Helium 3 crisis (shortage) has national security implications

[The Straight Story]

The United States is currently recovering from a helium isotope crisis that last year sent low-temperature physicists scrambling, sky-rocketed the cost of hospital MRI’s, and threw national security staff out on a search mission for alternate ways to detect dirty bombs.

“Everybody was freaking out, going into closets and digging out what you could,” said low-temperature physicist Marcius Extavour currently serving as a science policy fellow at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy.

While it’s a different version of helium than what’s used for party balloons – the gas inflated an amazing rate of discoveries that led to four Nobel prizes in physics, a see-through method of looking at lungs, and backpack of equipment that border security patrols can wear to check whether cargo coming into the country carries nuclear material.

But the isotope, helium-3, like many rare Earth elements, has been in high demand with only limited supply.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/the-outfall-of-a-helium-3-crisis.html

[JDPriestly]

1. Increasingly, raw materials will be in short supply.

Our planet cannot support the human population that we have already established for this reason.

[BklynThirtyThree]

2. the link between

overpopulation and depletion of raw materials is frightening. I'm called an alarmist for pointing this out often.

[somone]

3. We're turning the whole planet into Easter Island writ large

The rate of population growth is indeed frightening.

[Tesha]

8. Luckily for the planet, it's probably a self-correcting problem.

Unluckily for us, the default correction probably includes
a large die-off of humans.

We don't have to alllow the default correction to take place,
of course; we could design a better correction.

But we won't.

Tesha

[KittyWampus]

7. our planet can absolutely support the human population. The issue isn't sufficient resources, it's

allocation of resources and efficient use of them.

[Sirveri]

4. He3 exists in large quantities... on the moon.

It's a byproduct of nuclear weapons production due to the natural decay of Tritium which is commonly used as a fusion kicker. It's also ejected from the sun as part of its fusion process where it then ends up buried in the lunar regolith.

[Statistical]

5. Exactly.

And if fusion reactor based no He3 cycle is ever commercially viable countries will be taking a second look at the moon.

[Sirveri]

9. We could also manufacture it in traditional fission reactors.

It's not too hard to neutron bombard hydrogen and turn it into Tritium. Has a half life of 5 years so all we have to do is wait and then do a chemical sift.

[jimlup]

6. Just a context correction:

He3 is not a "rare-earth" element. It is an isotope of He (which is a Noble gas) found in limited supply in gas form underground.

[Rex]

10. I think that is why they use the word 'like'.

[jimlup]

11. Yeah, I stand corrected

Sometimes I read too fast.