• @DarthBueller@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          21 year ago

          There was a strategic helium reserve that the US government operated, but it was defunded and drawn down to depletion because of capitalism (gov’t doing it means corpos can’t make $$$ doing the same thing for twelve times the price).

          • @fubo@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            31 year ago

            The National Helium Reserve was started in the 1920s to store helium for military airships and barrage balloons; but airplane technology got a lot better and so we don’t use airships or even many balloons for military purposes anymore. So the original purpose of the reserve never turned out to be all that useful.

            Helium is found alongside natural gas, and there is still plenty of helium production in the US. Until we get a real room-temperature superconductor, every MRI machine consumes liquid helium for cooling. This and other industrial uses make it profitable for natural gas producers to keep extracting helium.

    • @Aceticon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      That sounds like “pie in the sky”:

      The problem with fusion reactors is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.

      If that was solved we would be better off doing fusion with plasma rather than fission, since even deuterium (a heavier form of hydrogen atoms because it has 1 neutron in the nucleous) can simply be extracted from the water and the H+H fusion reaction releases more energy than any fission reactions (and, funilly enough, would produce the much rarer helium, that’s needed for those reactors of yours).

      • @fubo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        The problem with fusion reactors is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.

        That’s one problem. Neutron embrittlement is another.

        • @Aceticon@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          1
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Yeah, I was just addressing the previous post.

          In all fairness I only checked what’s going on with fusion once in a while as my background is Physics (as in, I started a degree in it and then ended up going to EE because in my home country there really only are jobs for theoretical physicists, not the more hands-on kind) and hence only know it at a superficial level (of somebody with the background to understand Particle Physics but not a domain expert).

          Yeah, I do know about the embrittlement of the container walls due to neutron emission from the fusion reaction (no idea how bad or not that is compared to the rest), but last I checked plasma containment was still a bit of a problem as was the plasma cooling through photon emission (mind you, that might not be as much of a problem for the kind of temperature of the plasma the previous poster was mentioning, which - I assume - are less that what’s need to induce fusion).

          That said, all in all it just sounds strange to use fission to generate a plasma - I mean, bloody fire generates a plasma (the flame is a plasma) - so I don’t quite see the point of generating plasma with the whole overhead of a nuclear reaction rather than, say, high powered lasers, high-voltage currents (yeah, lighting is plasma) or just plain old chemical reactions.

          That whole thing sounded a bit too much like “fancy sciency words thrown around to deceive the ignorant” so common in scams.