10/30/2022 0 Comments Cargolifter hinge![]() ![]() "The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3," says Savage, and he's right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. "It would be a shame to squander it," agrees Kulcinski.įor helium-3's true believers - the ones who think the isotope's fusion power will take us to the edge of our solar system and beyond - talk of the coming shortage is overblown: There's a huge, untapped supply right in our own backyard. "For the scientific community, that's a tragedy," says Dave Cornelius, a Department of Interior chemist at Cliffside. At our current rate of consumption, Cliffside will likely be empty in 10 to 25 years, and the Earth will be virtually helium-free by the end of the 21st century. Liquid helium, which has the lowest melting point of any element (-452 degrees Fahrenheit), cools infrared detectors, nuclear reactors, wind tunnels, and the superconductive magnets in MRI equipment. NASA uses it to pressurize space shuttle fuel tanks: The Kennedy Space Center alone uses more than 75 million cubic feet annually. ![]() Industrial buyers use the gas primarily for arc welding (helium creates an inert atmosphere around the flame) and leak detection (hydrogen has a smaller atom, but it usually forms a diatomic molecule, H2). But now the government is getting out of the helium business, and it's selling the stockpile to all comers. Thirty-two billion cubic feet of the gas are bunkered underground in Cliffside, a field of porous rock near Amarillo. The federal government first identified helium as a strategic resource in the 1920s in 1960 Uncle Sam began socking it away in earnest. ![]()
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