitly outlined as a reason congress gave: selling it at market-driven prices
They give other reasons but there's basically zero reason to trust them. The truth is likely somewhere between the two takes above.
Theres no need for giving random takes. Theres a reason thats been enumerated, it would be nice to just have that answer instead of cliche cynical clutter.
Government being inefficient is required for private companies to have any interest in ownership because profit is the incentive to solve market inefficiency.
If the government was doing an awesome job, the private sector wouldn't have any interest.
This is quite a rosy take. The private sector is always interested in capturing new customers, and lobbying to shut down public services is a great way to do that. It's pretty simple, first you strip the service or institution of funding, do other things to degrade operations, then you complain that it’s a huge problem that only the private sector can fix. Exhibit A, USPS. Exhibit B, US public schools. Exhibit C, the US VHA. Exhibit D, the UK’s NHS and Ontario Canada’s provincial healthcare system.
I can't help but notice you didn't give any actual examples of what you've said happens. All of those government programs still exist. Where's the example of the shut down public service?
Helium party balloons exist because the government is pricing helium below market value which both causes wasted helium and prevents private competition. Notice how USPS, which is required to operate as a business would (paying its own bills, which it does) has competition in the market?
There's definitely a role for the government in a lot of sectors but I can't for the life of me imagine why helium should be owned and operated as a government service.
I'm from a country where the government has several institutions to provide healthcare. It's not the absolute best, and depending on the institution one qualifies for it might not be quickest or cover all conditions.
As administrations have come and gone, there's been a back and forth between officials who want to privatize health, claiming inefficiency, dilapidated facilities and that the system is a drag on public finances, and officials who want to save the system from what they claim is purposeful gross mismanagement by administrations who want excuses to privatize it.
Overall, even if not as pristine or efficient as the private sector, this system of healthcare does means the private industry has to compete with "free".
When I have a cold, I don't think I've spent more than $10-20 on a private doctor's appointment, out of pocket with no insurance. I had a rare eye condition called Keratoconus. In the USA, the specialized procedure to treat it seems to generally cost between $2,500 and $4,000 per eye [1]. I paid about $650 per eye on a private ophthalmology clinic, again, with no insurance.
EDIT: To add an addendum, and in the topic of "efficiency", whenever I'm back home I tend to have more face-to-face time with my doctor. There isn't a team of nurses on every clinic to talk to and do the menial work. I even book appointments directly via WhatsApp with my gastroenterologist, and transfer money directly to their bank account, instead of going through a front-desk secretary, forms, and apps/paperwork. Without insurance "networks" I hear of a good doctor and just go, no problem.
This also means I tend to go to the doctor when I'm home, rather than when I'm in the USA. I find very interesting how for me personally, the experience seems to be much better in a country with an overall lower purchasing power than the USA.
lol, the 90's called, they want their "government can't do anything erficiently" hot take back.
I thought we'd collectively realized that "run the government like a business" was this ridiculous notion that the owning class sold us to raid public coffers to enrich their own, to our detriment.
It really isn’t run like a business. 50 cents to send mail thousands of miles away to a mailbox that’s 3 hours from any major city? Show me any private mail carrier that would do this for less than 20x that cost
Why is it a natural monopoly? It's a monopoly right now because the government has prices so artificially low (subsidized by tax dollars) that private companies can't compete.
To the contrary. If Helium is as rare, precious and limited as we're led to believe, the price caps would be removed and helium prices would skyrocket to what the market would bear. I guarantee hospitals are going to pay more for helium than party city.
Helium prices are artificially low leading to it's irreverent use.
The market doesn't care why customers pay a lot for something, and doesn't care if something like health care costs more than it needs to and thus serves fewer humans that it could, or how those few lucky are selected.
The market does things efficiently, they are only occasionally and incidentally desirable things. It more often does undesirable things efficiently.
The market is a tool like any other tool. It's effective, but has no innate value positive or negative in what direction that effectiveness is applied. It is a saw that will equally effectively cut your lumber or your leg.
When you apply that lack of value to a human, the term is sociopath, and is pretty much equated with evil outside of a clinical context. Not because the sociopath actively wants to harm, but merely because they are truely neutral and don't care one way or another.
The market is sociopathic, and is unfit for deciding anything.
Average concentration of helium in natural gas is 0.05%, anywhere from 0.01% to 7%. U.S. proven reserves of natural gas contain over 10 billion cubic meters of helium even when simple extraction methods (that capture about 1/3 of it), are used. Problem is exaggerated.
Hank Green just posted a video about this recently, and he addresses this. In the past, helium was extracted alongside natural gas, but there is no reason the two need to be linked. As natural gas prices go down and helium prices go up, it makes sense to drill helium pockets only for the helium, and there are a few operations to do exactly this underway.
Boggles my mind how ignorant some people are when it comes to oil and gas. The modern world is not possible without them. No solar panels, no electric cars, no cellphones for everyone and their mom and no food for 10Bn people.
It is entirely possible and we are dead close to the deployment speed of renewables that will get us there with the natural rate of retirement of industrial equipment. Will be there by 2030 latest. People who claim otherwise did not observe the insane rate of production increases of all kinds of renewables-related tech.
But, natural gas will be still produced as an industrial feedstock; annual world consumption of helium, assuming 100% recovery rate (which may be possible or almost possible if supply is tight), can be almost produced from the amount of natural gas consumed for non-energy use worldwide, i.e. as industrial feedstock. Which sort of guarantees availability in the future too.
You are absolutely right. I am a lifetime environmentalist, but as I’ve learned I’ve become disenchanted with the current societal direction; it’s more based on ideological foundations than anything that squarely addresses the reality of objective sustainability.
There is so much groupthink (most due to the political manipulation) that you can’t talk to people. They’re so caught up in group messages that they don’t think for themselves or have the data or
Mind even get it.
Now we just gotta convince our rich overlords that life is more important than more money for the rich. That shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, yeah?
That's part of it. But electricity is still expensive, so I don't see a lot of people wanting to switch their natural gas heating and cooking to electricity anytime soon. We need a massive investment in nuclear and solar to bring down the cost of electricity.
That's hilariously off, much like how the "market value" of rare earth asteroids is in the $trillions... due to a shortage that wouldn't exist if we could mine said asteroids... the value of the helium is much, much higher than $100M.
Depending on who you ask, the value of the crude helium there is around $300M to $360M. The $2-$3/cf for refined helium isn't really that relevant, since what is included is unrefined, if it were refined it'd be worth many billions.
What is it worth as isotopes He3 and He4; e.g. for Nuclear Fusion, superfluidity and superconductivity experiments, and medical imaging that probably can be done without Helium?
> They are developing a magneto-inertial fusion technology to produce helium-3 and fusion power via aneutronic fusion, [2][3] which could produce low-cost clean electric energy using a fuel that is derived exclusively from water. [4]
Here's the part of the Real Engineering video where it is explained how 3He and 4He Helium isotopes are fusion byproducts and fuel used to generate electricity with nuclear fusion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38&t=12m40s
Doesn't this new nuclear fusion process also change the valuation of the Tritium in [Fukushima Daiichi,] heavy water? Why would you dump money into the ocean?
> Doesn't this new nuclear fusion process also change the valuation of the Tritium in [Fukushima Daiichi,] heavy water? Why would you dump money into the ocean?
This video provides background to explain some of that, but essentially,
1) It's hard to extract the heavy water from regular water. If you could do that efficiently there wouldn't have to be dumping of tritium into the ocean.
2) There's so little tritium in the released heavy water to be useful for nuclear fusion that isn't commercially viable yet. You'd be holding onto large quantities of water for a long time, as they already were.
FWIU most synthesized tritium is from TPBAR rods (and also separated from drained reactor fluid); so it is possible, there just aren't many research institutions or indeed any production operations that do isotope separation from water?
FWIU evaporation doesn't work because Tritium/He3 crawls up the walls of the container it was in, because gravity.
Presumably nuclear research scientists have already considered centrifugation, titration, pressure / heat / boiling and other phase state transitions, Laser Nuclear Transmutation (*), reuse in a reactor with TPBAR rods designed to collect Tritium for later processing, and as fuel for peaceful civilian e.g. a D-T + (He3, He4) nuclear fusion electricity generation.
Fusion that takes heavy water as an input e.g. at a first stage facility that processes radioactive material and yields nonradioactives for a 'second stage' (?) facility would be great.
FWIU, that is what Helion does; though there aren't yet separate stages.
Do old casks of heavy water (dangerous nuclear waste from an old-gen nuclear reactor) contain significant amounts of recoverable Helium-3 due to the 12.3 year typical (*) half-life of Tritium?
Again, Helium-3 is a viable nonradioactive input to nuclear fusion reactions.
Many deep wells with impermeable cap rocks would assure a USA supply - these well vent their He because it is 1-3% He.
Here is one:- https://www.firsthelium.com/
For what's is worth, it's about 22.6 M cubic meters, a cube with a side of 2.83 km.
I didn't check if they are storing it as a compressed gas but they probably do. 1500 psi is about 100 bar. No more a cube but still a very big array of 28.3 m tall tanks.
I'm hoping that the sale is restricted to US-based entities, because this seems like a precious resource which could easily get bought up by a foreign power looking to exert some influence.
> The National Helium Reserve, also known as the Federal Helium Reserve, is a strategic reserve of the United States, which once held over 1 billion cubic meters (about 170,000,000 kg)[a] of helium gas. The helium is stored at the Cliffside Storage Facility about 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Amarillo, Texas, in a natural geologic gas storage formation, the Bush Dome[2] reservoir. The reserve was established with the enactment of the Helium Act of 1925. The strategic supply provisioned the noble gas for airships, and in the 1950s became an important source of coolant during the Cold War and Space Race.
I for one am in favor of keeping it as a national resource in order to prevent the development of a zeppelin capability gap between us and the enemy.
EDIT:
I appreciate the rebuttals below, apparently Helium is important in the usage and production of MRI, IC fabrication, and cooling nuclear reactors. Pushes a reconsideration of the sell off, plus the possible resurgance of steampunk.
Helium is critical for all sorts of things, not least IC fabrication and cooling MRI magnets.
This was one of the big issues at the start of the Ukraine invasion because they're one of the world's preeminent suppliers.
The big problem is that there's a finite supply - it comes mostly from natural gas wells - and it's running out. Being lighter than air it just goes up and into space. Once we're out, we're out.
- "This was one of the big issues at the start of the Ukraine invasion because they're one of the world's preeminent suppliers."
That one was actually neon. It has nothing to do with natural gas; it's a byproduct of the cryogenic distillation of air, which steelmakers do on an industrial scale to get pure oxygen. As you point out, here's not much helium in the Earth's atmosphere; rather, since it (helium-4) is the product of alpha decay of geologic thorium and uranium, it accumulates in the same kind of places as natural gas. Hence: Texas.
There was a large HN thread on the neon thing here,
Also, helium tends to escape the atmosphere into space! Air is just a ton of colliding molecules, and something like helium has an atomic mass of ~4, compared to say nitrogen, which has an atomic mass of ~14, and it is in the N2 form, so it has a mass of ~18. So, an N2 molecule is way more massive than a helium atom. As a result, helium at the same temperature as nitrogen has a much higher average velocity and can escape the earth's gravity at a high rate.
Your article's talking about helium from Algeria, though?
- "The helium shutdown in Arzew [Algeria] is a result of high natural gas demand in Europe, due in large part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Helium is found alongside natural gas in conventional wells. Algeria normally compresses natural gas into liquid form at Arzew for global transport by ship. During that process, it’s economical to extract helium because it liquefies at much higher pressures and lower temperatures than natural gas, explains industrial gas consultant Jon Raquet."
- "But now, much of Algeria’s natural gas is being sent to Spain via pipeline, making separation impractical."
My understanding is that Ukraine and Russia both produce a lot of natural gas and hence helium, and that the supply to the west from Russia was cut off due to sanctions and further threatened in Ukraine due to conflict itself.
The shifting mentioned in the article is further knock-on effects of the war and its impact on energy markets - and how those further constrain the global supply chain for He.
This isn't my area of expertise though so please do let me know if I've misunderstood.
Right about gas, but it doesn't follow that they've invested in infrastructure to cryogenically separate helium from gas fields, the way they did with neon (at steel plants). (That was the colorful thing about the neon crisis: every country in the world has enormous neon resources; the list of countries that can produce industrial amounts on <6 months notice is short).
I looked it up: Ukraine doesn't export any helium (as of 2019 public data), and it has helium production capacity but it's marginal. Algeria is world #3, behind the USA and Qatar.
My understanding of this is that there's different qualities and mixtures of helium. When you buy helium from a party store it's a kind of "dirty" helium which is not pure enough for scientific/industrial applications.
The regular helium grade purchased from industrial gas suppliers and typically used for filling party balloons is >99% pure. There are higher grades available for specialized purposes, but using lower grades doesn't save any helium.
They are saying that the spinning disks with helium are old, which is silly. Flash is fast and convenient but a terrible thing to rely on for data storage.
It's a very common and I think reasonable way to refer to them - for most consumers there are two types of disk to care about, "old = spinning" and "new = flash". Old doesn't mean "and no longer has any use", just that it's the older of the two main options.
It is common, and silly. Also the terms are not neutral and there is no reason to apply those terms in this case other than to indicate the imagined relative worth. IE, helium is not used in old disks, it is used in spinning disks.
Not exactly. Helium is a part of radioactive decay and as such continuously produced, so in a pinch we might use filters in the air from nuclear plants or large deposits of radioactive minerals as an alternative source. The question is just how much can be produced that way.
According to [1], in a given year, 5000 tons (I'll assume metric ton which is more generous) of helium is produced by alpha decay of radioactive ores in the Earth's crust. At 0.1785 kg/m³ for Helium, this is 0.89 million m³ of helium produced by natural alpha decay each year.
According to [2], in a given year, 160 million m³ of helium is extracted across the planet. This rate of extraction is 180x the replenishment rate.
According to [2], there are at least 12061 million m³ of helium reserves known to exist and have been measured/estimated.
The timeframes for depleting this precious resource are incredibly short. The known 12061 million m³ of helium reserves, making the very generous assumption it can all be economically extracted, will be depleted by 2096.
The United States produces more natural gas than any other fuel and its consumption of gas is second only to petroleum.
It’s the main fuel used to power electrical plants in the US (all those Teslas generally run on LNG).
It’s also a fuel that doesn’t have a single source supplier. It’s Quatar, Russia, etc.
All these folks talking about reducing gas use and ending global warning by reducing consumption are not looking at this objectively and geopolitically. They see it through the lens of contemporary American environmental politics.
Up until 5-10 years ago natural gas was seen as the major reduction factor in the drop in coal usage and generally a win for the environment compared to continuing to use coal. It was the “better” fuel for the transition.
Obviously we are going to move towards more renewable fuels in future because coming into balance with nature is necessary. But it’s unlikely it’s going anywhere anytime soon and behind closed doors, I think energy policy clearly points to gas as the “lesser of evils” energy source for the foreseeable near future.
I haven't done the napkin math for this, but I don't think we'll need enough power from fusion to generate useful quantities of helium. I think we might get closer with certain kinds of fission. (alpha radiation is helium, after it captures a few electrons. IIRC, where Earth's helium comes from)
In a "it is literally possible to extract all of it and it will escape to space" sense, yes. But in a practical "humans are anywhere remotely close to exhausting helium deposits on Earth" sense, no. The "we are running out helium" thing was never real.
I asked about this once and someone pointed out the obvious E=mc^2 issue: a fusion reactor will generate only a trivial amount of helium in the process of releasing a large amount of energy.
So if fusion allows to generate preposterous amounts of cheap energy, what will be easier: generating commercial helium as a by-product, or using all that energy to go and bring helium home from Jupiter?
Currently we need helium to cool the superconducting magnets used to generate fusion reactions so the cart there is before the horse kind of problem, until someone comes up with a better solution.
> I appreciate the rebuttals below, apparently Helium is important in the usage and production of MRI, IC fabrication, and cooling nuclear reactors. Pushes a reconsideration of the sell off, plus the possible resurgance of steampunk.]
Also: liquid fueled rockets and space systems. Being able to nuke the other guy or space supremacy depends upon having helium. Maybe not that much.
I wasn't saying there's no alternatives; indeed current ICBMs use very little helium.
It's not just about pressurizing the liquid fuels for main engines. It's a purging gas; it can be used to pressurize RCS systems where other approaches are less practical; etc etc etc.
Helium is critical to tools like MRI machines. If we wish to keep our healthcare industry from technically backsliding, we probably want a good supply of it.
This isn't a joke. This is a privatization of a critical, finite resource - a huge step in the wrong direction. There's no way to manufacture helium. You can't condense it from the atmosphere like other gasses because when it's released, it rises and escapes the planet, permanently.
The supply is going to become very strategic when we run out of helium for MRI machines and other important superconducting equipment, scientific or otherwise.
We may develop suitable lower temperature superconductors, but there are thousands of MRIs that still need it, and plenty of medical centers that won't be able to afford to upgrade to new systems.
In addition to the other replies you’ve gotten, UHP (ultra high purity) helium is also important in certain welding processes, although there are, generally at least, substitutes in that field.
No, it's pretty much all helium for clinical work.
Short of a quench (catastrophic heating, effectively) the most modern units hardly lose any, and often need less in the first place. An old machine might cost you near 6fig/year in helium refill, especially if out of spec. Some new magnets don't typically need any in a give year.
High-temp superconductors are made of ceramic, so they are very inconvenient to work with. They are also mechanically brittle.
So the largest high-temp MRI for now is only big enough to image the head. That being said, there has been a lot of progress in the high-TC superconductors in the recent years.
Seems a bit short sighted to close the helium reserve and sell it off. The last 3 years have taught the value of having some slack in the supply chain.
Hopefully however gets these facilities will buy helium when its cheap and sell it when its expensive to provide just that sort of slack in the supply chain. My understanding is that strategic helium stockpile was just to make sure we have enough helium for our the US's use in the event of a war.
Not saying this is what’s happening here, but this is a typical way in which corrupt government/politicians make bank
They sell hugely valuable public assets to some private entity, which then sells it back (or lease or rent) to the government over the years, at a huge premium
There are usually some kickbacks, and/or indirect ownership through partners/shell companies involved
The current auction is part of a sale that has been in the works since 1996. If something untoward is happening, the public eye has had two and a half decades to spot it and correct it. And the eye has been on it; indeed, the mechanics of the sale were revisited and improved ten years ago.
That’s great, glad to know there’s been plenty of scrutiny over this
At the same time, we’ve had regulatory capture in a bunch of industries for decades and it seems there isn’t much the public can really do about it
The public being able to see what’s going on, for months/years/decades doesn't necessarily mean they are ok with it, it might just mean they are powerless
Yeah there's literally no reason to ever sell something like this. It's like selling all of the missiles. Oh now we need missiles, guess we'll need to buy them from the new private missile reserve.
They've done this with a lot of things in the UK and now we have crumbling buildings and billionaire politicians.
I hate this so much. Almost as much as I hate that we have been squandering it with an artificial price cap so we can fill party balloons cheaply. We have strategic reserves so we have resources when they are needed.
It's basically like "let's sell the Great Lakes because they're just sitting there" or "the grand canyon would make a great place to sell, it's not making a profit the way it is"
I thought I heard that once the helium is gone, it's gone. We can't make it; we can't pump any more out of the ground. That would seem to be a hard-stop. Is that really the kind of resource we want to turn over to capitalists; who are driven primarily by stock incentives and short-term profit?
It's a popular misconception, with a kernel of truth, but the kernel is very, very small: hydrogen and helium are light enough that they are not gravitationally bound to our planet. In other words, if you release some helium in the atmosphere, in time it will eventually escape to space.
While this is true, it's also irrelevant. Once you release a gas into the atmosphere, it's economically lost. It does not matter if it stays in the atmosphere forever, or it makes its way to the larger Universe. For example neon. Or kripton. Or chlorine for that matter.
Separately, there is plenty of helium in natural gas fields. We extract about 4 trillion cubic meters of gas per year. Natural gas contains between 0.01% and 7% helium. At the lower end, we pull out of the ground 400 million cubic meters of helium per year, but we simply don't bother to separate it. This is more than three times the entire Federal Helium reserve.
Now, if you read the article, you'll find out that this Federal Helium reserve is being sold as per a law enacted in 2013. Why did Congress pass such a law? I don't know, but presumably they have looked into the issue and determined that it's worth their time to bring it to the floor and hold a vote on it. The original helium reserve was instituted before WW2, when dirigibles were a thing, and the US was concerned with the Nazi Germany's lead in this particular technology. After WW2 though, dirigibles are only a curiosity here and there. Helium is not a strategic resource anymore.
Nuclear fusion can do it, but producing that much helium from nuclear fusion would have to be done off-planet. Quick napkin math, it would release about as much energy as the entire planet gets from the sun in a month.
I'd say dunning kreuger but I saw something once that it didn't mean what the popular interpretation claims it means. And I also worry about social sciences reproducibility in general.
The inability to respect the people who come after you is how we've ended up with every single generational problem that we face today. Literally every single one.
This is selfishness bordering on psychopathy. Just because you'll be dead doesn't mean you should be complacent about things that will fuck over future generations.
But why? Have they found new gigantic pockets of natural gas rich with helium? Or some scientific breakthrough allowing it to be produced radiologically?
Indeed: why? I suspect the answer is likely to be something worryingly banal, like "we're in debt" (or, "private interest knows a guy who wants to make some money"). Economies run on state-sponsored usury don't tend to last.
>I suspect the answer is likely to be something worryingly banal, like "we're in debt" (or, "private interest knows a guy who wants to make some money")
wikipedia has the answers. tl;dr it sounds like both of those things: the reserve was in debt and was depressing the market for helium.
Actually, the existence of the reserve was not depressing the market. The sell off of the reserve, which was mandated in 1996 and began in 2005, was depressing the market. The sale was modified in 2013 to try to relieve the market flooding issue. The present auction is the final piece of the sale.
Ugh, it is criminal how short-sighted this is. Helium is not easy to replace nor easy to store long term, it's the perfect application for government ownership of a commodity, just in case we need it.
i get your point and mostly agree with it - it's frustrating when people say things like "public transit isn't profitable"... yeah, it's not supposed to be, it's okay for things to cost money.
but that's different to being in debt. a public service can absolutely be in debt. it's given a budget, and if it fails to operate within that budget it goes into debt. that might mean the budget is too low, but there's always a point where a service is no longer worth the budget it would take to keep it operating. (not making a judgement on the helium reserve - i really have no context for how necessary or useful it is)
Anyone know how much it costs to maintain the reserve infrastructure? Do they have facilities that need to be staffed to keep an eye on it or is do they just need to just have perimeter security?
> The team estimates that just one part of the reserve in Tanzania could be as large as 54 billion cubic feet (BCf), which is enough to fill more than 1.2 million medical MRI scanners.
> “To put this discovery into perspective, global consumption of helium is about 8 billion cubic feet (BCf) per year and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world’s largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 BCf,” said University of Oxford’s Chris Ballentine, a professor with the Department of Earth Sciences.
I’d note this is only enough for 7 years of consumption. I’m not sure what kind of game changer that is.
As an alternative note that's a single newly discovered
pocket with more helium than this reserve held at its peak.
Both figures absolutely pale in comparison to how much we throw out because it's not profitable but the fossil fuels it's in are, but that's nothing new.
The Menlo Park property is the former US Geological Survey campus, which has been moved to the NASA Ames campus in Mountain View because the USGS couldn't make rent to the GSA. It's a nice campus although some of the buildings could use some superficial renovation. It's got a lot of lab space.
USGS moving both lower on the floodplain in light of global warming and sea level rise, and to far less seismically-stable land (bay fill as opposed to bedrock, far greater liquefaction risk) is ... arch.
"To protect your organization from excessive usage and Denial of Service attacks, we limit the number of allowed content delivery views within a twenty-four hour period. Try viewing the content again later."
C'mon guys, I was reading that 240 page government contract!
Are you saying zeppelins are an especially important facility for the military? (I'm sure there are uses, but only the way there are uses for anything).
I am saying it's ignorant to imply that the helium isn't important because it was originally secured for zeppelins.
Meanwhile, patients need 6 weeks of physical therapy before they can get an MRI as a direct result of a lack of helium. Even diagnostic MRIs in which PT is not indicated. The government trying to sell a crucial asset necessary for healthcare technologies is a sign that the government is not able to take care of domestic affairs.
They may have been trying to sell it before, but the lack of leadership on a critical resource like this is a bad sign.
> They may have been trying to sell it before, but the lack of leadership on a critical resource like this is a bad sign.
The helium reserve has been for sale for almost 30 years, hospitals have had plenty of opportunity to buy helium for their MRI machines. Your wait for an MRI isn't because of helium, it's because insurance providers want to avoid paying for things.
> Your wait for an MRI isn't because of helium, it's because insurance providers want to avoid paying for things.
More accurately, it's because of corrupt or wildly misguided politicians that are against single payer healthcare due to bribery from established healthcare and insurance companies
Doesn't this give companies that supply helium to hospitals an opportunity to purchase helium? It seems like if there's a shortage for important uses in the economy, then moving helium out of a government reserve is exactly what you'd want, right?
Your complaint is that you think for-profit hospitals should be gifted the helium rather than having to purchase it?
Two issues come to mind immediately. The first is that the market might not be the most efficient mechanism for allocation for something like helium. Are party balloons more valuable than cryo coolant for particle accelerators, MRI machines, and science? Just because you can't cough up the market price doesn't mean your application isn't valuable [1]. The second is we've seen what happens with OPEC when a cartel controls the supply of energy. A for profit cornering the market for a non renewable resource could lead us to suboptimal stewardship of said resource (because humans are short sighted, near term driven, and fundamentally greedy).
In 1979, in the midst of one of the many energy crisis in the 70s, the Shah of Iran said “oil is too valuable to burn." We've lucked out that we haven't run out of helium yet, but there is no guarantee we will continue to be lucky. The subcomments of this comment [2] explain the very real peril and concern.
To your point "Your complaint is that you think for-profit hospitals should be gifted the helium rather than having to purchase it?", I would respond: Helium should be priced based on the end use as well as any systems in place to recover and recycle [3] [4], vs temporary use where it will quickly be vented to space, lost to us forever.
I think your comparison to OPEC is interesting, b/c it sounds like you think the price of oil was artificially high, but in retrospect, I think many would say that it has been far too cheap to burn oil, and this has driven our multi-generational climate crisis. I.e. I think the market failure in stewarding precious resources was _not_ that OPEC tried to keep prices high, but that failing to price in the cost of damage to the climate and environment kept prices artificially low.
In the helium case in the US, my understanding is that from 1996 to 2013, though the US was the dominant global supplier and _could_ have chosen to act as a cartel, the 1996 legislation fixed prices to be artificially low (with the aim of merely paying off costs, rather than maximizing revenue), which is claimed to have disincentivized private parties from developing new production capacity.
I'm not some free-market zealot who thinks the invisible hand can do no evil. But in this case, if the problem is that (a) there's currently a bottleneck upstream of important healthcare cases and (b) we want to discourage waste then we should want helium to leave the national reserve (i.e. there's more supply available to hospitals and other parties), and we should want that to be at a reasonable price so it isn't used frivolously (e.g. we wouldn't want party planners to be induced to use more balloons just b/c they're cheap). So auctioning off some of what is held in reserve seems like a reasonable action.
Wrt pricing that is presumably _lower_ for installations with recycling capabilities -- I would think that recycling might if anything make institutions willing to pay a higher volumetric price, since they get more total benefit from it. If the recycling technology is efficient and practically applicable in many contexts, more and more facilities ought to be pressured by high costs to introduce recycling ... or leave the market.
My OPEC comparison was more centered on a small group controlling a critical resource who can control the price regardless of the needs of the consumers of said resource (not the historic price action). I agree with most of your points, but want to stress that the desired outcome should be responsible use and stewardship of what is both a highly useful and nonrenewable resource. Pricing is a component, but maximizing profit should not be the goal. I'd even go so far to say that you either wouldn't sell to consumers of helium who could capture and recycle it but currently choose not to, or you would subsidize the installation of that equipment for them out of the proceeds of more frivolous uses.
My personal opinion is the goal should be to maximize the utility of the resource, with any profits being second order effects. Instead, we too often end up like ancestors who raze the forest only to freeze to death in the winter [1].
I think if you _don't_ sell helium to non-recycling facilities in the near term, MRIs would stop altogether. The two articles about recycling that you shared are both research universities who considered it a PR-worthy accomplishment to put recycling in place to cover _some_ of their machines, which for the moment sound like they're almost entirely about NMR; the UCSF article even says that after paying $500k, they're still hoping to "inspire" other uses than NMR within the same university to begin recycling, i.e. the top-flight research university bragging about recycling still isn't able to do it for clinical MRI machines.
Do you know (or perhaps someone else can chime in) -- is it even feasible currently for a medical facility with 1-2 MRI machines to put a recycling system into place? Or is the recycling system of a size and complexity that only if you have a helium footprint above a given size is it realistic? Certainly, most places would not have the expertise on staff to design and implement such a system today.
Worse, if recycling were a requirement to purchase helium, how do we estimate which medical facilities would _not_ buy an MRI machine because of the higher initial cost of the recycling system, or maintenance of its collection, compression, or purification components? How would that change patient outcomes (especially given that the initial complain about MRIs in this thread was long waits due to limited capacity)?
In reply to your other post (I could not comment on it directly)
> ... then is there really still any meaningful relationship between helium supply and the patient wait time for MRIs as westcort complained? Or is it just that there are too few MRI machines in the healthcare system?
The US is second highest in number of MRI machines per capita after Japan. Its probably staffing issues or maybe MRI scans are used much more widely in the US.
I would have expected that since (in my experience) these machines are generally run by a technician, and the MRI itself is relatively quick (a few minutes), and hospitals can bill insurance thousands for an MRI, that once a medical facility has acquired and set up the machine the machine, that running patients through should more than pay for the time of staff immediately involved.
Thanks for pointing at that!
But if the description is correct,
> ZBO magnets allow practically unlimited
system operation without helium refill.
... then is there really still any meaningful relationship between helium supply and the patient wait time for MRIs as westcort complained? Or is it just that there are too few MRI machines in the healthcare system?
And, I suppose if anyone here knows -- why is it that NMR magnets at UCLA and UCSF required recycling systems which sound meaningfully less efficient (the UCLA article linked above reclaimed only 90%) rather than using the ZBO tech which is apparently standard in modern MRIs?
The 6 week wait isn't because of a lack of helium. It's for lack of money to fund the MRI to begin with. It's easy to point to lack of helium when really the cost of an MRI machine is expensive. The rare earth magnets alone of which are a greater scarcity than helium. My point is that it's more than just helium scarcity for not getting easy access to MRIs.
Is there a “lack of helium” or is there a competition for valuable uses of helium? MRI seems to use about 13% of annual helium production.
12,000 * 10,000 / 12.8 = 9,375,000/year [0]
1 cubic meter = 1,000 liters
9,375 (MRI) / 73,000,000 (Total production [1]) = 0.1284
At any point, an MRI machine contains about 2,000 liters of liquid helium, though suppliers need to replenish any helium that boils off. Mahesh estimates that an MRI machine uses 10,000 liters of liquid helium over its life span. (According to GE Healthcare, a manufacturer of the machines, that life span is 12.8 years.) In 2015, there were roughly 12,000 machines in the U.S., making MRIs one of the biggest helium consumers in the world, far above balloon stores.
> they can get an MRI as a direct result of a lack of helium.
It's a ~1mm machine with ~10k of helium in it, and modern ones don't need much refill. Even with old ones it's expensive, but not out of whack with other costs.
The helium market isn't really the proximal cause of not having enough MRI hours to go around, but there are concerns about it getting worse.
> Meanwhile, patients need 6 weeks of physical therapy before they can get an MRI as a direct result of a lack of helium. Even diagnostic MRIs in which PT is not indicated.
I've never heard of this, can you link to something discussing this?
Due to the cost of an MRI procedure, most insurers will require 6 weeks of PT/rehab efforts on an injury before covering the cost of an MRI.
I guess GP is attributing the cost of the MRI to the helium required to cool the magnet, but I'm not sure that's a big fraction of the amortized cost for a single procedure -- a reference would be good.
Some searches indicates most newer MRI's are "zero boil-off" machines that recondense most of the helium, and that even older, leaky MRI's might be using (losing) at most ~$20k helium per year.
I'm in London, a MRI here starts at around ~250 pounds or ca. $315.
Meanwhile $20k worth of helium replacement would be ~$55/day spread across all uses of the machine.
So I'm inclined to think you're right.
The more likely reason for the 6 week PT:
Most things for which you as a patient might want an MRI for that aren't obviously not something physio will help with are things you will end up needing physio for.
I'm assuming they've done a simple cost benefit analysis where the proportion of cases where they actually need MRI's are low enough that it's cheaper to just send people straight to physio first.
Prices here do vary a lot, and you certainly can end up paying 10x that price for a full body scan from an expensive provider with a bunch of extras (though judging by a couple, some of those extras are cheap/"free" (on the NHS) blood tests tacked on for no good reason other than to jack up the price).
[You can get full scans for significantly less too, at least down to $1300 - I haven't looked very thoroughly -, but most people opting for full body scans are not doing so to address a specific known issue, so the prices reflect that it's a luxury service that's rarely needed, and the price lists are full of pointless upsells]
If the 10x is for specific body parts, it might pay to take a short trip to do your MRI's rather than pay out of pocket where you are then.
10x is for specific body parts, largely due to the (predatory) disfunction of our health care insurance and for-profit care system. Even the x-ray I was required to have before an MRI, due to plate in my arm, was billed higher than your MRI. With that said, there are also private parties (e.g. not through health care provider) that offer full-body MRIs for only a grand or two; well, at least there were a decade or so, when we got one for my FIL.
Yes, if you go to an "imaging center" they typically cost less than at a hospital. Strangely, my doctor's referral was to the hospital not the imaging center so per my insurance that is where I had to go. My insurance and the doctor's practice and the hospital they sent me to were all owned by the same huge health organization... Hmmm.
"Despite news reports in October that the world is running out of helium, clinical MRI units throughout the U.S. were and remain unaffected."
I wouldn't be surprised if some patients are given bad info by either clinic or insurer. Blaming a global shortage, real or perceived, points the patient's emotional response away from the provider.
I've had an MRI (and had to do the prerequisite 6 weeks of PT).
The MRI is a huge machine. It's in its own room, and they have to be careful about allowing any metal too close to it. The scan itself took about an hour for a couple of different views, a tech had to get my body in the right position and support it with various pads and pillows. You cannot move at all, and if you do, they have to start over. Given the time for the scan itself, plus any setup and cleaning they might have to do, I'd guess one machine could do a dozen or so scans per day. At the hospital I went to, they only did scans two days per week, I don't know if that was because they had limited staff or they need to allow for maintenance/calibration of the machine. Also I had a scan with contrast, and the doc who did the contrast injection also had limited availability.
So there are real limits on the supply of MRI time, my guess is that this drives the price more than anything. It's not like an X-ray that just takes a few minutes.
I can't link to anything, but I can offer my own personal experience of having to pay for 6 weeks of physical therapy before they would give me an MRI for my knee. I just opted to look up the routine online and rehab myself. I'd have gladly paid my MRI copay, but I'm not paying for PT without even knowing if I need it yet.
I use Radiology Assist for easy, self-pay imaging. You can look up the actual cost of whatever scan you are interested in, at a facility near you, on their website. A few days ago I scheduled a 3 Tesla knee MRI, on the exact day I wanted - next week. My total cost is $375, and that includes a report by a radiologist, and a copy of the MRI images.
(I tore my ACL in March and opted for physical therapy instead of surgery. My knee feels like it’s at 100% and PT tests show no difference in performance between my knees. I’m interested in seeing the degree to which there has been healing, if at all. I self-paid for my initial MRI back in April as well. It would have been more expensive through insurance!)
> Meanwhile, patients need 6 weeks of physical therapy before they can get an MRI as a direct result of a lack of helium. Even diagnostic MRIs in which PT is not indicated.
In February my daughter started experiencing knee pain. Her doctor ordered an MRI and 1 week later the MRI was performed.
> patients need 6 weeks of physical therapy before they can get an MRI as a direct result of a lack of helium
Then why hasn't the government, with its huge helium reserve, stepped in to solve this problem?
Maybe there is some hope the helium could end up being sold to people who actually want to apply it to socially beneficial uses like this, since the government apparently has no interest in doing so?
Factions within the government have been trying to sell it off for that time. Other factions don't feel like wasting political capital defending this hill because they can't easily explain the issue to the public.
Musk can put a topping bid. 20 times the other top. He can then ask the party balloon people to pay 100 times = kill that waste business dead dead dead, - deserves that sort of death. Then he can meet the science demand at a variable spot price. The 10-15% from other small gas wells will be rendered economic = re-vitalise helium extraction from these small fry = there are a lot of them this procedure would render economic = assure a long tern supply. It would also liberate He from being a market pawn.
They call this - 'a cat among pigeons' and boy would they scatter....
I'm told that https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/helium/fede... is also good.
Thanks to the users who suggested these!