Helium is a finite resource. And there's a shortage.

[Baitball Blogger]

There isn’t much helium on planet Earth, however: just a few parts-per-million. The problem is that the helium nucleus is so light that our Earth’s gravity cannot hold it. Once helium enters our atmosphere, it escapes into the vacuum of space, lost from Earth, swept along with the solar wind.

snip

With a nuclear mass of just four — two protons and two neutrons — helium is a very stable element. Some of helium’s most vital properties for our purposes is that it is chemically inert and nonreactive, it is nonflammable, nonpoisonous, and, most importantly, it boils at 4.2 Kelvin, or minus 268 degrees Celsius, which is near absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible in the universe. No other element can remain a liquid at these temperatures. There is simply no other material with helium’s unique properties available to us at this time.

For many industrial applications, there is no substitute for relatively inexpensive helium. It is vital in aerospace and defense technologies, high-tech manufacturing, rocket engine testing, welding, commercial diving, magnets in particle accelerators, the production of fiber optic cables, and semi-conductor chips found in your cell phone.

However, it turns out that the single biggest use of helium is to support our medical imaging industry, specifically magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, and high-end material analytics take advantage of very high magnetic fields to make the nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, spectroscopy measurements. Those fields would not be possible to generate without liquid helium’s ultra-low boiling point.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/helium-gas-running-bad-news-150200232.html

[PoliticAverse]

1. They're using helium in some computer disk drives now even.

https://geology.com/stories/13/new-uses-of-helium/

[wasupaloopa]

2. I thought the biggest use of helium was

birthday balloons.

Not really but how do you get it?

[Baitball Blogger]

3. Here's a blurb from google.

On Earth the majority of helium found comes from radioactive decay. This is the opposite nuclear reaction called fission that splits atoms. For this reason radioactive minerals in the lithosphere like uranium are prime sources for helium. On Earth there are key locations where concentrated helium can be harvested.

[Blue_true]

16. It is often one of the by products of oil drilling.

A very massive helium field was found about 2 years ago in the southwest.

[ProudLib72]

4. Everything you ever wanted to know about helium can be found in this video

You may have to pause it, though, because it goes pretty fast.

[WhiteTara]

5. And Macy's uses a bucket load of it every year

to float those silly balloons.

[SCantiGOP]

6. They could switch to hydrogen

That would probably be the only thing that could make me watch the parade - the prospect of seeing Snoopy explode and hearing cries of “Oh, the humanity.”

[Kaleva]

15. The Hindenburg disaster brought to you by Macy's twice a year.

[Blue_true]

19. ....

You got there first.

[Liberal In Texas]

7. It should be outlawed for party baloons.

We're going to need it for blimps!

[canetoad]

8. It certainly should be

Apart from the shortage for scientific use, I'm always picking up dead balloon skins and their attached ribbons off the beach. They're a big danger to bird and sea life.

[Kaleva]

14. Those are condoms.

[Baitball Blogger]

10. The shortage has hit Party City.

They don't have any tanks in stock.

[N55-6MT]

9. Helium is a byproduct

It's not a gas that we're trying to extract, it's a byproduct of other activities such as natural gas extraction. Basically if we don't collect and use it, it will just fly away anyway.

[Baitball Blogger]

11. Very honored to have provided a medium for your first post.

[Delphinus]

13. Welcome

to DU!

[gopiscrap]

24. welcome to DU!

[GemDigger]

12. We are so smart, that someday....

… we will harvest it from the sun.

Joking aside, this is a pretty serious issue.

[blogslut]

17. Aren't we running out of helium reserves as opposed to helium itself?

Granted, I'm guessing that natural gas is a finite resource but at this point, it's pretty plentiful, and from it we extract helium. I think what happened (I COULD BE WRONG) is years ago, the PWB decided that we had too much helium in reserve so we started selling it off and now those reserves are almost tapped out.

[Blue_true]

18. I theory two forms of Helium can be made via fusion.

If Deuterium is fused with Protium, Helium 3 is formed. If two Deuterium atoms are fused or if Deuterium and tritium are fused, Helium 4 is formed (the subject of your OP). The problem is that a nuclear fusion process has proven to be elusive on earth due to the enormous temperature and pressure required. Deuterium occurs naturally in the oceans at a ration of around 1 to 6500 Protium atoms.

Helium is created naturally in the Sun, but clearly we can't harvest it from there. Solar winds should contain Helium 4 beyond what is captured from earth's atmosphere, solar winds should leave the sun carrying Helium 4, but again harvesting that Helium is beyond our technical capabilities.

[CentralMass]

20. I guess that helium beer is out of the question.

[customerserviceguy]

21. Yet

you can still pick up a mylar balloon from the Dollar Tree for, you guessed it, a buck. I would think that the price of helium would reflect a true scarcity to the point where frivolous things like balloons would be prohibitively expensive.

[dalton99a]

22. How the Qatar Crisis Shook Up the World's Supply of Helium

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/qatar-helium-production/532788/

How the Qatar Crisis Shook Up the World's Supply of Helium
The country provides 25 percent of helium used on Earth.
Sarah Zhang
Jul 8, 2017

... New helium plants came on line in Qatar, and the country quickly went from producing a small sliver of the world’s helium to 25 percent of it in 2016.

Now, Qatar is at the center of a regional crisis that seems to be about many different things, none of them helium. Yet the helium supply chain is tangled up in it. Qatar usually sends its supply over land through Saudi Arabia to a large port in the United Arab Emirates, from which the helium goes out to Singapore and then factories and labs around the world. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have cut off this route as part of the dispute.

It got bad. Because its helium had nowhere to go, Qatar suspended helium production in early June. Production resumed around July 2, and helium will probably take a more complex and expensive route via a port in Oman, according to Phil Kornbluth, a helium industry consultant. Furthermore, it’ll take a few more weeks for helium production to get back to normal due to the logistics of getting specialized liquid helium canisters back to Qatar and slowly cooling them before they can be used again.

“The thing this really highlights,” says Kornbluth, “is that the helium supply chain, even though there’s ample supply when everything is running, is inflexible and fragile.” The challenges of handling liquid helium and the fact that it’s only made as byproduct of natural gas in a few places around the world all make helium a tricky product to source. Qatar is producing helium again, but the political crisis is not over. It’s been a wake-up call.

The industry has been trying to make the helium supply more reliable. That could mean severing the link between helium and natural-gas extraction. Helium makes up a minuscule amount of natural gas. While Qatar’s natural gas doesn’t exactly have high concentrations of helium (0.05 percent), the country produces so much natural gas that its has accumulated helium byproduct for a tidy second business. The U.S., the world’s top helium producer ahead of Qatar, extracts helium from natural-gas fields around the Texas panhandle.

Since helium is only a byproduct, it’s hard for other helium suppliers to step up when something like the Gulf crisis happens. Producing a little bit more helium requires producing a lot more natural gas—and energy companies aren’t going to do that for the sake of their secondary helium businesses.

[muriel_volestrangler]

23. Though a new reserve in Tanzania over half the size of the other known reserves helps

Large underground reserves of helium in East Africa are at least twice as large as first reported, according to scientists from the University of Oxford and the company that plans to start pumping up the precious gas within three years.

The discovery of pockets of helium in the Great Rift Valley region of Tanzania was announced late last year. The initial samples from gas seeps in the area indicated that the underground deposits contained an average of 2.6 percent helium, mixed mostly with nitrogen. [See More Photos of the Helium Cache Found in Africa]

Based on that figure, independent resource assessors estimated that the underground gas field contains 54 billion cubic feet (1.5 billion cubic meters) of helium, or about one-third of the world's known reserves of the gas, which have been dwindling for decades, according to annual assessments by the US Geological Survey.
...
But new, real-time measurements of gas from the seeps, conducted by geochemists Chris Ballentine and Peter Barry from the University of Oxford late last year, showed that the concentrations of helium are much higher than the initial estimates suggested.

https://www.livescience.com/60620-huge-underground-cache-of-helium-in-africa.html

[fescuerescue]

25. We used to have a national Helium reserve

But W Bush sold it off.

[gopiscrap]

26. wow