Who knew we had a National Helium Reserve?

November 21, 2007 8:48 AM

Worldwide helium shortage results in pricey Thanksgiving Day Parades. Was selling off the National Helium Reserve a mistake, or was PJ O'Rourke right in calling the reserve "Amazingly stupid, even by Government standards"?
posted by selfmedicating (45 comments total)

If it gets expensive enough, they'll have to get it from the Moon. And that would be cool.
posted by smackfu at 8:59 AM on November 21, 2007

It was first discovered in 1903 when an exploratory well in Kansas produced a gas that "refused" to burn.

No mistake. Helium's a jerk. Find a more responsible gas.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:04 AM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

who knew? thanks for giving me something to talk about tomorrow.
posted by k8t at 9:04 AM on November 21, 2007

I suppose they could release more helium from the reserve more rapidly to try to float us all over the current shortage - but that wouldn't really work if the problem is growing demand - it might only slow down the establishment of additional producing capacity. The only other reason for keeping vast stocks of helium would be if you thought you were suddenly going to need a lot all at once. Which doesn't seem likely?
posted by Phanx at 9:05 AM on November 21, 2007

shortage be damned if a person has the money why can't they buy all the helium they want look at me Christmas, Christmas time is near Time for toys and time for cheer hahahaha
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:07 AM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Helium isn't just for birthday parties. This is a gas that won't catch fire, is lightweight, and while you can "drown" in it, it's non-toxic enough to be played with as a toy. Tons of uses in industry -
posted by BrianBoyko at 9:09 AM on November 21, 2007

Great, now the Germans will have a parade balloon superiority, and we'll start escalating, and soon we'll have that whole nasty zeppelin 'accident' all over again.
posted by Gungho at 9:14 AM on November 21, 2007

Remember when they said that industry could provide helium more cheaply, due to market pressure? WTF happened to that, huh?
posted by notsnot at 9:18 AM on November 21, 2007

Helium escapes from the atmosphere. The only reason we have any at all is because it's constantly being produced by radioactive decay. We need more nukes.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:21 AM on November 21, 2007

I like P.J. O'Rourke, but on this one, I always thought he was wrong. Helium comes from only a handful of sources on the planet, and the U.S. has the biggest one, by far.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:23 AM on November 21, 2007

This is a gas that won't catch fire, is lightweight, and while you can "drown" in it, it's non-toxic enough to be played with as a toy.

The really annoying thing about drowning in helium is that nobody takes your Donald Duck cries for help seriously.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:28 AM on November 21, 2007 [5 favorites]

Great... soon we'll have that whole nasty zeppelin 'accident' all over again.

Only when we switch to hydrogen... due to the helium shortage.
posted by rokusan at 9:30 AM on November 21, 2007

I'm not sure what link this came from:

It was first discovered in 1903 when an exploratory well in Kansas produced a gas that "refused" to burn.

But it seemed wrong to me, here's what wikipedia says:

Evidence of helium was first detected on August 18, 1868 as a bright yellow line with a wavelength of 587.49 nanometres in the spectrum of the chromosphere of the Sun, by French astronomer Pierre Janssen during a total solar eclipse in Guntur, India. This line was initially assumed to be sodium. On October 20 of the same year, English astronomer Norman Lockyer observed a yellow line in the solar spectrum, which he named the D3 line, for it was near the known D1 and D2 lines of sodium,[13] and concluded that it was caused by an element in the Sun unknown on Earth. He and English chemist Edward Frankland named the element with the Greek word for the Sun, ἥλιος (helios)[14]

On 26 March 1895 British chemist William Ramsay isolated helium on Earth by treating the mineral cleveite with mineral acids. Ramsay was looking for argon but, after separating nitrogen and oxygen from the gas liberated by sulfuric acid, noticed a bright-yellow line that matched the D3 line observed in the spectrum of the Sun.

By the time the Kansas thing happened, Helium had already been discovered.
posted by delmoi at 9:30 AM on November 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

I very much want Hydrogen filled Thanksgiving day parade balloons. I also want this to be a plot device in the next Bond film.
posted by Hicksu at 9:31 AM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

So the bottom line is that the USA has been subsidizing party balloons for the entire world for more than 100 years? The world thanks you, Uncle Sam.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 9:36 AM on November 21, 2007

delmoi: three paragraphs down, it explains that the Kansas discovery revealed that helium could be readily & commercially extracted from fields in the Great Plains, not just detected via spectroscopy.
posted by The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal at 9:45 AM on November 21, 2007

Helium is a really important material to science, industry and the military. It absolutely critical for most chemical analysis---all those chromatographic instruments you see on CSI depend on helium, for example (or would, if they were actually hooked up). The manufacture of nuclear materials also traditionally relies on helium, primarily for the separtation of the radioactive isotopes from the stables ones.

It is possible to use hydrogen gas as a replacement for helium. Hydrogen, however, is less safe, harder to handle and has less optimal gas properties than helium. This slows the change-over from renewable hydrogen to irreplacible helium. Many labs and industries are switching, but it's a difficult and slow process.
posted by bonehead at 9:46 AM on November 21, 2007

years ago in my old city, one of the local supermarkets occasionally held a "singles night" replete with tables of food and drink and helium balloons. i'd stalk the aisles with a balloon, go up to interesting women, take a deep lungful of the helium and address them in donald duck. oh that was fun.
posted by bruce at 10:00 AM on November 21, 2007

PJ said that? That was a monumentally stupid thing to say. (I'd like to say that PJ is smarter than that, but really I think he's just funnier than that, but I digress.)

This is, of course, seriously bad news for the Chinese plan to build hundreds of cheap helium-cooled pebble-bed fission reactors. Seriously bad news for any of the many industries that have come to rely on Helium -- industries that PJ would have known about if he'd bothered to do anything other than fire off a knee-jerk marketroid reaction.
posted by lodurr at 10:02 AM on November 21, 2007

Hydrogen's been getting a bad rap for the Hindenburg thing.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 10:05 AM on November 21, 2007

He did say it 10 yrs ago, right around the time the government decided to sell of the reserve. So maybe there are helium uses today nobody knew about then?
posted by selfmedicating at 10:06 AM on November 21, 2007

My friend worked at McMurdo Antarctica Station and told me that there was this big ass weather balloon down there that NASA launches every year since 2001. She says that there is like a gazillion giant helium tanks that have to get shipped to fill it. Maybe that's where all the helium went?
posted by k8t at 10:12 AM on November 21, 2007

It doesn't really matter whether there are uses now people didn't know about then, for two principle reasons:

First, there were plenty of very important and esoteric uses for helium even back then.

Second, because when you've got a near-corner on the market for an extremely exotic and extremely valuable and extremely limited commodity, you are stupid to sell off your reserve. Not smart.
posted by lodurr at 10:16 AM on November 21, 2007

Privatize = Profitize

Not that this is always bad, mind you...
posted by mygoditsbob at 10:17 AM on November 21, 2007

bonehead, what kinds of laboratory uses of helium are also amenable to hydrogen? Don't most lab uses of helium capitalize on its small molecular size or lack of reactivity?
posted by lodurr at 10:19 AM on November 21, 2007

Helium is largely the gas of choice for gas chromatography, which is one of the major tools of the analytical chemist. Food, drug, environmental and forensic work relies havily on it. Hydrogen can replace helium in this application, but until very recently, most of the manufacturers (Agilent, Varian, Thermo Electron), strongly advised against using it. Things are slowly starting to change.

A large chemical or environmental service lab can easily have annual helium usage costs in the hudreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
posted by bonehead at 10:31 AM on November 21, 2007

k8t writes "My friend worked at McMurdo Antarctica Station"

Whoa ... My uncle was stationed there (Navy) for two years. Not that many people have been there. Sorry to derail, but small world ...
posted by krinklyfig at 10:45 AM on November 21, 2007

I have some extra Helium for everyone.

It might depress you.
posted by Dagobert at 10:46 AM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I used to quite like P.J. O'Rourke, but haven't really laughed much at his stuff since Holidays in Hell.
posted by JHarris at 11:12 AM on November 21, 2007

ARGH Dagobert no!

"Who's hot tonight? Strindberg's hot tonight!"
posted by JHarris at 11:13 AM on November 21, 2007

There's no reason to get alarmed!

Shit.
posted by Anything at 11:31 AM on November 21, 2007

Years ago I had a post-doc GF in the sciences. I remember hearing about the importance of Helium and how scarce and non-renewable it is. Then she told me how her boss at the university would take home really expensive tanks of science grade Helium for her kid's birthday parties, then bitch everyone out when the lab ran low.
posted by a_green_man at 11:38 AM on November 21, 2007

You definitely can't replace helium with hydrogen for heliarc (tig) welding. Nor will it work for cryogenic applications (superconducting magnets for NMR or MRI).
posted by 445supermag at 11:41 AM on November 21, 2007

What about using neon for things like welding?
posted by delmoi at 11:55 AM on November 21, 2007

“ soon we'll have that whole nasty zeppelin 'accident' all over again.”
*high pitched voice*Oh, the humanity!
posted by Smedleyman at 11:56 AM on November 21, 2007

The solution is obvious: we must legalize cold fusion.
posted by Iridic at 12:06 PM on November 21, 2007

Isn't there a country we can invade for our party needs? Aren't terrarists sucking down hookahs of the stuff over in Balloonistan?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:28 PM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

hoverboards don't work on water has got it. Helium is the American element. It was the American denial of helium technology to the Hun which led to the Hindenburg disaster, and hence directly to Allied victory in WWI. Breathing in helium leads to a voice like that of Mickey Mouse - coincidence? I think not.

Far from closing the reserve, we should introduce a project to ensure that by gradual degrees all helium is repatriated to the stores of the USA. Where it came from, and where it belongs.
posted by Phanx at 1:32 PM on November 21, 2007

I used to quite like P.J. O'Rourke, but haven't really laughed much at his stuff since Holidays in Hell National Lampoon.

Unfortunately, he turned into Dennis Miller before Dennis Miller did.

Oh, and go helium. (I think selling off the reserve is probably penny wise and pound foolish.)
posted by Benny Andajetz at 2:40 PM on November 21, 2007

What about using neon for things like welding?

I've never heard of using neon, but argon is used extensively. Indeed, there is a great deal of detailed study into the chemical and physical properties of "inert" shielding gasses in welding.
posted by Tube at 6:14 PM on November 21, 2007

I learned of the non-renewableness of helium once released into the atmosphere from a college prof, and never looked at birthday-party balloons the same way again.

Particularly now that every hospital has an MRI machine (which requires a constant supply of liquid He in order to operate, to keep the magnets superconducting), the demand for the stuff must be out of control.

I think it's about time we started filling party balloons with hydrogen. Speaking as a former 9-year-old boy, you would not get any complaints from the kids.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:30 PM on November 21, 2007

I can't see any reason to disagree with O'Rourke, or any rational reason for having a large state-owned reserve of helium. If it's a good idea for helium, why not for lots of other elements? Why not a Fort Mendeleev with huge piles or puddles or tanks of everything?

On a side note, Kadin, surely helium is recoverable from the air? I'm no expert, but I should have thought it could be done by the same plants that produce oxygen from liquefied air. It's just that it's so cheap and easy to get it as a by-product of natural gas that no-one bothers at the moment. Or was your prof worried about it gradually boiling away off the top of the atmosphere?
posted by Phanx at 2:09 AM on November 22, 2007

Sure, selfmedicating - you guys had a National Helium Reserve. Uh huh. I bet you kept it right between the Federal Boron Depository and the American Manganese Storehouse. R-i-i-i-i-i-i-ght.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 2:47 AM on November 22, 2007

Particularly now that every hospital has an MRI machine (which requires a constant supply of liquid He in order to operate, to keep the magnets superconducting), the demand for the stuff must be out of control.

This was the case ten years ago, when gas-supply companies would deliver liquid Helium on a schedule to all MRI facilities. The magnets were vented to allow the boil-off to escape. If the boil-off did not escape, an explosion was likely, since Helium expands to 700 times its liquid volume when it turns to gas.

Nowadays, magnets are fitted with recondensing refrigerators that chill the Helium space to 4 Kelvin, where Helium remains a liquid.


...surely helium is recoverable from the air? ... I should have thought it could be done by the same plants that produce oxygen from liquefied air.

You want to go up to the top of the atmosphere with a big vacuum cleaner, you might get some. Otherwise, no. When released, Helium races upward like an air bubble in the ocean. Oxygen is not lighter than air, so it is in air down where we live.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:56 AM on November 22, 2007

If we had the big vacuum cleaner, we could stick the nozzle up into the heterosphere and suck down some of the helium layer, certainly, Kirth: but as a matter of fact down here in the homosphere they tell me there is a pretty constant 5.2 parts per million of helium, irrespective of altitude.

You have to remember that the air moves around and mixes up quite a lot; and that there's a certain amount of new helium constantly popping out of the rocks anyway, as a result of radioactive decay.
posted by Phanx at 6:14 AM on November 22, 2007