In The Future, This Balloon Will Cost $100

At one time it was food, then it was cars, now party balloons are the new sign of status.

There goes my weather balloon experiment.

Technical divers who have used Heliox, or saturation divers who breath Heliox, I think have had this at the back of their mind for years.

Is there an ETF for helium yet. I want in. Also I'm starting a new company; HeliumLine.com. After I pay off Glen Beck, I will be super rich.

And yet we have a few planets in our solar system abundant in Helium.

Even more reason to get our space butts in gear!

Overheard conversation in the future:

"We had to take out a second mortgage on the house to buy balloons for Sally's Sweet 16 Birthday party."

hm, so pretty much its our own damn fault for stopping the production of tritium and declaring that we'd get rid of all our helium stockpile by 2015?

@duffong:

Is there any compelling reason why you couldn't use hydrogen as your lifting gas?

The Hindenburg

Worst scientific article you have posted in the last 60 minutes.

We will never run out of helium, we may get to a point where the helium produced naturally underground and harvested is less than current consumption but we cannot ever run out and a higher value of helium will not be a bad thing.

Manufacturing helium3 is the least intelligent way to make things buoyant.

The Hindenburg went down because it was painted in thermite hydrogen cannot combust without an oxidizer.

Air is .0005 helium by weight. Were in no danger of running out. You just freeze it out of the air as needed. All the helium in use hasn't even budged the relative percent still remaining in the air. It's still .0005 and has been for over the last 100 years despite heavy use of helium.

They become $100 party balloons if your a buffoon enough to pay so foolishly!

"We will never run out of helium".

We will, though. The helium were using now has accumulated in natural gas reservoirs from radioactive decay over millions of years. If we have to sit and wait for alpha decay to produce more of it it's going to be stupidly expensive. Likewise if we have to get it from the atmosphere and that's not a long term solution(helium released into the atmosphere slowly evaporates into space).

The only practical way to make more helium-4 on Earth is as a byproduct of nuclear fusion.

"[...]we may get to a point where the helium produced naturally underground and harvested is less than current consumption but we cannot ever run out and a higher value of helium will not be a bad thing."

Running out of helium doesn't mean that there's no helium left. It means that all the major uses for helium go extinct; no longer viable. When we're no longer drilling natural gas, which is probably no more than a century hence, helium use is going to have to contract by something ridiculous like a factor 1000. Then you have run out.

"Manufacturing helium3 is the least intelligent way to make things buoyant."

Using helium for buoyancy is the least intelligent use of helium.

Manufacturing helium-3 is the most intelligent way to obtain helium-3 for super low temperature refrigeration, fusion research, neutron detectors etc.

"The Hindenburg went down because it was painted in thermite hydrogen cannot combust without an oxidizer."

Oh bother, not this thermite paint nonsense again. The iron oxide and aluminium paint were not intimately mixed as is REQUIRED for a thermite reaction to occur; they existed on different layers, encased in cellulose acetate butyrate. There was much too little iron oxide and aluminium to make any kind of difference. Iron oxide/aluminium thermite propagates a flame slowly and probably wouldn't have made a difference even if you slathered the hindenburg with it(in contrast to say copper oxide-aluminium thermite which goes off with a bang).

The hindenburg was surrounded in oxidizer, but it wasn't in the paint, it was oxygen gas in air. A mix anywhere between as lean as 4% hydrogen in air to as rich as 75% hydrogen in air will burn rapidly. When the fire is small radiant heat is almost irrelevant. But once it gets going the radiant heat will destroy the skin in a large area surrounding the flame, allowing air and hydrogen to mix rapidly and the flame to spread, *poof* goes the hindenburg and no magical thermite necessary.

What a load of bull. Helium can be extracted from natural gas. Yes, this is must more expensive than pumping the ready made stuff out of the ground but we are far and away from running out of the stuff.

It's not like helium went beyond Earth's atmosphere. It's still there. It will be more difficult to collect in the air and helium balloons will probably cost more for a little while, but I'm sure we'll have some sort of nanobots able to collect helium in two or three decades.

Helium 4 is used in balloons. We find it in natural gas fields. The government stockpiled it for use in airships, back when airships were a big deal. No reason to stockpile helium after we converted to jet fuel. Let the natural gas companies provide supplies, after of course the US government stops depressing the price.

Helium 3, which decays from Tritium, is not used in party balloons. It is used for radiation detectors, and that use really only took off after we stopped creating tritium. We've started creating tritium again, but so far no one really advocates creating a material for nuclear weapons, just to make more detectors.

Really, why is the article mixing apples and oranges?

"What a load of bull. Helium can be extracted from natural gas."

Essentially all helium-4 is extracted from natural gas. That's the conventional source.

"Yes, this is must more expensive than pumping the ready made stuff out of the ground but we are far and away from running out of the stuff."

Getting helium from natural gas is much more expensive than getting helium from natural gas?

Natural gas is the scarcest of fossil fuels; natural gas extraction and use will drop to effectively zero by the end of this century.

"It's not like helium went beyond Earth's atmosphere."

Yes it does. Why do you think the Earth's atmosphere is a paltry 5 ppm helium? Newly formed hydrogen and helium dominated the Earth's atmosphere.

Helium 'boils' off into space from the top of the atmosphere, it's a slow process but hugely important on geological time scales.

"[...]but I'm sure we'll have some sort of nanobots able to collect helium in two or three decades."

Extremely dubious.

It not outright physically impossible(the free energy of mixing is only ~30 kJ/mole) but helium is a very slippery customer; it's unlikely they're will ever be any easy absorption process because helium is extremely unreactive. Even if there was an absorption process the rate of capture would be very low because of how rare helium is in the atmosphere; therefor the capital cost would be very large.

Nanobots that sense atoms individually in order to tell helium apart from air seem like a terrible idea; they'd waste a lot of energy examining air molecules and only very rarely capture a helium.

Necessity is the mother of invention, so when we eventually do "run out" of helium, we'll find a substitute or a better way to manufacture it.

Personally, I'm hoping for another space race, possibly like what CDales1004 suggested. Just go planet mining.

--------
www.searchenginepartner.com

If we start pumping massive parts of it out of the air will it not even distribute like any gas in a volume? I'm assuming gravity makes our atmosphere into a container of sorts.

@dpetersep:

We have substitutes, and we will probably discover better ways to extract Helium. However, manufacturing it is a different matter altogether. Helium is an element, not a molecule. The only way to "manufacture" helium would be in a fusion reaction, involving hydrogen atoms. We aren't there yet & when we do have fusion reactors, it's unlikely that they'll produce as much helium as we're using up today.

Ok I'm a little late to the conversation but my question is why did the government dictate that we must get rid of our stockpile of helium? In 1996 were the technological uses for helium not apparent?

The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 was enacted for financial reasons. By 1996, the Department of Interior had lost over 1.4 billion dollars running the helium business. The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 was the government's way to recapture some of that money.