The article says it will probably owned by a German company, Messer Group. Germany and helium… 🤔

During the Nazi era, the Messer-led company benefited considerably from the regime’s arms production, employed forced laborers and was a supplier for the V2 production and the Wehrmacht.[1] In the denazification process, Messer, who had been a member of the since 1933, was classified as a follower in 1948

oh, right.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Messer

Also, can’t wait for this to make people’s medical treatment even more expensive! Exciting times! Thanks Joe Biden!

I’ve helped people make procedures with nitrogen and hydrogen based on studies that use helium because helium is too expensive. Not being able to do an MRI because you need helium is nightmare inducing.

What gets me is the fact that sell-offs like this are just accepted, but anytime it goes the other way and something is nationalised, it’s a huge overreach because we didn’t vote on it or whatever

Many such cases

the US doesn’t have any knowledge on the batteries or even the factories to build them

hilariously based

[Lead Scientist Gary Yang] soon ran into trouble. He said he couldn’t persuade any U.S. investors to come aboard.

“I talked to almost all major investment banks; none of them (wanted to) invest in batteries,” Yang said in an interview, adding that the banks wanted a return on their investments faster than the batteries would turn a profit.

Yang acknowledges that he wanted his U.S. engineers to work in China. But he says it was because he thought Rongke Power could help teach them critical skills.

He said he wanted to manufacture the entire battery in the U.S., but that the U.S. does not have the supply chain he required. He said China is more advanced when it comes to manufacturing and engineering utility-scale batteries.

“In this field — manufacturing, engineering — China is ahead of the U.S.,” Yang said. “Many wouldn’t believe [it].”

Nobody left to neocolonize but ourselves I guess.

That’s crazy to me. It’s obviously useful, how is it not worth it to extract it if it’s already there during the process? That’s like hearing people back in the day burning gasoline since it was a byproduct of extracting crude oil.

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Nope, we also don’t have much in the first place.

pretty sure it just goes up to the top of the atmosphere and stays there.

It’s not a common element. And because it floats, it’s quickly lost to space once released.

We could technically make more with Hydrogen and nuclear fusion, or fissile products, but the price of man-made Helium would probably be about ten million fold more. It has a variety of useful properties that range from expensive to impossible to replace with other gases, namely its thermal properties, its inertness and being lighter-than-air.

Helium is too light to stay within Earth’s gravity. Nearly all helium came from underground. The problem with helium is that it’s too good. It’s inert, light, and doesn’t conduct anything. It’s really good for some specific applications, like MRIs use it.

The helium that’s on Earth now is the only amount we have. The sun is full of it though, like it spits out helium by the ton every second. There’s an amount of helium-3 on the moon too, underneath the top layer, and I’ve heard some space scientists speculate that we might eventually have to harvest helium from the moon.

It’s possible to break down some radioactive elements into helium, but that takes hundreds of millions of years. It’s possible to make helium-3 using nuclear fusion with tritium and lithium then capturing the decay products, but this is extremely slow, expensive, and I think less than something like 200kg of helium have ever been made this way. It’s hypothetically possible to bombard deuterium atoms together to create helium. Deuterium is a hydrogen isotope that has a neutron in its nucleus. If you’ve ever heard of “cold fusion” that’s a big part of what those people want to accomplish, reliable and efficient ways of creating helium atoms.

The cosmically ironic part about Earth running out of helium is that the universe makes helium in such large quantities that it’s the second most common element. There are huge clouds of helium floating around space that are larger than our whole galaxy. Our sun builds enough helium to last us for hundreds of years and it does that in several seconds.

It’s a byproduct of natural gas extraction.

They finished the sell-down years ago to a much reduced capacity but now they’re outright selling off the entire remaining stockpile and all the infrastructure

We can always use hydrogen for the floaty balloons. Double as fireworks!