So you may have heard about a helium shortage. Helium is indeed so light that it can float up and out of Earth’s atmosphere---but that’s not the real problem. The trouble, says a new report, is actually political, a string of bad decisions that threw helium prices into chaos. The result: headaches and canceled experiments for scientists, and a few new ideas for how to keep buying the profoundly useful element.
At one point, the government had stored a billion cubic meters of helium in a massive cavern in Amarillo, Texas--the Federal Helium Reserve overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. In 1996 Congress passed a law to gradually shut the facility down and sell off the reserves, but this depressed prices, which screwed up the market and discouraged competition. A second bill in 2013 was supposed to help fix it, but---surprise---it ended up discouraging competition in different ways, according to a report last week from the Government Accountability Office. When the reserve shuts down in a few years, scientists expect even more volatility.
That’s a problem, because helium is more than just a delightful gas that floats balloons and gives us Mickey Mouse voices. It boils---which is to say, becomes a gas---at minus 452.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Or, put another way, it becomes a liquid at the lowest temperature of any element in the universe. So superchilled liquid helium plays an irreplaceable role in scientific research. Low-temperature physicists use it to power their dilution refrigerators, which can cool samples down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. At these temperatures, molecules have almost no kinetic energy and can barely move. Physicists can then measure tiny quantum effects obscured at higher temperatures. For similar reasons, liquid helium minimizes fluctuations in telescopes. The team behind the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica, for example, lugged liquid helium to the South Pole, where it’s already pretty cold---just not liquid-helium-cold.
Liquid helium is also used to cool superconducting magnets in everything from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to the Large Hadron Collider. The materials that make those magnets only superconduct at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero—temperatures only possible with liquid helium. “Helium is the only element we can use reliably. There is no alternative” says Tom Rauch, a global sourcing manager for GE Healthcare, which makes and services MRI machines.
But if labs can’t afford it, or can’t plan when to buy it? Industrial and military applications—such as semiconductor manufacturing, leak detection, and diving—actually account for most helium used in the US. And the military can handle price changes. But smaller users like labs that have fixed budgets, especially in physics, can’t. “It’s just killer when prices fluctuate,” says William Halperin, a physicist at Northwestern University.
Lance De Long, a physicist at the University of Kentucky, has been forced to abandon experiments because of helium prices. His lab makes new materials and then analyzes them using a machine with a helium-cooled superconducting magnet. This year, helium cost him $35 per liter—unusual to be sure, as other researchers have reported prices anywhere from $6.50 to $12. But that illustrates the variability in prices all over the country. Scientists have also been coping with a general upward trend, with prices rising 50 percent since 2000.
On the other hand, helium’s irreplaceability has forced some scientists to become much more creative in how they buy and use it. In 2014, the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society connected with the Defense Logistics Agency, which buys helium for the military, to broker lower costs for researchers. The pilot is tiny---only seven universities---but it’ll expand if it’s successful.
Another possibility stems from a fundamental property of the element. It’s a noble gas, which means that it doesn’t react---or combine---well with almost anything else. Given the right kind of (expensive) capture systems, you can recycle and reuse helium. Labs and industrial facilities are installing those systems to grab back helium that escapes into the air.
For now, scientists are just hoping for more stable prices. International producers such as Qatar have recently stepped up production. But helium sellers around the world set their prices according to Federal Helium Reserve auctions, so all eyes are on the Bureau of Land Management to set better rules.
