(Sound of inhale)
I really don't care, readers.
"Scientists warn world’s supply of helium close to depletion; Gas widely used in hospitals and manufacturing" by Leslie Tamura, Washington Post | October 17, 2010
WASHINGTON — Trapped within a subterranean expanse of rock near Amarillo, Texas, is the world’s largest supply of helium, the Federal Helium Reserve.
The US government is on track to sell the last of this stockpile within five years and let the private sector control the market.
But some scientists fear that within a few decades, there may not be any helium to control. They say we are close to running out of the second most common element in the universe. (In our solar system, most helium is inside the sun.)
At the current rate of usage, “the world would run out in 25 years, plus or minus five years,’’ Robert Richardson, a Cornell University physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1996 for his work with superfluid helium, told a gathering of Nobel laureates in August. This is troubling news for anyone who uses helium, and that’s not just stores selling party balloons.
Anyone getting an MRI depends on helium. The extremely stable, supercooling properties of the gas maintain the scanning machines’ superconductive magnets. MRI machines account for more than a quarter of the helium used in the United States; it is also widely used in welding and provides the inert atmosphere necessary to manufacture optical fibers and liquid crystal display (LCD) screens.
No more HDTV?
Helium is used to pressurize and purge the fuel tanks in NASA’s rockets. It prevents the particle accelerators at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN from overheating....
The earth’s retrievable sources of helium were created over millenniums by the radioactive decay of rock, and it is often extracted from natural gas. The most productive reserves are in the United States, which also consumes about half the helium used worldwide.
In the past few years, Algeria, Qatar, and Russia have created helium processing facilities. According to the US Geological Survey, Poland, Canada, and China also have natural gas fields that could produce helium.
But the Federal Helium Reserve is the only known place on the planet with the kind of rock formation that can store helium. In addition, the helium naturally occurring there is found at an unusually high concentration....
Richardson, who in 2009 cochaired a National Research Council committee on the sale of the helium reserve, has repeatedly warned that the United States is squandering its control of this unique, nonrenewable resource.
We've squandered a lot around here the last few decades.
“We will have no helium,’’ he said in an interview, “and we will have to rely on Russia and Qatar and Algeria.’’
And no peace, either.
Helium was first seen as a strategic resource in the early years of the 20th century, when lighter-than-air dirigibles seemed to have military potential....
Isn't that the way everything is viewed by the rulers of our planet?
--more--"
Yeah, the zeppelins went down fast after the Hindenburg blew up.
