Consider helium conservation
All the helium on Earth arose from natural fission of uranium and thorium in the planet’s crust and mantle. We can access it only through certain natural gas deposits - many of them in Texas - which contain enough of the gas to make it possible to isolate. This is the helium of every high-voiced balloon prank, as well as of every MRI scanner and high temperature superconductor. About 1/4 of helium use is in cryogenic applications. Helium is ideal for such purposes, as it has the lowest boiling point of any known element.
What is not commonly appreciated is that, once these particular gas reserves are depleted, we will know of nowhere from which to get helium. Whatever helium is released into the atmosphere gradually rises through it, eventually drifting into interplanetary space. Despite all the helium being released by human beings, atmospheric concentrations have remained constant at around 5.2 parts per million.
We can produce minute quantities of helium through hydrogen fusion, of the kind that will eventually take place in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but it will not be even close to the quantity that will be required to cool the superconducting magnets that will keep the plasma inside that device contained.
It would be particularly ironic if a long-hoped-for source of renewable energy (nuclear fusion) proved impractical not because of issues associated with energy levels of plasma containment, but because we had squandered the planet’s accessible supplies of coolant.
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:51 am
And so the environmentalist War on Fun continues!
No more balloons!
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Selling off the National Helium Reserve sure looks like a stupid idea now, doesn’t it?
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
The National Helium Reserve, also known as the Federal Helium Reserve, is a strategic reserve of the United States holding over a billion cubic feet 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 reserve was established in 1925 as a strategic supply of gas for airships, and in the 1950s became an important source of coolant during the Space Race and Cold War.
After the “Helium Acts Amendments of 1960″ (Public Law 86–777), the U.S. Bureau of Mines arranged for five private plants to recover helium from natural gas. For this helium conservation program, the Bureau built a 425-mile (684 km) pipeline from Bushton, Kansas to connect those plants with the government’s partially depleted Cliffside gas field. This helium-nitrogen mixture was injected and stored in the Cliffside gas field until needed, when it then was further purified.
By 1995, a billion cubic metres of the gas had been collected and the reserve was US$1.4 billion in debt, prompting the Congress of the United States in 1996 to phase out the reserve. The resulting “Helium Privatization Act of 1996″ (Public Law 104–273) directed the United States Department of the Interior to start liquidating the reserve by 2005.
July 24th, 2008 at 7:16 am
[...] is a catch-22 involved in some forms of resource planning. Take, for example, helium (as discussed recently). As of now, we only know of one place from which to get it - certain natural gas deposits. We have [...]