Helium is hard to replace

4/10/2026 at 4:01:44 PM

I really enjoyed this oddlots podcast episode that covered similar points and had a lot of "wat" moments for me, including the US selling off its strategic helium reserves at a loss because politicians labeled it "party baloon reserve", and how long it takes to produce naturally and how hard it is to find, process and transport.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE

by sixhobbits

4/10/2026 at 4:18:57 PM

Part of the reason there's a shortage is because the US was the main supplier. There was no market incentive for anyone to invest into helium extraction.

It'd be like if the US used it's strategic oil reserve to supply the US with oil at a low price at all times.

A strategic reserve isn't supposed to be used as a supply. The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. The fact that selling the helium reserve could create a shortage should tell you that it wasn't being used as a reserve but as a supply.

The US was, essentially, artificial subsidizing the price of helium. What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.

by parineum

4/10/2026 at 4:48:56 PM

The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive).

There were several announcements, a lot of discussion, and a long process before they started selling it. It was also a temporary action, with a well known end-date (that TBH, I never looked at). It had a known and constant small pressure over investments, it wasn't something that destabilized a market.

by marcosdumay

4/10/2026 at 7:03:00 PM

Isn't it like underground? Why would it be expensive?

by j-bos

4/10/2026 at 7:11:42 PM

It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper.

[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...

by atombender

4/10/2026 at 11:29:12 PM

The Bush Dome Reservoir is a giant underground formation. So yes, it's being stored underground.

by vel0city

4/10/2026 at 11:48:43 PM

I was replying to the last question: "Why would it be expensive?"

by atombender

4/10/2026 at 8:54:36 PM

It was a penny wise and pound foolish political move to pretend to be financially responsible and reduce the deficit by some tiny rounding error on top of a rounding error amount.

Basically political bike shedding so elected officials could avoid making any hard or controversial decisions that would have a material impact but maybe upset some folks due to raising taxes or reducing spending.

by phil21

4/11/2026 at 6:06:23 AM

I suppose I'm neutral on the topic of strategic helium reserves; but what aspect of this is supposed to be pound foolish? What exactly is the buffer meant to be for?

A strategic petroleum reserve makes a lot of sense, petroleum is part of the food supply chain and it'd be stupid to be in a position where a short disruption could cause people to starve. Not to mention the military implications if an army can't zoom around because the petrol stations run dry for whatever reason.

I don't see anything on the list of uses for helium that looks particularly time- and helium- sensitive in the way that a strategic stockpile would help with.

by roenxi

4/11/2026 at 6:53:20 AM

The article for example mentions MRI macines, aerospace engineering, fiber optics and semiconductors, so I guess it depends on if you want those things to still be available in a crisis

by procaryote

4/11/2026 at 10:10:27 AM

That does sound kinda minor? A worst-case scenario of a month or two without MRI machines or "aerospace engineering", whatever that means doesn't sound particularly scary. And that is making some pretty unrealistic assumptions like there is literally no helium, hospitals don't have private reserves that can last a few months and there are no replacement gasses or alternative options of any sort. And people can make do with limited fibre-optic or semiconductor manufacturing. We have crisises in various computer components every few years (I can think of HDD, RAM & GPU supply shocks over the last few years). Doesn't seem to be a major problem. A couple of months of disruption isn't a strategically interesting event.

by roenxi

4/11/2026 at 3:44:30 AM

> The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency.

Is there a widely-accepted definition of "an emergency" in the context of strategic reserves?

[Thinking of the SPR] "Oil/gas prices are currently higher due to geopolitical events, my [potential] voters are getting increasingly unhappy, and there is an election soon" would probably constitute an "an emergency" in the mind of a typical politician and his/her advisors.

Whether eg the SPR was created to (indirectly) help politicians keep their jobs is debatable.

by logifail

4/11/2026 at 7:35:48 AM

An unexpected and/or temporary change in supply or price.

The reserves are there to soften any quick price spikes or avoid them entirely, they aren't there to set the price in the long term. To my knowledge, the oil reserve has generally been used that way, even when the price change is self inflicted.

by parineum

4/11/2026 at 5:27:39 AM

> What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.

If they're not paying for the negative externalities that come from the methane extraction that comes along with it they really aren't paying the real price at all.

by Teever

4/10/2026 at 4:31:55 PM

Exactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone sells the strategic oil reserve.

by actionfromafar

4/10/2026 at 4:38:56 PM

Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.

by rootusrootus

4/10/2026 at 6:23:03 PM

Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation.

Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.

by ben_w

4/10/2026 at 7:36:23 PM

Specifically, the US federal government. Just like most Americans don’t hate the people of Russia or Iran any more than the folks the next town over, I’ve never met someone from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, or pretty much anywhere else who hates all Americans. I’m sure they exist, but probably as a small minority. There’s plenty of reason to hate our government though, especially if it has threatened to destroy your entire civilization.

by cestith

4/10/2026 at 11:42:17 PM

I don't know about the percentage of the population, but everyone who leaves Iran and learns English (or German) is much less likely to be a fan of the Iranian regime than those who never left Iran in the first place, so you'll definitely have a sampling bias.

by ben_w

4/11/2026 at 8:08:00 AM

That doesn’t mean they will become fan of either the U.S. or Israeli regimes.

by bigfatkitten

4/10/2026 at 9:14:07 PM

Growing up in the Southern US, I met plenty "Let's bomb all the savages in the Middle Easy and take their oil" types. Some of them grew up to be self-proclaimed Nazis.

by soulofmischief

4/11/2026 at 5:42:47 AM

That's ignorance on top of brainwashing. If they had met the people from those countries they would drop such mindset in 30 seconds.

by ekianjo

4/11/2026 at 6:04:13 AM

I'm not sure I agree. Given that the area in question here is the southern United States, and considering that racism is alive and well there, indeed with people groups they have met (and who speak English), I'm not convinced that exposure to non-whites speaking Farsi will somehow fix their attitude.

by bruce511

4/10/2026 at 8:57:47 PM

Yeah, buy Americans are not target of Russian aggression and violence. Russia is kinda abstract ennemy far away. Feelings get stronger when the country is actual target of bombing.

by watwut

4/11/2026 at 1:11:03 AM

What about the Iranians being targeted by drone with Russian help?

The same Russia that Trump can’t get enough of.

by lostlogin

4/10/2026 at 10:52:54 PM

US government is invoking religion in its justification, US military command has prayer meetings, they call the attack on Iran “part of gods plan”

by hdgvhicv

4/10/2026 at 7:21:53 PM

Are you aware of what the US regime has done to Iran? There's a reason they say that.

by GeorgeWBasic

4/10/2026 at 11:44:02 PM

Literally the devil. Not metaphorically a bunch of bastards, the actual devil. And not as performed by Tom Ellis.

There's a reason why I asked the guy.

And I asked him a few years ago now, so "what the US did" that the regime found objectionable has more to do with the US support for Israel and all the consequences of that than it has to do with any direct attacks by the USA against Iran; for direct action I think you might need to look at the 1979 revolution to undo the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup?

by ben_w

4/11/2026 at 1:15:22 AM

Just because someone hates you and calls you the devil (or loves you and calls you an angel) doesn't mean they think you're literally the physical embodiment. Especially when you're not even a living being but a country or a government. I'm pretty darn sure you can assume it's a metaphor and that your coworker doesn't have evidence to the contrary.

by dataflow

4/11/2026 at 5:39:36 AM

Trust me, we, Ukrainians do mean that in relation to _anything_ that is to north-east of our country.

A good rule of thumb is to always say for yourself.

by ZuBB

4/11/2026 at 6:11:17 AM

> Trust me, we, Ukrainians do mean that in relation to _anything_ that is to north-east of our country. A good rule of thumb is to always say for yourself.

Leaving aside that I am skeptical millions of Ukrainians sincerely believe the devil has been launching missiles at them from the northeast (regardless of what you write here)... it's rather hypocritical to speak for millions of Ukrainians and then tell me to only speak for myself, don't you think?

by dataflow

4/10/2026 at 7:05:26 PM

I think the issue is about our not believing what religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning

by drowsspa

4/11/2026 at 8:28:46 AM

Hegseth reasons? I don’t see it.

by actionfromafar

4/10/2026 at 7:09:09 PM

God's angels typically don't bomb your little girl's school.

All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.

by IAmBroom

4/10/2026 at 9:06:35 PM

God is documented as being rather keen on genocidal smiting. That is part of the exact problem. I googled two relevant examples:

  1: God commands King Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants

  2: When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often commanded to carry out total destruction against the Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass"

I'm not into religion, but it has had a massive influence on my culture (NZ) so I pay some attention to it.

by robocat

4/11/2026 at 3:57:16 AM

The historical and religious context:

1. While approaching the land, the Amalekites had attacked them, preying on the weak. God had said that they would be destroyed. Now, probably partly as a test for their first king (he failed, didn’t eradicate them), God said, get on and do it.

2. God had promised the land to Abraham and his descendants, but said they’d only get it in four hundred years’ time, because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete”—they still had time to choose God’s ways. Only once they were irredeemable were they to be destroyed.

by chrismorgan

4/11/2026 at 2:44:19 AM

Holy books seem to be buffets that people just pick their favorite dishes from, for the most part. At least, in the western world. I can't speak to elsewhere.

by BobbyJo

4/11/2026 at 5:46:43 AM

That's from the old covenant. If you believe in Christianism the new covenant changes everything.

by ekianjo

4/11/2026 at 3:02:41 AM

It might be hard to accurately tell if those who hold those opinions are Americans or not, just from online rhetoric.

I’m Canadian for example.

by tranceylc

4/10/2026 at 6:11:49 PM

It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests. But this problem is not exclusive to America.

by elzbardico

4/10/2026 at 6:29:17 PM

> sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.

That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.

At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests.

And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.

by mschuster91

4/10/2026 at 7:20:32 PM

Would like to add Vox is nowhere near the other's popularity, and has received substantial donations from... Hungary. A total of 6.5 million euros during the 2023 elections.

by spookie

4/11/2026 at 6:11:06 AM

> eat the rich, and try to build something more sane

The tragedy is that right wing parties are sponsored by the rich snd serve primarily them. Economic grievances of ordinary people are exploited to make them vote agains their interests.

by citrin_ru

4/10/2026 at 7:19:02 PM

> That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.

I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old.

I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals.

Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.

by rootusrootus

4/10/2026 at 7:34:13 PM

If Europe has "pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy" then why do they have nothing to show for it? They can't even protect their own sea lines of communication.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 9:12:18 AM

On the other hand: The US can't even build a single proper high-speed rail line, hasn't figured out how to electrify its railways, doesn't understand that bike lanes are good for car people, hasn't managed to solve four-way intersections yet, doesn't have anything even remotely resembling a free market for critical supplies like power and internet, and is in general going bankrupt due to excessive urban sprawl.

I could probably go on for another ten pages. Europe definitely has its flaws, but let's not pretend like the US is a paradise where everything is perfect and nothing ever went wrong.

by crote

4/11/2026 at 1:13:24 AM

Have you been to Europe?

The comparison is stark.

I wish my country had achieved half as much in terms of infrastructure.

And in terms of protecting themselves, if the US stopped protecting Russia, the situation there would be a lot tidier.

by lostlogin

4/11/2026 at 1:58:26 AM

Yes, I've been there many times. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 2:00:29 AM

Then we can both agree that it’s surprising what people like and value.

by lostlogin

4/11/2026 at 3:37:59 AM

No, I don't agree. I am not even slightly surprised.

by nradov

4/10/2026 at 11:14:05 PM

Sounds like your only metric is military strength? Then sure, the US dominates, though it pays a lot for that privilege.

by rootusrootus

4/11/2026 at 1:16:13 AM

US just showed the world its military strength.

It couldn’t open the straits and begged for help from is ‘weak’ ‘allies’.

Europe wouldn’t have been all that impressed.

by lostlogin

4/10/2026 at 11:40:08 PM

There are a lot of metrics, take your pick. But if you can't obtain reliable supplies of energy and other critical resources then none of the other metrics matter.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 9:16:05 AM

Oh, like the 2021 Texas power crisis? Or the ongoing water shortages in the western part of the US?

by crote

4/10/2026 at 9:22:32 PM

The American government is a psyop.

I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc.

And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives.

You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.

by soulofmischief

4/11/2026 at 2:05:40 AM

The pledge is not to some painted cloth or the current government but the community of people you are part of and the decision of who leads them, made thru free and fair elections. I really thought about its meaning as someone that chose to come here and join this community out of my own free will. IDN, Perhaps people that are taught to memorize it as children simply regard as mantra and never think about its meaning. PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge, most often to fatherland/motherland or even a King or Tyrant.

by Shitty-kitty

4/10/2026 at 4:45:37 PM

I think that's broadly true: both sides want America to fail when the other side is in power in order to prove they're right.

by senderista

4/10/2026 at 6:24:28 PM

I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.

by gcanyon

4/10/2026 at 6:57:18 PM

Strong disagree.

One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.

by drfloyd51

4/10/2026 at 8:54:00 PM

There's a fundamental disagreement among people on what "help" really is.

Giving money to someone who could otherwise work is very different from giving food to a single mother who is already working 10 hours a day. Giving needles to a drug addict "helps" them in a certain way, yes. But it also enables their addiction to continue.

Yea it's easy for everyone to say "I believe in helping people!!". But which side of the fence you sit on in the US is non-trivially determined by what you believe "help" looks like in practice.

by tjwebbnorfolk

4/10/2026 at 10:09:05 PM

It's scary how blind people are to this. The right wing wants to help people in the long term and the left wing wants to help people in the short term. Both approaches seem obviously wrong to adherents of the other because they both disadvantage the group that the other wants to help.

Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people. That's a characterization both sides use against each other because they refuse to understand each other.

by foxglacier

4/10/2026 at 11:19:01 PM

> The right wing wants to help people in the long term

That sounds overly generous. It seems more like the right believes in social darwinism and feels like it benefits society overall by ridding us of lower quality people. The left believes there should be a fundamental minimum standard for existence that all members of society are entitled to.

by rootusrootus

4/10/2026 at 10:44:35 PM

If there are ANY people the right wing wants to help, it's rich people and grifters, and "long term" to them is like 3 months. Sorry, but the current admin IS "just bad" and DOES want to harm people - see ICE.

by hn_acc1

4/10/2026 at 10:53:08 PM

Try thinking of honest examples. If you can't, you're not competent to have thoughts about the topic because you will only be able to feel emotions and pretend they're thoughts.

by foxglacier

4/10/2026 at 11:23:36 PM

> The right wing wants to help people in the long term

> Approximately nobody is just bad and wants to harm people

Garbage. Mitch McConnell was on-record as saying during the Obama years that Republicans would be blocking any legislation from his administration that they could "even if it benefited the American people in any way" (his words, not mine) just so they could say it was a "do-nothing Presidency".

by FireBeyond

4/10/2026 at 7:41:01 PM

Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.

by NoMoreNicksLeft

4/10/2026 at 8:59:36 PM

The other side actively goes out of their way to be cruel and is proud about it. All the while trying to stigmatize decency and help.

by watwut

4/10/2026 at 8:41:16 PM

> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are

Being awesome because you help those in need? How horrible!

> more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping

This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue signalling". It often comes from people who are less helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about whether something actually helps isn't authoritative, and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.

by ImPostingOnHN

4/10/2026 at 9:31:03 PM

"Government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely popular take in the USA.

by ryandrake

4/10/2026 at 11:30:43 PM

As I understand it the key Republican discovery was that their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.

That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.

by tialaramex

4/10/2026 at 9:50:19 PM

I think the actual sentiment is closer to "first, do no harm" (a.k.a. the precautionary principle) which is not nearly as bizarre!

by zozbot234

4/11/2026 at 9:24:28 AM

Which would be laudable if that was what is actually happening. In practice it looks more like DOGE: setting every part of the government you don't understand or emotionally dislike on fire. Meanwhile, large corporate sponsors are allowed to do immeasurable harm without any oversight whatsoever.

by crote

4/10/2026 at 11:21:15 PM

That might be the noble aspiration that lives only inside their head, while outwardly the sentiment seems to look more like "make the government harmful so we can justify making it smaller."

by rootusrootus

4/10/2026 at 6:29:57 PM

Classic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when the other dismantles the institutions that let the country work, so both sides are equally bad.

by krsw

4/10/2026 at 6:48:23 PM

Both bad, and one is more bad than the other. They’re not equally bad but they are both very bad

by californical

4/10/2026 at 8:47:18 PM

This is a bit like saying a hangnail and a gangrenous amputation are "not equally bad but they are both very bad". One is literally chopping things off to permanently alter them. The other is, at times, uncomfortable and frustrating.

The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and should be called out as such.

by disillusioned

4/10/2026 at 7:32:24 PM

Yes the US is more bad, agreed

by chipsrafferty

4/10/2026 at 7:29:42 PM

The enlightened centrist take is not entirely wrong, though. The left definitely has some blind spots, among them their purist dedication to perfect morals and a willingness to tell anyone who does not perfectly agree to piss off.

While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency.

Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.

by rootusrootus

4/10/2026 at 7:52:40 PM

There’s a bit of a duality about perfect agreement within the voters for the party’s candidates and somewhat within the party membership itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of telling each other to piss off. There’s a lot of jockeying for the platform and the primaries. But come the general, it’s a minority of the voters who will sit it out or vote for a minor party. Sometimes it’s a large enough minority to hand things to the Republicans, though.

by cestith

4/11/2026 at 9:36:52 AM

A massive problem in the US is that the completely broken two-party system has essentially killed the political spectrum. People more-or-less vote against the party they dislike more, not for the party they want. To see any form of change you need someone like Trump to completely take over a party in one go and kill the old one from inside.

From an outside perspective the US does not have a political left. The policies proposed by the Democrats are roughly in line with the mainstream right-wing parties in the rest of the world. A mainstream left-wing party would look an awful lot like someone like Bernie Sanders - and we all know the Democrats would rather platform a wet paper towel and lose than see him gain any kind of power!

by crote

4/10/2026 at 5:25:49 PM

About half of the strategic petroleum reserve was sold off in 2022.

by dave78

4/10/2026 at 5:41:02 PM

I'm guessing you can find a supply of helium near the top of the atmosphere :)

by amelius

4/10/2026 at 5:50:22 PM

Turns out -- no, it permanently escapes to space with the help of the solar wind

by dmitrygr

4/10/2026 at 5:58:06 PM

The overall amount of helium in the atmosphere is still more than enough for the foreseeable future, and it could be extracted (albeit at high energy cost) by augmenting existing air separation units (ASU's). Of course natural gas wells currently provide an easier to extract source, seeing as the concentration there is way higher.

by zozbot234

4/10/2026 at 8:22:29 PM

Helium is only 5ppm in the atmosphere. Extracting useful quantities of it that way will probably never be economically viable. In other words, if for some reason we can no longer get helium from natural gas wells then it will be cheaper to just let patients die instead of doing cryogenic distillation of helium from the atmosphere to run MRI machines.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 10:13:03 AM

MRI could switch to LH2. Yes, it's explosive and higher boiling temperature so would not support as high field and incompatible with currently used semiconductors. But it's doable. Plenty of other important uses (i. e. semiconductors and lasers) where it is much more irreplaceable.

by tliltocatl

4/10/2026 at 8:30:40 PM

We are already separating out the majority elements from air via ASU plants, so we should compare the abundance of helium in what is left from typical extraction. And that looks quite technically viable, if obviously uneconomic at present.

by zozbot234

4/10/2026 at 10:53:36 PM

This is a very good point.

Oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and argon make up 99.94% of the atmosphere. The remaining 0.06% has 5ppm is nearly 1% helium. That's up 200x from the original concentration and is well above the 0.3% that is sometimes quoted as the limit for economic extraction of helium (and well below the 7% of some natural gas).

Furthermore, the leftover gas is also already cold. It is absolutely true that 85K isn't very close to the boiling point of helium, it is a lot closer than starting at the temperature of gas at the well head.

The gotcha is almost certainly going to be that an ASU probably doesn't liquify most of the gas it takes in. That means that the exhaust gas will only be slightly enhanced.

by ted_dunning

4/10/2026 at 10:09:01 PM

In a world of extremely cheap solar electricity pushing grid prices negative, a lot of things might be a lot more economical then conventionally thought though - particularly when you factor in the desire to get a full return on industrial manufacturing of panels.

by XorNot

4/10/2026 at 11:39:52 PM

For me personally, this is one of the most promising aspects of solar that I hope to see in the future. There are many, many things we could do but currently do not because the energy cost is not worth it. Push the energy cost to zero, or even below, and it will be interesting to see what new things become abundant.

by rootusrootus

4/11/2026 at 1:15:16 AM

http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/atmos...

the density is low though

observe that where Helium becomes a significant percentage, there is also Hydrogen and (monoatomic) Oxygen.

if one were driven by purism or vanity for stoichiometric exactness, then at a height of 1000 km theres 2 Hydrogens per Oxygen atom, so this could be reacted to water, and the energy used to power compression of the Helium, the water would freeze.

without this vanity, helium becomes a significant fraction at much lower heights... and thus higher densities.

The energy to compress becomes nearly insignificant at low pressures.

if humanity ever builds space elevators, this will be one of many benefits of having space elevators.

by DoctorOetker

4/10/2026 at 6:47:03 PM

Space is at the top of the atmosphere right? That place is full of stars producing helium by the teragram.

GP ain't wrong, but the phrasing implied we'd have it closer by than it actually is.

by dguest

4/10/2026 at 6:57:58 PM

No, they're entirely incorrect because they used the word "near". There is no practically usable helium near the top of the atmosphere.

But, I'm also confident they were making a silly joke.

by nomel

4/11/2026 at 1:17:30 AM

Is this graph wrong?

http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/atmos...

by DoctorOetker

4/10/2026 at 5:57:45 PM

Even if it didn't, collecting it seems wildly expensive.

by stvltvs

4/10/2026 at 7:50:35 PM

Or free if we managed to run solar powered sails (or so) skirting the very top and autonomously sending the harvest down.

by subscribed

4/10/2026 at 8:14:46 PM

If by “free” you mean “very very expensive” then i agree with you. It would cost a fortune to even just attempt a pilot project proving feasability. Then we would need to send up regular replacements to the “sending the harvest down” hardware at the minimum. Just imagining the cost of a tank which can be launched into space, autonomously dock with the collector sails, then deorbit and land makes my head spin. And then doing that at scale, paying people to launch it, paying people to operate the system.

It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.

by krisoft

4/10/2026 at 10:22:00 PM

Helium mines on the sun, pumping out millions of barrels of birthday-grade helium.

by sfjailbird

4/10/2026 at 10:54:54 PM

At night it’s called the moon

by hdgvhicv

4/11/2026 at 9:38:17 AM

Weren't there genuine plans to mine helium on the moon? I vaguely recall it being captured from solar wind or something.

by crote

4/10/2026 at 6:07:26 PM

<10% of natural gas plants recover helium. All of them extract it. The remaining >90% vent it into the atmosphere. This is an engineering / money problem, not a physics problem.

by alex_young

4/10/2026 at 6:44:08 PM

It becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas.

I'm not a chemist but are there really no alternatives? Running fusion plants to make helium seems very unlikely to become cost effective, but it would be quite the sci-fi future if we filled party balloons by bombarding hydrogen with free protons.

I guess there aren't any easy molecules to break apart to get helium either since its a noble gas. No hydrolyses type solutions because there aren't any molecules that incorporate helium. I guess radioactive decay, but even that is ultimately limited over long enough timescales.

by jandrese

4/10/2026 at 10:12:19 PM

There are NO alternatives. There's nothing else that stays liquid at 4 K and absolutely nothing else comes close.

by gaze

4/11/2026 at 1:19:38 AM

> There are NO alternatives.

We use a lot in our MR scanners.

The tech is changing and magnets are using far far less.

Super-conduction at higher temperatures has made progress too.

So while you are right that nothing else stays liquid at those temps, we won’t be needing nearly as much helium in radiology in the next few years.

The new generation use something like 700ml of helium, where the standard was hundreds of litres. https://magneticsmag.com/siemens-healthineers-gets-fda-clear...

by lostlogin

4/10/2026 at 10:48:44 PM

The article itself spells out several alternatives to buying continuous amounts of Helium: high temperature semiconductors and zero boil-off systems that don't require a continual supply.

All these "we're going to run out" stories pretend that engineering cannot adapt to changing cost structures, which is just total nonsense.

Sure, there is nothing that can be directly substituted for how we use Helium today, but clearly we're using Helium inefficiently today and the answer is that once markets force us to change, we will find more efficient ways.

by Eridrus

4/11/2026 at 6:22:01 AM

The article also points out several cases where this isn't possible

by nextaccountic

4/10/2026 at 6:58:46 PM

> it would be quite the sci-fi future if we filled party balloons by bombarding hydrogen

How dangerous are party balloons filled with hydrogen? Not a whole balloon arch obviously.

by triceratops

4/11/2026 at 1:24:04 AM

There are many cases in the news of accidents with sometimes a large number of party balloons filled with hydrogen or other flammable gases.

One of the larger episodes was in 2012 in Armenia, where thousands of balloons exploded during a meeting, injuring 154 people, of which 4 seriously (the video is of poor quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWEm2sS7Dw8

A smaller, more recent episode in India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH5JwHeKnZo

by generuso

4/11/2026 at 9:01:12 AM

a party balloon - say a cubic foot - is about 2g of hydrogen. Involves 16g of oxygen. So we're talking 18g of very fast burning, borderline detonating mass. Releases 240 KJ of energy. To compare the hand grenade - 60g TNT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-1_grenade_(Russia) - releases the same 240 KJ of energy.

by trhway

4/10/2026 at 7:00:46 PM

I had a science teacher that did this in class, then taped a match on the end of a yardstick and held it under the balloon. They made quite a bang. I wouldn't want to be right next to it when it went off.

by jandrese

4/10/2026 at 7:05:45 PM

Yeah I've seen that demonstration in school too. But if the teacher was willing to do it in school, with kids, how dangerous was it really?

by triceratops

4/10/2026 at 7:54:14 PM

Along with the other commenter, I'll add that a classroom is usually a lot bigger than a home dining room or other domestic party locations. That size also helps things dissipate instead of reflect. Not sure by how much but I'm sure it does something.

by Neywiny

4/10/2026 at 9:22:11 PM

My chemistry teacher told us how once when he ignited helium in a test tube, the tube broke and he ended up with pieces of glass embedded in his skin. The students had face masks and he was looking the other way "just in case" for this "safe" experiment but he could have easily been blinded.

Things can always go wrong. We probably shouldn't strive for 100% safety because they we'd spend our lives in a padded cell. But we also shouldn't assume things are safe because they're common or routine.

by martin-t

4/11/2026 at 1:21:05 AM

he did not ignite helium

by DoctorOetker

4/11/2026 at 1:28:40 AM

The triple-alpha process of a neutron star does seem unlikely in the classroom setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process

by lostlogin

4/11/2026 at 8:34:11 AM

Sorry, meant to say hydrogen

by martin-t

4/10/2026 at 7:34:29 PM

You can get permanent hearing damage from that demonstration if you stand right next to that balloon.

by cyberax

4/11/2026 at 1:26:30 AM

It would be interesting to see how many would still want to do it, knowing this.

I would.

by lostlogin

4/10/2026 at 9:17:22 PM

Makes sense.

by triceratops

4/10/2026 at 9:23:03 PM

Was there an experimental control?

How does that bang compare to the bang from an equally-inflated balloon full of ordinary air?

by tbrownaw

4/10/2026 at 10:05:47 PM

We did this. One balloon with plain air. One with pure hydrogen. One with 50/50 hydrogen and air. The one with pure hydrogen popped closer in magnitude to the pure air than it was to the 50/50 mix.

ETA: I may be misremembering, the more I think about it, the more I recall that we did not use air, we did use pure oxygen. Not like it was hard to get (and we had lots more interesting stuff than that in the lab, this was the 80s...). But the outcome I do remember. The entire point of the experiment was to examine the difference between the individual pure elements and the mix. We expected the pure hydrogen to be far more interesting than it turned out.

by rootusrootus

4/11/2026 at 1:33:00 AM

Pure hydrogen in a balloon produces a low, loud, very satisfying bang. Completely different from a sound of an air balloon popping. Here is a video from a very good Royal Society of Chemistry demonstration series on various unusual combustion process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwbyl7ywfhk&list=PLLnAFJxOjz...

Hydrogen mixed with air or with oxygen produces an ear piercing supersonic detonation, exceedingly loud and unpleasant. Not recommended for demonstrations.

by generuso

4/11/2026 at 4:54:18 AM

Good vid. To readers - note that the playlist has other compositions

by fuzzythinker

4/10/2026 at 10:10:13 PM

As a kid I took a lot of classes at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, which was paradise for fledgling nerds. On the last day they would have a little closing ceremony with some cute little science experiment. One of my favorites was "Going Out With A Bang".

The instructors would bring out a helium balloon and a candle on a meter stick. The balloon goes pop, huzzah.

Then the twist. "Hey, wanna do it again?" All the kids would be like "meh, I guess?" They would then bring out a balloon full of hydrogen (maybe some oxygen too?). It would look identical to the first one, floating there tethered to the lab bench.

When the candle hit the second one, it made a white flash and a really sharp BANG. It was an order of magnitude louder, and you could hear the transient bouncing off the walls and echoing in the halls. It made an impression.

by invalidator

4/10/2026 at 8:28:52 PM

> It becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas.

I actually remember a similar problem from some compound that was mainly formed as a byproduct of some old Canadian nuclear reactor design. As the tech gets phased out, the material is no longer available in significant quantities, with consequences for a projects that need it (like Iter).

Some things can be cheap if they are produced as a byproduct, but very expensive if they have to be obtained directly.

by cubefox

4/10/2026 at 8:28:28 PM

As usual - 'there is scarcity of XYZ' -> price it accordingly, and markets will align quickly. Dont expecr private companies to have long term thinking, thats not how bonuses for those steering the wheel are set up.

by kakacik

4/10/2026 at 4:31:49 PM

I’m not really worried about any potential helium shortage. We are actually really good at extracting it, the problem is purely economics and as soon as prices get to the point where investment is warranted then there will continue to be adequate supplies. The main issue right now is the proper demand increase forecasts do not align with potential investments costs and helium extraction investment does just not make much economic sense given current forecast Helium costs.

by Aboutplants

4/10/2026 at 5:29:32 PM

If demand keeps growing (as it has been), we've got ~40-60 years of "cheap" reserves left. As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain.

There's about 40-70 billion cubic meters of economically recoverable (assuming future technology development + price increases). The complete total upper end of known geological reserves is ~60-100 billion cubic meters - that's about correct in terms of order of magnitude even if we find new deposits.

Current consumption is 180 million cubic meters/year. At a growth of 3%, you've got 80-140 years before we run out. At 5% growth it's 50-90 years.

Saying "I'm not worried about it" is true in the myopically selfish "I personally won't have to care about it". It's conceivable that your children will be dealing with it and definitely grandchildren in a very real existentially meaningful way.

by vlovich123

4/10/2026 at 5:49:06 PM

It's very hard if not impossible to do predictions over century timescales. How relevant are 1926 resource problems to today? If you wrote your comment in 1926 you would be talking about rubber, fertilizer, coal, wood or oil, and 4 out of those 5 are mostly solved today.

At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.

by dtech

4/10/2026 at 6:44:13 PM

I agree century timescales are tough, I'm not convinced 4 of 5 of your listed things have been solved.

Rubber has been replaced with oil.

Fertilizer has been replaced with Natural Gas that comes from the same place as oil.

Coal usage has been replaced/displaced primarily by natural gas, see above.

Wood, or deforestation, was a real problem in the 1920's, but many uses were replaced by plastics (oil) and natural gas. Sustainable forestry helped a ton here too once it hit the paper industry's bottom line.

Oil is certainly not solved, so we solved 4 out of 5 with the 5th.

by pureliquidhw

4/10/2026 at 7:48:46 PM

Exactly -- that means that any analysis based on the current (as of 1926) 'reserves' or 'production capacity' for rubber/fertilizer/coal/wood would have been invalidated as soon as we switched to using oil instead. Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows). At that point, what you'd have to have forecasted would be the 'reserves' of nitrogen, which are functionally infinite.

by achierius

4/11/2026 at 3:10:27 AM

That still amounts to magical thinking. And the point of the post that you’re replying to is that we didn’t actually make things better. We actually accelerated our exploitation of other resources to make up for the shortage of the others which had serious other negative side effects.

Since we’re dealing in magical hypotheticals, what if this new economical way to split nitrogen generated so much pollution that it poisoned natural water supplies? Also the “economic way” is misleading. If prices shoot up enough, then crazy things become economical like missions to other planets to retrieve it. But that’s an insane cost that has to be borne out by all humanity. Historically that worked because you increased how many people were on earth so it spread the cost out. However, it’s pretty clear the Earth is at carrying capacity for humans with our current technology which is why the population growth has slowed drastically. So increasing costs threaten to become a weight the next generation can’t lift resulting in societal collapse.

by vlovich123

4/10/2026 at 6:27:22 PM

We're definitely not mining the moon for helium, but might well end up "mining" the gas giants.

by ben_w

4/10/2026 at 6:01:32 PM

Isn’t those calculations pretty unreliable? It’s like those predictions we only have 5 or 10 years of oil left. And then we find more oil or better extraction process and we got another 10 years and so on.

by victorbjorklund

4/10/2026 at 9:21:14 PM

Ah, "The Iranian Nuclear Bomb Deadline" ploy.

by Ylpertnodi

4/10/2026 at 7:03:24 PM

> As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain.

No shock at all if the price is relative to what's left. Shouldn't boring market pressures guarantee this, unless the government gets involved?

by nomel

4/11/2026 at 3:13:11 AM

No, if you hit a resource limit you’ve got exponentially increasing prices for the remainder which starts to make applications not even possible anymore. It’s not a shock in terms of months, but you could easily see MRI machines skyrocket in price over a few years as helium becomes inaccessible unless someone figures out a non-helium approach to MRIs.

by vlovich123

4/10/2026 at 5:59:11 PM

Just in time to start extracting helium on Mars

by wongarsu

4/10/2026 at 6:13:29 PM

Maybe we will build chips in space in vacuum?

by elzbardico

4/10/2026 at 5:38:08 PM

> myopically selfish

A standard western personality trait I’ve been confronted with repeatedly over the last… hmm. Well that got depressing real quick.

by cheschire

4/10/2026 at 4:03:03 PM

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode with a helium producer on the topic recently:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...

* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...

by throw0101d

4/10/2026 at 7:03:42 PM

It looks like that by simply reducing use in welding, lifting, and purging gas (all with clear alternatives) and maybe also 'leak detection' and 'other' (not expounded on in the article), they can fill in for the entire Qatari output, and that's without including extra production and recycling which is quiet possible.

by yyyk

4/10/2026 at 4:34:01 PM

For diving, there has been some experimental use of hydrogen as a partial replacement for helium in breathing gas mixtures. This obviously increases the risk of fires and the physiological effects aren't fully understood. But it might eventually be used in commercial, military, and exploration diving for those cases where we need to send humans really deep and using an atmospheric suit isn't an option. Regular sport divers will probably never breathe hydrogen.

https://indepthmag.com/hydrogen-dreamin/

by nradov

4/10/2026 at 4:59:47 PM

For divers, we really should be focusing on building better underwater drones. Remove the risk to human life entirely. You don't need AI either, just a remote-controlled machine with a cable that goes up to the surface. I know there is some loss in dexterity with current robot arms, but building more dexterous system seems like it's not an impossible task.

by snek_case

4/10/2026 at 5:13:55 PM

ROVs have already reduced the demand for commercial divers on some types of work. But it's going to take decades (if ever) until they're able to do the full range of human tasks. Some construction work has to be done essentially by feel in near-zero visibility so using an ROV for that would require advanced force feedback mechanisms, maybe imaging sonar and other sensors. Not necessarily impossible, but extraordinarily difficult and extremely expensive with current technology.

For sport and exploration divers, going there yourself is kind of the whole point. I'm not interested in watching a video feed from an underwater drone.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 4:48:50 AM

do regular sport divers breathe helium?

by NooneAtAll3

4/11/2026 at 9:56:32 AM

Depends on your definition on "regular", doesn't it?

Joe Average on a fish-watching trip in the Bahamas? No, you can go to about 30 meters using regular air or nitrogen-oxygen mixtures.

Some technical diving enthusiast planning a 50-stage 20-hour dive to 175 meters, just because the hole is there? Well, you absolutely need some other gas in there, and helium is currently the popular choice.

by crote

4/11/2026 at 5:50:19 AM

The EUV lithography dependency is the one that worries me. MRI can reduce consumption 90%+ with zero-boiloff designs. Semiconductor fabs are moving in the opposite direction.. more helium per wafer as feature sizes shrink. That's not a recycling problem, it's a demand growth problem.

by kuzivaai

4/11/2026 at 10:24:37 AM

The good news (for the EUV fabs) is that they can outbid pretty much every other user of helium.

by khuey

4/11/2026 at 6:34:56 AM

I did undergrad in Physics at the University of Florida. Some (many?) labs there did condensed matter experiments involving Helium 3. It's a million times more rare than normal helium. Nonrenewable, all that.

There was a dedicated system underground. Vacuum jacketed tubes taking waste helium from the labs to a reservoir across campus.

Helium is rare, helium 3 is precious.

by MathMonkeyMan

4/10/2026 at 8:10:03 PM

The long tail economic ramifications that this disruption to the supply chain will have could be potentially decades, in ways that will most certainly be catastrophic, and what's concerning to me is how small of a percentage of the population (at least in the US) is grasping this.

by JohnMakin

4/11/2026 at 2:41:51 AM

Waaay back in the early 1980s, I read an Asimov essay, “The Vanishing Element”, about the irreplaceable nature of helium and how badly humankind was wasting it. He pointed out that, once released, it just rises through the atmosphere and lost to space. I guess that chicken is coming home to roost.

by Wistar

4/11/2026 at 3:00:17 AM

That’s not true though. Helium doesn’t just rise through the atmosphere and gets lost to space. A helium balloon rises because it’s less dense than air, so air pushes up on it. It rises until the atmosphere is thin enough and stops there. When helium is not in a balloon, it doesn’t rise because it mixes with air and air doesn’t push on it. The atoms are still smaller and move faster than other gases. Some will go up and eventually gain enough speed to hit escape velocity. According to Maxwell-Boltzmann speed distribution of noble gases, only a small fraction of helium should be escaping the earth atmosphere due to that. The actual amount escaping is larger than predicted, but the exact mechanism isn’t fully agreed upon. Solar winds are thought to be responsible, but that’s just one theory. But the important thing is that helium doesn’t just rise when mixed with oxygen or nitrogen a.k.a “air”

by eddythompson80

4/11/2026 at 3:56:28 AM

A quick search seems to show that helium is being lost to space. Wikipedia’s article claims the loss of helium to be at a rate of about 50 grams per second.

by Wistar

4/11/2026 at 4:49:06 AM

I was talking about the mechanism it’s lost to space by not denying it. It doesn’t simply rise until it escapes like a helium balloon. Solar wind and helium kinetic energy play a bigger role there.

by eddythompson80

4/10/2026 at 11:10:36 PM

Xenon is very rare too and currently without substitute for certain medical applications, but more interestingly it produces psychoactive effects that could shed light on stuff no other substance apparently can: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11203236/

by Vachyas

4/10/2026 at 6:54:15 PM

Helium luckily is the second most abundant element in the universe. A good reason to go to the stars.

by aeternum

4/10/2026 at 7:38:22 PM

mostly out of our reach unless you have way of removing it from the sun without your retrieval craft melting or being captured by the suns gravity well or from gas giants without the onboard system being fried by the intense radiation or again captured by the gravitation.

by smegger001

4/11/2026 at 3:07:45 AM

Once we’re talking about the scale of the universe, all elements are essentially “abundant” from earth-size prospective.

by eddythompson80

4/10/2026 at 6:58:16 PM

We might find it quite difficult to extract from the stars, that said.

by everdrive

4/10/2026 at 7:41:43 PM

It might be expensive compared to improved Earth mining, but lunar regolite is rich in Helium 3, there would be no need to mine stars.

The funny part is, lunar regolite soaks Helium from its exposure to solar wind, so mining it would be an indirect mining of a star, our sun.

by ASalazarMX

4/10/2026 at 7:54:16 PM

It is pretty much impossible to extract it from stars, but the 4 big planets have large amounts of helium.

It would be quite expensive to extract it from there, due to the necessity of escaping from their gravitational field, but not impossible.

by adrian_b

4/10/2026 at 8:24:08 PM

If we have such advanced tech, and trip to big planets would seem economically feasible, I think we will be long beyond the point of desperately needing transporting helium to do such crazy trips.

by kakacik

4/10/2026 at 8:16:14 PM

A round-trip lasting centuries is not a practical solution. Star Trek is fiction.

by IAmBroom

4/10/2026 at 11:44:30 PM

“Not within a thousand years will man ever fly”

by aeternum

4/11/2026 at 5:08:07 AM

We need the price of helium to skyrocket otherwise it won't be valued at all. If another blimp or balloon is never produced again, I wouldn't blink an eye, it should be reserved for medical and scientific purposes since we can't manufacture it in large quantities.

by reenorap

4/10/2026 at 3:53:39 PM

Is there any way to actually produce helium other than nuclear fusion? I would assume not, but I'm not an expert in this field.

by LorenDB

4/10/2026 at 4:10:52 PM

Helium is produced naturally by radioactive decay underground. There is no way to artificially produce it in useful quantities.

But we can capture more of it from natural gas wells. Today much helium is just vented off and wasted at wellheads. As the price rises it makes sense to invest in cryogenic helium capture equipment for more wells.

by nradov

4/10/2026 at 8:02:23 PM

Helium exists in great quantities in the 4 big planets, which unlike Earth have strong enough gravity to retain it.

Others have mentioned that some helium exists on the Moon, where it comes from the solar wind. The use of the helium 3 from there has been suggested for nuclear fusion, if the fusion of helium 3 became possible (it is much more difficult than the fusion of tritium with deuterium, which is the main approach attempted for now).

However, for fusion relatively small amounts could still be useful. For other uses the amount of lunar helium might not be enough, even when ignoring how expensive it would be to transport it from there.

by adrian_b

4/10/2026 at 3:55:28 PM

It can form during radioactive decay of uranium and thorium.

by adrianN

4/10/2026 at 4:11:50 PM

And that's where all of our helium actually comes from. Any radioactive decay that emits alpha particles generates helium, since alpha particles are just helium nuclei. When that happens underground, the helium can get trapped. It tends to get trapped in the same places that natural gas gets trapped, so natural gas extraction often encounters helium as well.

Similar to oil and gas (although a completely different mechanism), it takes deep time to accumulate, but can be extracted much, much faster. So although new helium is being generated underground all the time, we can still run out in a practical sense.

by wat10000

4/10/2026 at 6:54:30 PM

Dumb question, but is there any world where a fission reactor could reasonably genrate waste with a short enough half-life to produce meaningful amounts of helium as a side-gig?

by BobaFloutist

4/10/2026 at 7:42:54 PM

I'd say no, although the amount of helium that's produced is small enough that it's not quite as absurd as I would have thought. Worldwide helium production is something around 25,000 tons/year. A nuclear power plant produces about 25 tons of waste per year. There are about 440 nuclear power plants in the world. If their waste consisted entirely of helium, that would be roughly 44% of total world helium production. More than I guessed! But, of course, only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that waste ever turns into helium, so even if you somehow made it decay all at once, it would be be pretty insignificant on a world scale.

by wat10000

4/10/2026 at 4:12:04 PM

Terrestial helium isn't produced by nuclear fusion. It's produced by nuclear decay. As you may know, you get alpha, beta and gamma radiation from decay. Gamma rays are just energetic photos. You typically need thick lead and/or concrete to shield you from them. Beta radiation is high energy electrons. A thin sheet of steel will shield you from those.

And lastly we have alpha radiation, which is just a Helium nucleus. A sheet of paper will generally block alpha radiation.

Some materials are really strong alpha emitters. A good example is Polonium-210 where almost all of its energy from decay is in the form of alpha radiation. This is why Po-210 is so lethal when ingested, which has been used for that purpose [1].

But this means if you produce a lump of Polonium-210, it's basically radiating Helium. The source of almost all of the Earth's Helium is from uranium and thorium decay.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...

by jmyeet

4/10/2026 at 5:08:11 PM

> Gamma rays are just energetic photos

They are indeed. The average planet busting Gamma Ray Burst is just a Vogon trying to "get the whole family in".

by onraglanroad

4/10/2026 at 7:29:07 PM

I would think that lighting a Vogon family picture would be about as advisable as recording a Vogon speech. That is to say not at all.

by throwaway173738

4/10/2026 at 4:03:48 PM

It's also formed similarly to oil over millions of years underground if I understand correctly so can be a byproduct of natural gas mining.

by sixhobbits

4/10/2026 at 4:09:19 PM

It's often found alongside natural gas because the rock structures that can trap methane can also trap other gasses, but the original source is different - thermal decomposition of organic matter for natural gas and radioactive decay, mostly of uranium and thorium, for helium.

I agree that the "accumulation over millions of years" is similar (and similarly a potential problem if we burn through all that accumulation).

by daemonologist

4/10/2026 at 10:05:24 PM

Helium will leak out of some structures that hold methane. Shale will trap methane and let helium escape. Layers of salt trap both. Thus horizontal drilling and fracking to recover oil and methane from shale produces very little helium.

by fraserphysics

4/10/2026 at 4:30:42 PM

Which is exactly 100% of Earth's helium. Every single helium atom we use is a result of alpha decay, as a very good approximation there isn't any primordial or stellar helium on or in Earth.

by Sharlin

4/10/2026 at 4:38:46 PM

The reason helium can't be produced chemically (like hydrogen can be produced e.g. from water) is that there are no natural chemical compounds which contain helium. That's because it doesn't form those compounds in the first place, since it's a noble gas.

by cubefox

4/10/2026 at 5:37:35 PM

Not at any temperature nor pressure found on Earth:

> These could exist in planets like Neptune or Uranus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_compounds

by Tangurena2

4/10/2026 at 4:11:00 PM

If you have something that emits a lot of alpha particles as it decays, you could surround it with a source of electrons, I suppose. The details would have to be left as an exercise, and I doubt you'd get enough helium to be very useful unless you were dealing with large amounts of ridiculously-radioactive substances.

Same with fusion. Due to the implications of E=mc^2, fusion yields a lot of energy and a uselessly-small amount of matter. There don't seem to be many good ways to get a lot of helium besides either waiting millions of years for it to show up naturally, or carefully recycling what we already have.

by CamperBob2

4/10/2026 at 5:05:10 PM

> you could surround it with a source of electrons, I suppose

Water would be the best for this. The cross-section is good and water can ionise easily. But yeah, you would not get a lot of it.

by kergonath

4/10/2026 at 4:02:12 PM

Atmospheric extraction on Earth would require massive amounts of energy and infrastructure.

Gas giant atmosphere extraction sounds very far future

by nsxwolf

4/10/2026 at 4:01:28 PM

Fun fact, helium was discovered on the Sun nearly 30 years before it was found on earth.

by Invictus0

4/10/2026 at 4:02:53 PM

Hence the origin of the name!

by CamperBob2

4/10/2026 at 10:22:16 PM

Qatar produce(s/d) about a third of global helium. With the force majeure in place I won't be launching student HABs anytime soon. (Schools don't like hydrogen)

by tagami

4/11/2026 at 4:36:01 AM

On June 27, 2024, the Biden Administration announced the final sale and transferring of the U.S. government’s remaining helium reserve to Messer LLC, a subsidiary of a German industrial gas business group with operations in China.

by deIeted

4/10/2026 at 3:57:39 PM

Recently had to deal with radon in a basement, leading me to a fun side trek of learning about uranium decay (it has been a lot of years since chemistry classes).

When you hear about alpha decay of radioactive materials, that is the matter spitting off a highly ionized helium nucleus, freshly birthed into this world. That He nucleus rapidly steals electrons from matter, which is how it can be dangerous to human cells if ingested.

All of that helium underground is the result of alpha decay, and a single uranium-238 element will birth 8 helium atoms as it transitions through a series of metals and one gas (radon), then finally finding stability as Pb206. U235 will birth 7, becoming Pb207.

Anyways, found that fascinating. It's just happenstance that helium often gets blocked exiting the crust by the same sort of structures that block natural gas from escaping, and they are an odd-couple sharing little in common.

One other fun fact -- radon only has a half life of 3.8 days. Uranium becomes thorium becomes radium, then radon where it has an average 3.8 days to seep out of the Earth and into our basements, where it then becomes radioactive metals that attach to dust, get breathed in (or eaten) and present dangers. In the scale of things, crazy. Chemistry is fascinating.

by llm_nerd

4/10/2026 at 4:10:22 PM

> That He atom rapidly steals electrons from matter

tfa:

> Thanks to its filled outer electron shell, it is inert, and won’t react with other materials

by 867-5309

4/10/2026 at 4:25:10 PM

The particle that is emitted from an alpha decay isn't actually called a He atom (I edited my root comment so this isn't misleading, apologies) -- I was being loose with terminology -- though it has the right number of protons and neutrons. It's called an alpha particle. Once it steals two electrons -- it carries a +2 charge and is extremely successfully at slicing electrons off of other molecules it comes across -- it is then considered the helium that we know and love, and is now stable with the properties we know.

And by stealing those electrons from other molecules it sets off other chemical reactions, which in things like DNA is highly suboptimal. This all generally happens at the birth of the He atom, presuming it isn't in deep space or something with no electrons to cleave from neighbours, and is only an instantaneous state.

by llm_nerd

4/10/2026 at 4:31:14 PM

> *particle that is emitted from an alpha decay isn't actually called a He atom”

“Because they are identical to helium nuclei, they are also sometimes written as He2+…” [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle

by JumpCrisscross

4/10/2026 at 5:14:01 PM

You should really have posed that as a "I don't know anything about this so I'm confused" question.

by onraglanroad

4/10/2026 at 5:08:09 PM

He2+ is not a helium ion, which is very reactive. It’s not a helium atom, which is inert.

by kergonath

4/10/2026 at 11:00:50 PM

Is He1+ an ion while 2+ is not because no known chemical reactions produce the latter? (Is that true?)

by JumpCrisscross

4/11/2026 at 8:28:44 AM

Sorry, it was a terrible typo. He2+ is an ion.

by kergonath

4/10/2026 at 5:49:46 PM

  He has risen,
  He has risen,
  He has risen,
  Helium is alive.

by DonHopkins

4/10/2026 at 4:13:46 PM

Because it rapidly steals electrons, it becomes inert quickly. Helium you find lying around will be inert. Helium that has just shot out from the radioactive decay of an unstable atom will not be inert.

by wat10000

4/10/2026 at 4:19:34 PM

I would imagine that an alpha particle would still be inert in the sense that it won't cause chemical reactions with other molecules.

by chii

4/10/2026 at 5:08:49 PM

Stealing electrons is a chemical reaction.

by kergonath

4/10/2026 at 5:30:38 PM

So how hard would it be for elon to build a gas raffinery sattelite that captures helium while skimming the top layer of the atmosphere, dropping filled canisters by parachute?

by cineticdaffodil

4/10/2026 at 7:53:00 PM

The biggest obstacle is that planetary extraction has to become too expensive, so space extraction becomes viable. If that were the case, it would probably be safer to mine the Moon, to avoid further messing of the atmosphere with refineries or even more frequent space flights.

by ASalazarMX

4/10/2026 at 5:37:53 PM

You'd need investors willing to pay $50,000\kg of helium, for one.

by bigyabai

4/10/2026 at 5:38:26 PM

[flagged]

by DonHopkins

4/10/2026 at 7:34:33 PM

>The vast majority of MRI machines used today use superconducting magnets made from niobium-titanium (NbTi), which becomes superconducting at 9.2 degrees above absolute zero. This is well below the boiling point of any other coolant, making liquid helium the only practical option for cooling the magnets.

Well, this is part of it. The other issue is that the superconducting phase diagram has two limits: the transition temperature Tc and the upper critical magnetic field Hc. The magnetic field limit is generally highest at absolute zero and drops steeply with temperature. Even for the superconductors with Tc as high as 120 K the Hc at 20 K will be much less than the Hc at 4 K. So in order to make powerful superconducting magnets you need helium regardless of what superconductor you use, since nothing has broken this pattern.

by scythe

4/10/2026 at 10:52:25 PM

Do we know if this pattern is just something we've observed so far, or is it a natural law?

by tblt

4/10/2026 at 4:21:28 PM

The US used to have a massive Strategic Helium Reserve [1]. Starting in the 1990s, Congress passed a law to sell down the reserve. This flooded the market with cheap Helium (yay, party balloons?) because the mandated pricing just didn't make any sense.

10-20 years ago there was a lot of talk about how this was foolish because it was depleting and squandering an unrenewable resource. But the thinking has shifted on that because it's an inevitable byproduct of natural gas production.

Now natural gas itself is limited but you can still get Helium from alpha decay of radioactive elements. Some elements are particularly strong alpha emitters (eg Polonium-210, Radium-223). They're basiclaly producing Helium constantly.

Helium is a known issue in various industries. The article notes (correctly) that MRI Helium use is decreasing because of the rise of so-called "Helium free" or "Helium light" MRI technology.

But there are short term supply issues. As noted, Qatar produces ~30% of the world's Helium currently. And that can (and has) been disrupted by recent events.

Lithography is a particularly important consumer of Helium for superconducting magnets. That demand is rising with probably no end in sight. Lithography itself is on the cutting edge of technology and engineering so seems harder to replace. I mean, EUV lithography is basically magic.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

by jmyeet

4/10/2026 at 4:40:21 PM

Shutting down the National Helium Reserve seemed like a good idea at the time. It was originally established when airships were considered essential for national security, largely for maritime patrol. But blimps and dirigibles fell out of favor for most military missions and there wasn't much demand for other uses, so it was politically hard to justify wasting tax dollars to maintain a reserve.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 1:30:59 AM

I thought it was stockpiled to block Germany from buying it?

by lostlogin

4/10/2026 at 9:18:17 PM

Ironically exactly now - while we are at or close to peak natural gas extraction - would be the best time to fill up strategic helium reserves worldwide. If every natural gas well was required to capture and store helium for future use we could extend that runway by multiple generations.

But instead of our grandparents and great grandparents general idea of investing in the future of their societies, we’ve decided to stop doing that and add up all the debt possible to pass down to future generations.

It is quite depressing to think about.

by phil21

4/11/2026 at 1:33:16 AM

> But instead of our grandparents and great grandparents general idea of investing in the future of their societies, we’ve decided to stop doing that and add up all the debt possible to pass down to future generations.

This is even true at a genetic level, the human genome is rich in fitness, but with healthcare we are lifting natural selection pressure and feasting on the fitness we inherited as if it can be taken for granted, at the cost of future generations genetic fitness.

by DoctorOetker

4/10/2026 at 4:44:43 PM

The article briefly touches on insufficient recycling. Though it's not clear for which applications helium recycling is technically/economically feasible and for which it isn't.

by cubefox

4/10/2026 at 4:01:02 PM

For a second I thought this was about Helium browser :(

by KalandaDev

4/10/2026 at 4:18:34 PM

I recently began wondering if a planet's helium supply could be the 'great filter'. As in, if a civilization could stall out due to not having access to enough helium to product the technology to access off-world helium.

by nisegami

4/11/2026 at 6:24:53 AM

Pretty much any time there's some kind of problem in the world, someone chimes in to say that maybe not solving this problem is the great filter; and we have exactly the same amount of evidence (none) for all such hypotheses. Why is a shortage of helium more likely to be the great filter than the development of multicellular life, getting absorbed in AI worlds, nuclear war, etc.?

by JuniperMesos

4/10/2026 at 6:48:25 PM

This presupposes that there are no alternatives to helium for off world exploration. Would be interesting if warp drives were real but required vast amounts of helium to operate with no substitutions possible.

by jandrese

4/10/2026 at 4:32:41 PM

That sounds more like a tiny filter. :)

by actionfromafar

4/11/2026 at 10:33:34 AM

[dead]

by cameolkc

4/10/2026 at 6:45:15 PM

The US has made itself reliant on a global market economy that they also constantly disrupt with idiotic mistakes.

But for some reason for Americans peace is never the preferred option.

by expedition32

4/10/2026 at 11:15:17 PM

[dead]

by totalmarkdown

4/10/2026 at 4:42:12 PM

[flagged]

by phplovesong

4/10/2026 at 4:51:51 PM

Your post is frustrating to read because of the incorrect spelling and grammar; these errors make it hard to take you seriously.

>""The war in Iran" should be called for what it is:

>"Its "trumps war", nothing else. Hes the solely to blaim. Israel would never had started it on their own.

>"The kicker? MAGA voted for "the no wars president", and so far hes started FIVE."

Could be:

"The war in Iran" should be called what it is:

It's 'Trump's War', and nothing else. He's solely to blame. Israel would not have started it on their own.

The kicker is that MAGA voted for the 'no-war' president, and so far, he's started five.

Note that in addition to spelling and grammar, I switched "FIVE" to lower-case italics (which are reverted to regular because the block is italicized), as capitalizing for emphasis is against the HN guidelines.

by nickff

4/11/2026 at 6:02:10 AM

nice bot account you have there.

by phplovesong