Its probably worth pointing out that if we were to commercialise molten salt thorium nuclear reactors they produce a steady stream of Xenon. The half life is very short so it becomes non radioactive quickly. This xenon would always need to be removed from the reactor anyway so forms a useful byproduct.

Like helium, its a noble gas. It may be able to stand in for helium in certain industrial operations, but certainly not blimps...

Andy

For MRI scanning this means the available substitutes can only offer much higher temperatures at which the scanner can operate, implying less conductivity and therefore a less effective scanner.

Haven't we been making rather good progress on high-temperature superconductivity recently? Or did I just imagine that?

Rembrandt - Thanks for the props in your article. You did a decent job of explaining the helium supply situation. I think that the shortage will be relieved in 2011 by new supplies from Algeria and Qatar, where new plants are expected to be built and one of the existing plants will be expanded.

Also think that Kovykta will happen around the same time frame.

Difficult to forecast beyond three years with accuracy in this business, or most businesses, for that matter.

MrMuileh

Another interesting application of helium:

We use 'lots' (well, relatively) of helium at our pressure standards lab room. It's used for checking leaks in high-precision pressure gauges and calibrators. The fact that the helium leaks out nicely from even the tinyest of gaps and the fact that its a rare noble gas ie. there is no other source of helium around in the lab so its easy to detect even the tinyest amount - helps reveal leaks and pinpoint exactly their location like no other gas. We could use hydrogen instead but - boom!

Rembrandt thanks for this article, some good research indeed.

An important article on Helium by Rui Rosa was published a few months ago by SandersResearch, that adds some more pieces to this puzzle:

There are no known sources of refined helium not already committed in long term contracts. A hypothetical new entrant in this market would need to locate a new source of crude helium and build a refinery. Constructing a helium refinery large enough to be viable in the world market would cost between $25 to $100 million dollars. In addition, tens of millions of dollars would be needed to acquire the necessary infrastructure for distribution, trans-fill facilities, cryogenic and high-pressure tube trailers and liquid dewars, capable of transporting helium from the refinery to customers.

http://science.reddit.com/info/65rns/comments/

thanks for your support.

I work for a company that manufactures optical filters, and some of our product goes to the space program. In order to properly test our filters designed for space applications we have to cool them to 77 degrees Kelvin using liquid helium. The wavelength passed by an optical filter shifts with temperature changes.

Which brings up the whole issue of testing instruments and structures designed for space - they have to be supercooled for testing. I'm sure NASA uses lots and lots of liquid helium. So it may be: Goodbye helium, goodbye space exploration too!

Helium is a precious resource, but different from a hydrocarbon.
To get the value from a hydrocarbon, you have to burn it up.

Helium never gets used up, unless you disperse it.
And as the world's smallest molecule, it really wants to disperse.

This suggests that the price will go up dramatically and
applications that conserve their helium will not be greatly affected.

I feel helium is a critical and finite resource that will never have an adequate substitute for cryogenic applications. We have been very cavalier in using it; I cringe at those huge Thanksgiving Day parade balloons. We ought to be following the Hotelling rule for all that we are worth with helium, and have at least a $50 per cubic meter worldwide tax on the stuff, to encourage sane long term behavior. Once it is gone, it is really gone, and I am sure our great grand children will miss it much for all of the useful things that they would like to do with it. Thanks to us, they will have no choice but to do without.

It is not an absolute requirement that MRI scanners need helium, though many are so designed. They just need an extremely high magnetic field, reliably.

Non-superconducting magnets would work, but they would take more electrical power and generate more waste heat.

There are also less clinically used but scientifically important high quality MEG (magnetoencelography) machines which require liquid helium to get extremely low-noise and sensitive recordings of magnetic fields from human brains under cognition. Here, bathing in liquid helium is apparently the only practical way to get sufficient cooling.

Since the devices are extremely sensitive to magnetic fields, MEG operations preclude any active technologies or metals anywhere in the shielded room. I don't think it would be possible to make any active cooling design which wouldn't overwhelm the sensitive magnetic sensors (which detect individual magnetic flux quanta, smallest possible change in magnetic fields!)

There are other uses in scientific research where liquid helium is essential: very low temperatures needed simultaneously with low electrical/magnetic noise so you can measure very small quantities sensitively.

As well as the supercollider being built in CERN; where the flux intensity combined with physical force and cooling requirements mean that no other solution is feasible for the magnets.

When I was in graduate school, I used prodigious amounts of liquid helium. Even used the gas as well (as a part of the gas mix for a CO2 laser).

For the most part the liquid helium was used to chill superconducting solenoids of one sort or another. Higher temperature superconductors hadn't been discovered yet. Typically we would pre-cool the thing with liquid nitrogen to get the thing down to 77K, blow out the liquid nitrogen and fill with liquid helium. Helium is unique in that it has a low latent heat of evaporation, meaning that it doesn't take much heat to get the stuff to boil off - if you are using it to chill down something that is warmer, it takes a surprising amount of helium to do the job, and it also means that any storage vessels must be exceptionally well insulated (many have a liquid nitrogen jacket to help reduce boiloff).

For some of our experiments we would attach a mechanical pump to lower the pressure over the liquid helium - mainly to lower the temperature below the lambda point (we were doing optical experiments, and the bubbles would screw things up - below the lambda point helium is a superfluid and it no longer boils, and it will never freeze). In our labs, the helium gas on the exhaust of the pump was also vented to the atmosphere, but I suppose it could have been filtered and recycled. If you need the superfluid properties, there is really no substitute for helium. All other cryogenic fluids will freeze if you chill them down enough.

In our labs we had no recycling capability, so the helium gas was vented to the atmosphere. Although some universities did have a helium recycling capability and had helium return lines running through the building. The problem is that along with a recycling capability, you also need a liquifier, and those machines are expensive and consume a lot of power.

We typically used 25 liter storage containers to transport the liquid helium. And of course you were supposed to use a special reaming tool every couple of days and run it down the neck to make sure that an ice block wasn't developing. There was a day where I had completed some experiments, and I had a bunch of such containers in my lab. I was downstairs using the xerox machine, and someone ran in and said that a helium storage container had exploded on our floor. In my mind I saw my whole graduate school career was going down the crapper, but I ran upstairs and found that it wasn't one of mine. Still it was damned impressive how much damage the thing did when it let go. The overpressure in the room blew the doors off the hinges, and the top half of the storage container hit the ceiling and destroyed a lighting fixture. There were pieces of the thing all over the place, and superinsulation all the way up and down the hallway.

In terms of boiling point, the next nearest cryogenic liquid is liquid hydrogen at about 20K IIRC, but the safety considerations tend to nix any ideas of using this for much of anything other than rocket fuel.

I have also used closed cycle chillers. They use helium as a working gas, but since they are entirely closed cycle you just plug it in and turn it on and it chills the thing down that you are trying to get cold. You can't get to temperatures that are quite as low with these things, but for some jobs they work quite nicely. IIRC, you could get to about 10-15K with those designs. As helium becomes more scarce, these things might get to be more common.

So does this potential helium shortage pretty much nix the nuclear industry because of insufficent gas for welding and checking for leaks? Will it also affect the welding of windturbines? Will it even cause shortages of high tech, lightweight aluminum bicycles as helium becomes very expensive? Thxs for any informed replies as this is not my area of expertise.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

Rembrandt:

...Multi-Resonating-Image( MRI) scans...

I think you mean "Magnetic Resonance Image" not "Multi-Resonating-Image" right?

I think you'll find Toshiba and others are now making MRI scanners where the coil is cooled directly by the "cold head / cryocooler" without the need for helium immersion. Improvements in this area compared to conventional immersed coil designs are continuing.

Fascinating. Wikipedia has an article on helium that says

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.

If we start doing CO2 sequestration the cost of separating Helium and other noble gas components is going to fall by 99%. There is as little nitrogen in the gas stream as possible so separating CO2/H2O from ArNeKrXeHe in the offgas is not exactly going to be difficult. Ne will be cheap enough to use in ballons though the lift is going to be about one fifth as high. They'll have to use bigger balloons to get a decent amount of lift.
Still it's going to be expensive. The new superconductors don't have very high critical fields, the point at which the magnetic field is as high as it will go and still stay superconducting. That means that the MRI scans won't have as high a resolution using liquid nitrogen cooling. Is there a decent alloy that uses liquid neon to achieve a high critical field point? MgBr or NbSn?

Assuming that some portions of the world want to pursue high-temp gas-cooled fission reactors: is the amount of helium required for such a reactor significant on the scale of other uses?

Assuming that some portions of the world want to pursue high-temp gas-cooled fission reactors: is the amount of helium required for such a reactor significant on the scale of other uses?

Well, the helium will not go away, will it? It will stay in the atmosphere and can be extracted from the atmosphere, so I can not see any problem here

I don't see any peak helium problem being in any way similar to the problem of peak oil so I'm not sure what the point of this article is. Helium is used primarily in high technology applications where technology can probably substitute another process, e.g. using high temperature superconductors for MRI scanning. These can already operate at 20-40K and produce fields of up to 25 Tesla. Also, although I have no personal knowledge, I am extremely skeptical that a non-helium based arc welding system could not be developed etc.

The difference with Peak oil is the complete dependence on the current oil based system and the time and investment it will take to move over to a new energy delivery system. I don't see this as being anywhere near the same problem as for helium which is, in comparison, a product for niche applications.

You raise some interesting points, but I felt the need to point out a few errors. Firstly, MRI is the same thing as NMR imaging - the name was changed because of public perception of the word "nuclear". Secondly, nitrogen freezes at -196C, Helium -269C, not the values you gave.

The other major point is that operating a superconducting magnet at higher temperatures doesn't just mean a poorer scanner - raising the temperature will stop the magnet superconducting and it will quench, meaning it's effectively useless. You might be able to make the magnets out of other materials, but this is (a) expensive, and (b) unless you can get things to superconduct above 40K, you still need liquid Helium to cool them (you can get down to around 40K with other refrigeration techniques at present). It's also not just a matter of getting the magnet superconducting - once you start putting a current through it, the magnet will heat up and the critical temperature actually reduces, so it's not just a case of finding a material that will superconduct above 40K.

And Olle, yes, helium will indeed slowly leach out of the atmosphere into space. It's light enough that there's not really anything to stop it. It's also VERY expensive to extract the little helium that is in the atmosphere and liquify it.

Good thing that low-field MRI is starting to mature:

They rely on superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs, to detect the very low fields.

In cooling, the alternatives to Helium are Neon and Hydrogen. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Neon is the second-lightest noble gas, glows reddish-orange in a vacuum discharge tube and has over 40 times the refrigerating capacity of liquid helium and three times that of liquid hydrogen (on a per unit volume basis).[5] In most applications it is a less expensive refrigerant than helium.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon ... and for Hydrogen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen

Helium is only needed for cooling applications below 14K (-259C).

Rembrandt,

You have the wrong picture with your story. This is the correct one.

Thanks,

;-)

Hmm... unlike fossil fuel, helium is abiotic.

I wonder how long it will take the gas fields to replenish themselves from natural alpha sources? (not that we can wait that long, it's just an idle question)

Helium isn't consumed during the reaction, so this isn't much of an issue. It's like saying we'll run out of platinum for our catalytic converters, but in fact we just reuse and recycle platinum from older cars as they are decomissioned. Since it isn't a fuel, we won't run out. As long as it is contained, this isn't much of an issue.
I'm actually more concerned with what we'll do with all the helium by-product produced by millions of years of deuterium-tritium fusion, but that won't be much of an issue for a really long time.