The problem with scientific planning

This is interesting news, no doubt about it, but it does contain a flaw:

Deep within the Precambrian basement rocks of the Earth, groundwaters can sustain subsurface microbial communities, and are targets of investigation both for geologic storage of carbon and/or nuclear waste, and for new reservoirs of rapidly depleting resources of helium.

Finding life down there is fascinating, that life living off the hydrogen created.

However, the implications for helium supply are precisely and exactly zero. Which should worry those who believe in scientific planning of things - if the science doesn’t know then how can it be used to plan?

The Earth’s original complement of helium boiled off into space billions of years ago. There’re some 3 parts per million in the atmosphere which could be extracted at vast, vast, cost (the same way neon, xenon and so on are captured, just keep liquefying air in a distillation process). But where does that come from? From this radiogenic process. A helium nucleus is an alpha particle, this is a common enough product of the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. There’s a lot of those two around, therefore there’s a constant stream - perhaps whiff is better - of helium being created.

Which is also where we get helium from today. Some of that created seeps through into the atmosphere, soon to boil off into space - the 3 ppm concentration is the balance of the creation and boil off processes and is a constant. But some gets trapped into natural gas reservoirs and we extract from those. True, the wells we’ve historically used are getting tapped out, but we know of at least 6 stock market companies exploiting other areas (Saskatchewan, Tanzania, come immediately to mind) and given that LNG is the distillation of natural gas that’s the largest new source.

Our point being that this is not, in fact, the discovery of new reserves (they’re resources anyway but that’s a technical description). Rather, the entire industry knows this, acts upon it and this is where we get our supplies from anyway.

Contrast this with all those recent shouts that helium is running out, is an irreplaceable and limited natural resource and no one may ever again have party balloons.

Political policy tends to be based on those scientific findings, not industry practices. Which is the problem with scientific planning - it often doesn’t know what industry already does.

We will admit to having been amused by those cries of helium exhaustion. It’s the one non-radioactive element we use in quantity that is continually created anew here on Earth. But that amusement does rather turn to horror when we see planners attempting to use their scientific ignorance to demand that the one element we’ve a continual supply of is running out.