Element Shortages, Really Light and Really Heavy

Element shortages are in the news these days. The US has been talking about shutting down its strategic helium reserve, and there are plenty of helium customers worried about the prospect. The price of liquid helium, not a commodity that you usually hear quoted on the afternoon financial report, has apparently more than tripled in the last year. I think that this is more of a gap problem than a running-out-of-helium one, though. There's still a lot of helium in the world, and the natural gas boom of recent years has made even more of it potentially available. Trapping it, though, is not cheap - this is something that has to be done on a large scale to work at all, and substantial investment is needed. Air Liquide has a liquefaction plant starting up in Qatar, but that won't be running at full capacity for a while yet, it appears. I think, though, that this plant and other such efforts will end up providing enough helium for industry and research, at a price. We aren't running out of helium, but the cheap helium is going to be in short supply for a few years. At the other end of the periodic table, though, it looks like we really are running out of plutonium-238. One's first impulse is to say "Good!", because the existing stockpiles are largely the result of nuclear weapons production in years past. But it's an excellent material to power radiothermal generators, since it has a reasonable half-life (87.7 years), a high decay energy, and is an alpha emitter (thus needing less...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs