Helium shortage ahead

Physicist shows concern over helium resource depletion

By Tim O'Brien

Although helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe, here on Earth, reserves for the noble gas are diminishing. Helium prices are increasing, creating challenges for scientists and manufacturers who rely on the gas.

As it stands, helium is a non-renewable resource. Helium supplies on Earth come from radioactive alpha decay in rocks, namely granite. Since it is not commercially efficient to extract helium from the air, we have to rely on extracting it from rocks. But because alpha decay is a slow process, the reserves are not being replenished quickly enough.

The US government set up a national helium reserve in 1925 which holds a billion cubic metres of helium in Amarillo, Texas. However, in 1996, the Helium Privatization Act mandated that US federal agencies stop production of helium by 1998 and sell the reserve supply by 2015. This would cause helium production to decline while consumption continues to rise in the United States, and this has scientists worried.

“This strategic reserve represents half the Earth’s helium stocks,” said Robert Richardson, Nobel Prize winning physicist. “As a result, helium is far too cheap and is not treated as a precious resource. The rest of the helium in the US will last only twenty-five years at current usage.”

Scientists like Richardson have concerns because helium is used to operate many important innovations, such as MRI machines in hospitals, fibre-optic cables, liquid- fuel rockets, and superconducting magnets.

“Here at MUN, our biggest use of helium is for superconducting magnets,” said Mike Morrow, professor of physics at MUN. “When liquefied, helium boils at -269 degrees Celsius. It’s what we use to cool these magnets down.”

There are several applications that scientists use superconducting magnets for.

“Chemists use [superconducting magnets] to learn about structures of molecules and to identify compounds that they have been synthesizing. Biochemists use them to study metabolism,” said Morrow. “Myself, I study proteins and membranes.”

The helium used at MUN is recycled, but the machines need an initial amount of pure helium in order to begin operating. So, only about 60–70 per cent is recycled.

“All of the labs have plumbing that connects to the magnets and runs the helium back to a central facility where it runs to a compressor,” said Morrow. This compressor is responsible for purifying the helium once it has been used in a magnet. But, what about MRI machines in hospitals, for example?

“Most hospitals don’t recycle their helium,” Morrow stated. “Universities that have a helium liquefier recycle helium, but hospitals typically don’t have the infrastructure.” This is the problem that Richardson emphasized, that helium is not being treated as a precious commodity.

“It’s being squandered. There is no chemical process available to produce helium.”

Richardson is adamant that the Helium Privatization Act is a mistake. He proposes a price increase of 20–50 fold to make recycling worthwhile. This puts pressure on agencies such as NASA, whose recycling efforts for helium are null because of the cheap price to buy it. NASA uses liquid helium to clean fuel, hydrogen, and oxygen out of rocket engines without making effort to recover it.

“If helium became a hundred times more expensive, they would use shrouds to recover it,” Richardson said. “Once helium is released into the atmosphere in the form of party balloons of boiling helium, it is lost to the Earth forever.”

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