Robert Richardson got a Nobel Prize for creating a superfluid comprised of chilled helium. But he started his talk at the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting by announcing that he'd be focusing purely on science policy—policy related to his work, given that the policy in question is the one that governs much of the world's stockpile of helium.

Because of how the US is privatizing its stock of the gas, prices are artificially low, which is encouraging a pattern of consumption that may leave us without significant supplies of the gas midway through the century.

Inert but interesting

Why is that significant? Richardson started by describing helium's more interesting properties, which are key to its commercial use. These include its chemistry—his slide led with the text, "helium has no chemistry; it is a mere placeholder between hydrogen and lithium on the periodic table." Being completely inert may seem rather dull, but for industries that work with highly reactive materials, this absence of chemistry can be essential.

Helium also has the highest thermal conductivity of any gas and is transparent to neutrons, which means it plays a key role in the design of next-generation nuclear reactor technology. It also has the lowest boiling point of any gas, which makes it useful for a variety of cooling applications, including keeping the hardware cold enough to superconduct at the Large Hadron Collider.

"It's my favorite element," Richardson said in explaining why he cared so much. "I've made a career studying it."

The light weight of a helium atom, which makes it perfect for party balloons and blimps, is also the key to its scarcity. The Earth simply doesn't exert enough gravitational force to keep it on the planet. Once in the atmosphere, helium will migrate to the stratosphere and be lost to space. All the primordial helium in the Earth's vicinity when it formed is long since gone, and only flukes of geology have given us the opportunity to study it on Earth.

Richardson noted that the only places with significant helium deposits are areas where salt domes have formed above deposits of granite. Over geological time, radioactive decay has released alpha particles—helium nuclei—into these deposits, where they can generally be found in a mixture with natural gas.

By chance, the vast majority of these deposits are located in the US, in the Great Plains and the western states. Most of the other sites where helium can be commercially isolated are facilities that liquify natural gas, which leaves helium as a byproduct.

Government management and mismanagement

Although helium had been detected in the sun back in the mid-1800s, the first deposits were found in a natural gas field in Kansas in 1903. Within two decades, the US military was using helium in dirigible aircraft, which led to it being managed by the government as a strategic resource.

Even as technology changed, helium found new and equally critical roles, first as a component of large balloons that protected ships from air attack in World War II, then to purge rocket fuel tanks before loading them with hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

To ensure a stable supply, the US government gradually built a pipeline system that paralleled the one for natural gas and brought helium to a salt dome for storage. The site, called the Bush Dome for reasons that have nothing to do with the politician, has a liquefaction facility on site and a huge fraction of the world's total supply of helium.

That's where things stood in the mid-1990s, when Congress decided that the US government needed to get out of the business of managing helium. Ostensibly, this would allow market forces to set a price proportionate to its remaining supply, something Richardson indicated he supported.

But Congress dictated that the supply had to be wound down within about 20 years, even though the Bush Dome had enough helium to supply the entire globe for most of a decade, even if all other sources were cut off.

The result has been low prices for the gas even though, at 2008 rates of consumption, we had only a 25-year supply. The good news is that, in the US, usage has stabilized; for instance, argon, which is one percent of the Earth's atmosphere and is equally cheap, has started displacing it in applications like welding.

Helium usage elsewhere has continued to rise, though, driven in part by its artificially low price. Even with the lower rate of use, however, we'll go through the remaining supply within a century.

Richardson's solution is to rework the management of the Bush Dome stockpile once again, this time with the aim of ensuring that helium's price rises to reflect its scarcity. In practical terms, he said that it would be better to deal with a 20-fold increase in price now than to deal with it increasing by a factor of thousands in a few decades when supply issues start to become critical.

But he also made an emotional appeal, stating, "One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever."