Just as we’re starting to deal with the scourge of dihydrogen monoxide poisonings, the United States has a helium shortage, caused by mismanagement by the bureau of land management. I guess fearing that China would steal the entire world supply of helium, the US decided we needed to create a strategic helium reserve in a cave in Texas.
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/feds-created-helium-problem-thats-screwing-science/
When we decided that was silly, we started selling it off creating a glut and killing the suppliers. Now that the supply dried up, the prices have skyrocketed.
How is helium produced? Well helium is an element, so you don’t produce it, you separate it out from everything else. Helium has the lowest liquid point of any element.
http://www.madehow.com/Volume-4/Helium.html
While there is some helium in the air, you could separate it out, but that is inefficient. He4 is a natural product of alpha particle emitting radioactive decay. Some natural gas fields have high amounts of Helium where uranium is present nearby.
Helium is isolated by distillation, which works because different elements boil at different temperature. Because Helium has the lowest boiling point, you essentially boil off everything else and what you have left is helium. How do you do that? You add pressure. When you compress a gas, it heats up. When you cool down the compressed gas, it loses energy. Slowly release the pressure and the gas mix gets colder. When it gets colder, the gases with the highest boiling points turn to liquid first. You remove that liquified gas and set it aside. The helium is still a gas. Repeat. Eventually the gas is only a few degrees above absolute zero and all you have left is helium.
The US Military needed a lot of helium during World War Two. They found that by filling the tires on bombers with helium, they could extend the range of the planes.
If we can get Congressman Hank Johnson (D) stop worrying about Guam tipping over and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D) to stop looking for the American flag she said Neil Armstrong planted on Mars…. maybe they can fund a new program to establish a base station on the sun to extract helium and bring it back to earth. With today’s helium prices “sky high”, it is sure to be profitable before the current federal solar projects. OBM – amazing what you can do with it 😉
That’s a hot idea. The secret is to travel to the sun at night
After deep thought, I realized we have a win-win opportunity here. If we move the national helium reserve to Guam, the helium can keep the island from sinking. Just be careful to not add in too much helium. He don’t want Guam floating off into the upper atmosphere
Wasn’t there some Democrat Congressperson who worried that some island would flip over if they relocated too many people to a specific location?
This is our fine (ungodly expensive) school system at its finest.
My cousin in Boston who worked on the SSC before Reagan killed it (!) adds that part of why the military got involved in helium was to prevent Germany from getting any during WW 1 for its blimps.
The SSC was killed in 1993 when Bill Clinton was President by a Democratic Congress who almost always vote against spending money on science Reagan left office in January 1989. Reagan and Bush were strong supporters of the SSC.
According to a comment I read that sounds moderately credible, one of the things that ballooned the cost estimate was fire ants. They had a habit of destroying the circuit boards. It is what they do