The $1,000 balloon
Helium is full of contradictions. It’s the second most abundant element in the universe, but is relatively rare on Earth. It’s non-reactive, totally inert—yet the most valuable helium isotope is sourced from thermonuclear warheads.
And even though we treat it as a disposable gas, often for making funny voices and single-use party balloons, our global supply of helium will eventually run out. That’s because, at a rate of about 50 grams per second, this non-renewable resource is escaping the atmosphere for good.
In this edition of The Element of Surprise, our occasional series about the hidden histories behind the periodic table’s most unassuming atoms, we examine the incredible properties and baffling economics of our most notable noble gas.
Featuring Anjali Tripathi and William Halperin.
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LINKS
Read John Paul Merkle’s petition arguing to change the name of helium to “helion.”
Despite being about a quarter century old, this passage from “The Impact of Selling the Federal Helium Reserve” has a pretty comprehensive list of the uses and properties of helium.
More on the recent sale of the Federal Helium Reserve (NBC News)
Physicist William Halperin said the idea of mining helium-3 on the moon was… unlikely… but that hasn’t stopped this startup company from trying it. (Wired)
Want to learn more about the weird history of American airships? Check out this film produced by the U.S. government in 1937, when they were still hoping to keep our airship program afloat.
Balloon release in Bremen marketplace (destined to release their helium into space before most likely falling into the sea). Credit: Oren Rozen via Wikimedia Commons.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Taylor Quimby
Editing by Rebecca Lavoie, with help from Justine Paradis, and Marina Henke
Our staff also includes Felix Poon
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, and Ryan James Carr
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Taylor Quimby: Okay. Hey, Nate.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, Taylor.
Taylor Quimby: So I've got a science riddle for you.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
[mux]
Taylor Quimby: A child is having a birthday party and is given a balloon on a string.
[SFX - balloon inflates]
Nate Hegyi: Mhm.
Taylor Quimby: Everything's fine until, as often happens, for a split second, the child gets distracted and he lets it go outside.
Nate Hegyi: Uh oh.
Taylor Quimby: Everybody looks up as it floats away into the big blue sky. What happens to the balloon?
Nate Hegyi: Um, many things could happen to the balloon. Uh, the balloon could get caught in some sort of electrical wire.
[SFX - zap sound, and balloon deflating suddenly]
Taylor Quimby: Let's say it doesn't hit a wire and it doesn't hit a plane or a flock of birds.
Nate Hegyi: Uh, I think eventually it probably hits some sort of atmospheric pressure to where the balloon, the skin of the balloon, just can't handle it, and it pops.
[SFX - pops, mux stops suddenly]
Taylor Quimby: And then what?
Nate Hegyi: Well, then… Yeah, then the plastic falls back down to earth.
Taylor Quimby: But what happens to the helium?
Nate Hegyi: It stays in the atmosphere? This is a crappy riddle, by the way.
[mux]
Taylor Quimby: It's a science riddle.
Nate Hegyi: Those are just questions. Those aren't riddles. Those are just questions.
Taylor Quimby: To most folks, you know, helium is a novelty, right?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: We use it for party balloons and to imitate Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Nate Hegyi: Yep.
Taylor Quimby: Not actually a good idea, by the way.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, okay.
Taylor Quimby: That's about it. But helium is actually a marvel unlike anything else in the universe. It is essential to some of the most advanced technology on the planet, and it does not stay in the atmosphere. Our entire global supply is slowly escaping into space. Oh, every second, about fifty grams… roughly twenty small balloon's worth of helium… escapes Earth's atmosphere, never to return.
Nate Hegyi: I mean, maybe we should chill it on the children's birthday party. Balloons.
Taylor Quimby (Helium voice): Yeah, it's pretty scary stuff, isn't it?
Nate Hegyi: [laughs] You just said you're not supposed to do that, but then you did it anyways!
[mux swells]
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegy here with producer Taylor Quimby, and today we're bringing back our series The Element of Surprise. Hidden histories on the periodic tables, most unassuming atoms.
Taylor Quimby (Helium voice): And this time, it's number two on the table. But number one, in my heart, I call it helium. But that's sir helium to you. Because this is one noble gas. [laughs]
Nate Hegyi: Oh my God.
[mux fades]
Taylor Quimby: Do you know why you have to be careful sucking in helium balloons?
Nate Hegyi: No. Why?
Taylor Quimby: Because there's no oxygen in it.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah. So you can't just be doing it over and over again, as I stutter, stop and start again. All the while you're huffing in the studio.
Taylor Quimby: My understanding is that for party balloons, they actually started putting a little oxygen in there because of stupid people,like, just huffing too much of it and then passing out .
Nate Hegyi: And then suing them.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. [clears throat] Well, I hope you're excited to talk a little bit about physics today, Nate, because I remember you saying that was your favorite subject.
Nate Hegyi: I actually do love it when we do physics stories. I just really, uh, suck at physics.
Taylor Quimby: Well, you're going to be pleased, because this time I have found a very good teacher.
Anjali Tripathi: My name is Anjali Tripathi. I work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I'm an astrophysicist, and I study how planets, including Earth, change over time.
Taylor Quimby: So let's start, Nate, at the beginning. And I mean the very, very beginning…
[bang SFX, ambient mux begins]
… the big bang.
Anjali Tripathi: In the first couple of minutes, when the universe started, you had lots of particles floating around.
Taylor Quimby: It's hot, it's energetic, it's intense, but also kind of boring because there is just not much to look at yet.
Anjali Tripathi: And eventually the temperature got cool enough that they could start to build up into atoms. And so about three minutes or so after the Big Bang, you have helium forming.
Nate Hegyi: Just by the way, as an aside, that's amazing that we figured out exactly when helium starts forming. How about roughly, you know, give or take three minutes after the Big Bang?
Taylor Quimby: And at first, the entire universe was composed of just the three lightest elements hydrogen, helium, and just a teeny bit of lithium.
And that was it for like a few hundred million years. But slowly, those atoms and molecules started to swirl together and form stars. And some of those stellar furnaces got so hot they exploded fuzing atoms together to create all of the other elements we know today.
Anjali Tripathi: Iron and gold and platinum and everything fun.
Taylor Quimby: And oxygen and carbon. The stuff that you know, allows for life for us. And billions of years later, you have Carl Sagan. May he rest in peace who famously explained, we are all star stuff.
Carl Sagan from Cosmos: The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Taylor Quimby: Now even today, nearly a quarter of all the matter across the entire universe is made up of that first, primordial helium.
Nate Hegyi: Primordial meaning…?
Taylor Quimby: From the big bang.
Nate Hegyi: From the big bang.
That makes the second most abundant element in the universe
And yet - we didn't even know helium existed until 1868, when a French astronomer was doing a little eclipse. Tourism in India. Apparently people have been doing that for a long time. And he was looking at the sun with his fancy new machine called a spectroscope.
Anjali Tripathi: So he looks at the sun and he says, there's this really weird yellow line. I don't know what this is.
Taylor Quimby: These spectroscopes, they're kind of like prisms, you know, they break down light into its component parts. When he’s using it this way, he’s not just breaking down light into a pretty rainbow, he’s looking at these different colors and they are chemical signatures for different elements on the sun.
Anjali Tripathi: It's almost like a barcode imprinted on the rainbow.
Taylor Quimby: Cool. And so they think this is a brand new element that only exists on the sun. And that is how helium got its name.
Anjali Tripathi: You know, the Greek representation for sun is Helios. So I'll call this element helium.
Taylor Quimby: Ah, at that point, they knew absolutely nothing about what it was, except that it was this yellow line on their spectroscopes, which is also why helium doesn't have the same name suffix as other gasses like it. So the noble gasses: krypton, argon, radon, neon and helium. Like. Come on, guys.
Nate Hegyi: Heliogyn. Heliojon? Helion.
Taylor Quimby: Helion.
Nate Hegyi: Helion.
Taylor Quimby: . There's actually a guy who, for the sake of consistency, has sent a Change.org petition to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, asking them to change the name to helium.
Unfortunately, he's only got 20 signatures so far, so I just don't think.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Does not surprise me that he's only got 20.
Taylor Quimby: The point of a lot of this is that there may be tons of this big bang helium in the sun and out in space, but here on Earth, helium is actually very, very rare.
Only about 0.0005% of Earth’s atmosphere is made up of helium atoms.
And, our very limited supply of helium was NOT created during the Big Bang.
Instead, it comes from the breakdown of unstable radioactive elements.
Anjali Tripathi: You know. Uranium and thorium and rocks in the Earth's crust that are decaying. Because these radioactive elements aren't stable, they are constantly becoming other products. And each time they undergo a transformation, basically off comes what becomes a helium atom.
Nate Hegyi: So is helium radioactive?
Taylor Quimby: No. Helium is the byproduct.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Taylor Quimby: But it is weird to think that I just sucked up, like, uranium atom leftovers and then.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, then just blew them out into the studio.
But what this means is that helium is kind of like a fossil fuel. Just like it takes millions of years for plants and plankton to turn into oil… it takes millions of years for enough uranium atoms to break down into helium and other stuff, to slowly collect in pockets underground.
Taylor Quimby: Do you think about helium as a nonrenewable resource?
William Halperin: Absolutely. No question. We cannot renew it.
Taylor Quimby: So this is the second expert I spoke to for this episode. His name is William Halperin.
William Halperin: I'm a professor at Northwestern University. And helium is an essential part of basic research in my laboratory, many laboratories. So we need helium in order to invest in the future.
Anjali Tripathi: It's not something that you can artificially produce, helium. And so because there is no way of artificially producing helium, it's hard to find. But it's also so important for so much of what we do on Earth and actually outside of Earth, that we call it a strategic or endangered element.
Taylor Quimby: So I want to talk about those two things. First, what makes helium strategic, or important for humans. And then how its relative rarity makes for some super weird economics?
Nate Hegyi: Okay, okay.
So let’s start with important.
Taylor Quimby: If there was like a graduating class of all the elements... And so at the end of the yearbook, there's like the superlative section, you know, what do you think helium would get?
Anjali Tripathi: I think helium might get most uplifting.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. First of all, helium is super duper light. That’s what makes it good for balloons, and for airships
Taylor Quimby: Aka one of my favorite made up sounding words. Dirigibles.
Nate Hegyi: Dirigibles. Dirigibles.
Taylor Quimby: Uh, helium’s extreme lightness, by the way, has another weird side effect. Sound travels three times faster through helium than it does through normal air. Huh? And that is why when you breathe it in, your voice sounds higher.
Nate Hegyi: The sound is traveling at a faster frequency.
Taylor Quimby: Well, basically, the sound waves are bouncing around your voice box and resonating differently than it normally would. Contrary to what you think, helium doesn't actually change the pitch of your voice, so like, the note isn't higher. Yeah. Instead, helium changes what musicians would call the timbre, which are these little micro differences in a sound wave that affect how we hear it.
Nate Hegyi: Okay. You could have a cello and a violin play the same note, but the violin is going to sound higher.
Taylor Quimby: Exactly. And so, you know, I'm kind of curious to try this, actually. What's a song that I could sing?
Nate Hegyi: Um. Um…
Taylor Quimby: Okay, I got one, I got one, um. All right. So this is the stupidest thing I've ever done.
[Sings] You belong among the wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea.
Taylor Quimby (Helium voice): You belong among the wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea.
Taylor Quimby (Helium voice): So I don't know if you could tell this, but if I layer these over afterwards. Yeah, it should be that they're still in tune with each other.
[Normal voice and helium voice layered together] You belong among the wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea.
Nate Hegyi: Wow. Taylor Quimby: Another one of Helium's most important qualities is that it is a noble gas
William Halperin: Helium is not chemically active.
In other words, it’s inert. It's a perfectly balanced little atom that isn’t interested in combusting, or combining with other elements..
William Halperin: Beautiful property.
So if you want your airship not to accidentally blow up , you use helium.
Or if you want to shield sensitive technology from reacting to the oxygen in the air - you use helium as a “shielding gas.”
So all the semi-conductors that power our computers - require helium.
Speaker2: Not to mention what's called optical fiber.
Being non-reactive also makes it great for detecting leaks in things like gas lines, or propane tanks, or space-suits. Basically, if you manufacture anything air-tight, helium is what you use to test it.
And being inert also makes helium super important for scuba-divers.
Nate Hegyi: To bring you back up?
Taylor Quimby: That’s a great guess, but actually it's something totally different.
So as you descend into the ocean, the increased atmospheric pressure compresses gasses - and nitrogen, which makes up most of our air, starts to get absorbed into your bloodstream.
This can basically get you instantly drunk - technically It’s called nitrogen narcosis, but divers call it getting narced - and I have read these stories about scuba divers, you know, forgetting that they can't breathe underwater and almost taking off their masks. Oh my God, hallucinating schools of fish and following them down further than is safe.
Because helium is inert, it doesn’t cause this problem - so divers use special helium mixtures in their air tanks to keep them safe.
The funny side effect here, is that if you ever listen to tape of professional divers communicating over radio, they’re nearly unintelligible.
[Clip of divers communicating - one voice is using a helium mix tank and is utterly unintelligible]
Taylor Quimby: And the third maybe most important thing about helium these days is its use as a coolant.
So if you want to cool down a drink you use ice.
If you want to flash-freeze food, or ship vaccines, you might use dry ice - which is solid carbon dioxide, right?
But if you need to reach the lowest temperatures possible throughout the known universe… you use liquid helium.
We use it in nuclear reactors to cool things down. We use it for satellites and other space stuff. We use it to make superconductors, research into quantum computers, and particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.
And we use it for one of medicine’s most important diagnostic tools.
William Halperin: Magnetic resonance imaging machines. Mri machines…
Again - here’s William Halperin.
William Halperin: …Which depend critically on helium.
Taylor Quimby: Okay… So THAT is why helium is important. And coming up, we will talk about the bizarre economics of an element that is always trying to escape.
Nate Hegyi: I just imagined William Halperin at his nephew's eighth birthday, grabbing all the. All the balloons, pulling them down. Shall not waste this very.
Taylor Quimby: He was very pro balloon. He was like, balloons are fine. Okay? Nobody nobody here wants to be a party pooper, Nate, you know. No, no.
Nate Hegyi: It's outside in. I'm Nate hegy here with Taylor Quimby, and we are talking all about helium.
Taylor Quimby: Right. So should I take another breath? Should I? Should I open it with more funny voice? No. No, of course not. No, I've.
Nate Hegyi: Done too much. As I said, there's a lot of stuff you got to explain to me, and I can barely understand. I'm barely following.
Taylor Quimby: Right. So valuable as it is, it is very hard to make any money extracting helium from the ground.
But, when you look at natural gas deposits, which are valuable - there is often a little bit of helium mixed in. Maybe just 1 or 2%.
But, you know, if you're a fossil fuel company, like you're going to take all the profits you can get, right? You're going to separate that out and you're going to sell it on the side.
So if you look at the market today, virtually all of the helium for sale comes from private sector natural gas companies. But it was not always that way.
In the 1920s, most of the world’s helium was owned by the U.S. government. And that’s because they were getting into the airship game.
Archival newsreel audio: The history of rigid airships is a story full of excitement and adventure. Man's struggle to conquer the air started with.
Taylor Quimby: They had already been using helium to make barrage balloons during World War One. If you ever see pictures during World War One, and there's all these weird blimps hovering over major cities. Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Were they essentially to dissuade planes from flying through because they're hard to dodge?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, actually. So they're anchored to the ground with all these different steel cables and different angles. So yes, if a if a plane or a bomber was trying to get in, they could hit those steel cables and crash. Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: It sounds like that would work. Yeah. Sounds like dangerous to fly over.
Taylor Quimby: Now, the US wanted to create giant airships that could move twice as fast as naval ships to bring planes to, you know, theaters of.
Nate Hegyi: War, essentially like aircraft carriers in the sky.
Taylor Quimby: Now the Germans had a big head start on building airships, but they famously used hydrogen - which was cheaper, more available, but also very flammable.
Thus, the Hindenburg disaster.
Side note: Did you know that the Hindenburg was a Nazi airship?
Nate Hegyi: No, I did not know that it was a Nazi airship!
Taylor Quimby: Point is, the United States ALSO had a military airship program that used helium.. But then one of these flying aircraft carrier prototypes, the USS Akron got caught in a storm off the coast of new Jersey and it crashed into the Atlantic.
Archival newsreel audio: The most likely explanation is that the ship was unwittingly maneuvered so close to the surface that her tail hit the water.
Taylor Quimby: 76 crew members. Three survived.
Not too long afterwards, another one crashed off the coast of California, and that pretty much ended the program.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
Taylor Quimby: But even after the US lost interest in airships, there was another reason to hoard all of the helium. And that is, of course…
Nate Hegyi: Weather balloons.
Taylor Quimby: The space race.
Nate Hegyi: Oh. The space race. Dangit.
Archival NASA audio: Liftoff! We have a liftoff. 32 minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11.
Taylor Quimby: You cannot launch a rocket without helium. So by this point, the US had set up a federal reserve, a strategic stockpile of helium, and they started buying it from all of these private natural gas producers and storing it away.
And they kept doing that all the way until the 1990s, way after the space race had more or less been won.
By then, they had more than 1,000,000,000m³ of helium stored in this giant underground system of porous rock in Texas.
Nate Hegyi: There's a really bad movie where that helium strategic reserve starts floating away and the town on top of it, and they're like, oh no, really? It's good. No, I'm just making it up. I just know that if I were to write a movie, I could see that movie. Sorry. Continue.
Taylor Quimby: So by this time, the genie is out of the bottle. The U.S has this massive strategic stockpile - but there’s also a private industry of natural gas producers selling helium to party stores, research labs, hospitals for MRI machines, you name it.
And Congress is not pleased.
C-span audio from congressional hearing: The federal government got involved in helium production at a time when there was no private helium production.
But by 1996, the private sector was collecting and selling nearly 90% of the global helium market. And, the US’s “strategic stockpile” is nearly a billion a half dollars in debt - and isn’t seeming very strategic.
C-span audio from congressional hearing: Here we are, arguing 70 years later, whether or not we need a helium reserve in order to do dirigible research in the United States. This is absolutely absurd.
Taylor Quimby: So Congress gets together and pass a bill that says, let’s sell off our stockpile to pay down the debt it’s accumulated. And we’ll let private industry take the lead on helium.
C-span audio from congressional hearing: This bill will get the government out of the helium business. This legislation protects our domestic helium industry from undue disruption by the federal government.
Taylor Quimby: So we start selling off this helium as fast as humanly possible, at insanely cheap rates. And guess what that did?
Nate Hegyi: Totally crashed the helium economy.
Taylor Quimby: Yes! With all this cheap helium flooding the market, the private industry we were trying not to disrupt couldn’t compete!
Taylor Quimby: So in 2013, Congress gets back together to try and fix the problem. Now, they want to sell off the rest of the helium at a premium - to lift prices and encourage the private sector to get back in the game.
C-span audio from congressional hearing: We are not selling the nation's helium at market prices.
This by the way, is one of those rare bipartisan bills from the super-polarized Tea Party Congress…
C-span audio from congressional hearing: Imagine, Mr. Speaker, a world without balloons.
… which made for some hilariously sarcastic comments from a Democratic lawmaker who couldn’t believe they were spending two full days talking about helium, while utterly failing to agree on a federal budget.
C-span audio from congressional hearing: This Tea Party Congress will make the tough choice to keep children's birthday parties on schedule and give industries that rely on helium the lift that they deserve.
Taylor Quimby: So as of early 2024 - the US government was officially, and finally out of the helium game. They sold off the last of the stockpile.
And now, the global helium supply relies on a relatively small number of natural gas producers.
So every time even one of them goes offline, or a war or pandemic disrupts the supply chain, you hear news stories about helium shortages.
Helium shortage news clip: We don't mean to burst your bubble or balloon, but global helium supplies are running out…
Taylor Quimby: All, by the way, I think are required by law to start at a balloon store.
Helium shortage news clip: 12 years ago, Balloon Tunes paid $58 for a tank of helium. Today it's up to $250. We're at a.
Nate Hegyi: [Pretending to be a news anchor] “Party city in Providence, Rhode Island, where little Timmy's not going to have a birthday he dreamed of…”
Taylor Quimby: But party stores aside, this is serious business.
William Halperin: So if you want to think of this from an economic perspective, you should ask the question, how many MRIs are being made worldwide per year?
Taylor Quimby: So this is Will Halperin again - the professor and physicist at Northwestern University. And remember, MRIs cannot function without liquid helium, right? I read somewhere between 1 and 2000 worth. Wow.
William Halperin: It's not just the absolute volume, but you have to cool it down, which takes approximately three times that amount of the total volume, and you multiply it by the number of MRIs produced in the world today per year. And then you have a sense of what the helium supply must be in order to keep that industry alive.
Nate Hegyi: That's why my MRI was so expensive. It's like $1,000 to get it done.
Taylor Quimby: So these shortages, it's not just that it increases the price, which it has. It's also literally led to rationing where you could have the money, but you might not get what you order.
William Halperin: The suppliers of which there are not many in the United States, they tell you that you can't have the amount of helium you've been buying in the past, and you will be restricted to less than half of what you've been buying over the previous year. In my laboratory, and I'm representing now my colleagues here at northwestern who used the helium that I'm responsible for distributing. They can't do their work effectively if they have to reduce what they're doing by a factor of two. What do we do? We tell our students to go away, you know. I mean, what are we going to do?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Does that mean, like, they're also rationing MRIs or are MRIs becoming more expensive? Like, I'm just imagining, like, your limp's not that bad. I don't think you need an MRI.
Taylor Quimby: Well, I do think, you know, suppliers, um, have to make really tough choices about who they're selling to.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: When you hear about shortages, you know it's not happening evenly. But I just think you have to know that this is the reality of supply and demand with a nonrenewable resource that is dependent On really weird economics. Yeah.
William Halperin: And it's particularly difficult for institutions, national laboratories, universities that depend on helium, for training students, discovering new things and moving hopefully forward.
Taylor Quimby: Now, if you think that's weird, wait until you hear about helium three.
Nate Hegyi: Helium three.
Taylor Quimby: I knew that deep down, that would annoy you. Do you remember from high school chemistry what an isotope is? Nate.
Nate Hegyi: I remember the word isotope. I do.
Taylor Quimby: So most of the helium we have is helium four, of course, which means there are two neutrons and two protons. And that's kind of like what, what most helium atoms are. Yeah. Helium. Helium three is an isotope that is missing one of its neutrons. And for reasons I am not going to explain, it makes it even better and even more valuable as a coolant.
William Halperin: The cost of helium three is approximately $1,000 for a gas liter. That's like a small balloon. It would be $1,000 balloon.
Nate Hegyi: $1,000 balloon of helium three.
Taylor Quimby: Of helium three.
Taylor Quimby: So if you recall, uh, Nate, most of Earth's underground basic helium, this is like capital B, basic helium. It's made from these uranium atoms breaking apart. Right. Which which I explained is a very, very long process. Right. Well, helium three comes from a very rare substance called tritium
William Halperin: The tritium is radioactive, meaning it decays, but it's not hundreds of millions of years. It's 12 years.
In theory, that sounds great - because it’s a much faster natural process than the helium that comes from uranium.
Except for a very long time, we didn’t have any tritium.
William Halperin: Okay. So helium three was basically not available, uh, in natural abundance in the world until the end of the Second World War.And the reason for that is the invention of the hydrogen bomb.
Taylor Quimby: So we started collecting this tritium because it goes into hydrogen bombs, it goes into thermo-nuclear warheads. Yeah. Those get put into secret silos or whatever. But every now and again, they have to siphon off the helium three that starts collecting in our hydrogen bomb arsenal.
Nate Hegyi: And so it's like off-gassing this helium three, and then we're collecting it, vacuuming it up.
Taylor Quimby: And that - our potentially world-ending nuclear arsenal - is the sole source of America's helium three supply.
Nate Hegyi: And what are we using helium three for again?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. So helium three goes into a lot of the stuff. Particle accelerators…
Nate Hegyi: …Okay, so all of that stuff you were talking about, the MRIs, everything else like that, that's not helium four, that's helium three.
Taylor Quimby: It's a mix. But helium three has some special applications that helium four can't do at all.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Taylor Quimby: So, for example, after nine over 11, the Department of Homeland Security started using, um, these special neutron scanners that can detect radioactivity. It was, you know, it was basically like...
Nate Hegyi: Trying to find the dirty bomb.
Taylor Quimby: Exactly.
Nate Hegyi: That kind of thing.
Taylor Quimby: So the Department of Homeland Security orders, like 3000 of these super special neutron scanners that require helium three to work.
William Halperin: And when they got halfway through, they realized they didn't have any more helium three. Uh, they had basically used it all. So, again.
Taylor Quimby: I mean, you know, I've always thought about, like, supply and demand, like, oh, coffee beans. Like, people want coffee. How much coffee is there? But, like, yeah, this is a very different type of supply.
William Halperin: If they wanted more, they would need more hydrogen bombs, which they don't have, or they would have to build a supply of tritium.
Nate Hegyi: It seems very complicated. Very complicated.
Taylor Quimby: Well, it's funny you should say all that, because one of the things that you will read about helium three, if you Google it, is that a lot of people are suggesting that we start mining helium three on the moon.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
Taylor Quimby: I don't know if you remember the sci fi movie moon with Sam Rockwell. Did you see that?
Nate Hegyi: I did. Was he, was he mining?
Taylor Quimby: Yes he was! They were mining helium three.
Nate Hegyi: Oh. That's clever.
Taylor Quimby: Anyway, this is serious enough that a couple of space-tech bros have raised millions of dollars for a startup to look into moon mining of helium three.
Taylor Quimby: So when I read about the possibility of mining the moon for helium three, that too is a question of supply and demand, which is that if in some sort of future world, the demand is so high and the supply is so low, that could make that economically make sense? Or do you think the space mining of helium three on the moon is pretty unlikely?
William Halperin: I would use the term bullshit. Now, Taylor. I have testified in Congress on the subject of helium four and on the subject of helium three, and I got a question from the oversight Committee on just this point. Why do we need helium three? We can just go to the moon and get it. I don't know whether it's commercial. I don't even know what the process would be to mine helium three on the moon. But one thing I do know is that the cost of payload is incredibly high. To move something to the moon and to take it from the moon back to the Earth such that that is, in the foreseeable future, completely impractical. So I call it BS.
Taylor Quimby: So at least you don't have to worry about that.
Nate Hegyi: There you go. Okay, good. I was starting to get a little bit like, man, we're really living in the future and I don't really like it. And, uh, but at least we're not going to be doing moon mining of, uh, helium three.
Taylor Quimby: No.
Nate Hegyi: I can rest.
Taylor Quimby: The good news is that the world is starting to understand how awesome helium really is. So we’re finding new sources of production. And labs, like the one William runs is getting better at recycling the helium we do have.
But I want to end this episode where we started, no matter how good we get at recycling, the inevitable fact is that someday, long from now, Earth's supply of helium will have drifted off into space. Here's Anjali Tripathi again.
Anjali Tripathi: So helium is this nonrenewable resource that is just escaping into space. And we never think about it because you can't see it. As you said, it's sort of invisible.
So this is called atmospheric escape, Nate. You know, we just don't have a strong enough gravity to keep these super light atoms of hydrogen, helium in our atmosphere.
And in fact, if you look at Earth from a distance, and if you could see ultraviolet light, you would see this haze of gas, like puffing off of the planet, almost like a halo.
Nate Hegyi: Wow. And that's just the hydrogen in the helium.
Taylor Quimby: Just being pushed off out into the solar system. And in fact, if you look out into the universe, which Anjali has done, studying exoplanets. Yeah. She sees this all over the place. This isn't this isn't just like an Earth phenomenon. This is a foundational aspect of the universe.
Anjali Tripathi: So if we look at all of the exoplanets that we have found to date, we see a lot of little planets and a lot of big planets. And in between there's this gap. And maybe it's our technology or something about how we're looking that precludes us from finding it. But it could also be. And one of the leading theories is that it's caused by atmospheric escape, that if you're of that size, you just can't survive at that size. You're going to get smaller, right? Because some of the smallest planets we've seen with exoplanets are actually just getting basically evaporated away by this process.
Nate Hegyi: So is Earth just like evaporating away slowly?
Taylor Quimby: Well, not all of it, but some day long, long time from now, uh, there will be very little hydrogen. Helium oxygen will make up a much bigger portion of our atmosphere, and the planet might start to oxidize in places and turn red like Mars.
Nate Hegyi: Wow. That's cool. Yeah. So the lesson here is a we should stop using balloons. That's. I know that's not the lesson. Um, I think they should just invest sort of in space. In moon mining, what they need is a giant space vacuum.
Taylor Quimby: There we go. Problem solved.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Email William about that one. I can give him details.
Taylor Quimby: I did ask Anjali and William if we should stop using balloons. And nobody, nobody wants to be the party pooper here.
Nate Hegyi: No!
Taylor Quimby: Um, but I'll say this if you do decide to get one. And hopefully if it's for a very special occasion or for a one time taping of a podcast, my advice is that you hold on because once you let go, it's not coming back.
Nate Hegyi: Ah. That's it. What a sweet.
ending. Yep. The more you know.
Taylor Quimby: Um, okay.
Nate Hegyi: That is it for today. I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Element of Surprise. Please tell us what you think we should do next. Once we've got some good suggestions, we'll make a poll on Twitter, Instagram, and in our Facebook group.
Taylor Quimby: We've already heard from some folks who think we should do magnesium and boron next, but there are a lot of other elements to choose from, so email us. Send us a voice memo with your idea. Our email is outside in at npr.org.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was recorded, produced, and mixed by Taylor Quimby, editing by Nhpr.org, director of helium three mining, Rebecca LaVoy. With help from me Nate hegy. Our staff includes Justine Paradise, Felix Poon, and Marina Hankie.
Taylor Quimby: Music by blue Dot sessions and Ryan James Carr
Outside in is a production of NBR.
Nate Hegyi: Quick question for you. What happens when you mix lead and helium?
Taylor Quimby: I don't know.
Nate Hegyi: You get a LED Zeppelin.
Taylor Quimby: I can't believe I didn't see that coming after all the work I've done on this episode.