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Scientists Speak Out Against Wasting Helium In Balloons
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Tom Welton, a professor of sustainable chemistry at Imperial College, London, believes that a global shortage of helium means it should be used more carefully — and since helium cools the large magnets inside MRI scanners it is wrong to use it for balloons used at children's parties. 'We're not going to run out of helium tomorrow — but on the 30 to 50 year timescale we will have serious problems of having to shut things down if we don't do something in the meantime,' says Welton. 'When you see that we're literally just letting it float into the air, and then out into space inside those helium balloons, it's just hugely frustrating. It is absolutely the wrong use of helium.' Two years ago, the shortage of helium prompted American Nobel Prize winner Robert Richardson to speak out about the huge amounts of helium wasted every day because the gas is kept artificially cheap by the U.S. government and to call for a dramatic increase in helium's price. But John Lee, chairman of the UK's Balloon Association, insists that the helium its members put into balloons is not depriving the medical profession of the gas. 'The helium we use is not pure,' says Lee. 'It's recycled from the gas which is used in the medical industry, and mixed with air. We call it balloon gas rather than helium for that reason.'"
There is a lot of Helium in the Sun, so go to the Sun and get some and bring it back. Dear Laura: Wowza, you look great!
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There may be a free-market solution. Let's float a trial balloon and see how everyone reacts.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Using hydrogen for childrens' party balloons would solve the problem and make things potentially much more exciting!
Hurry up and get those fusion plants up and running!
The notion that because gas is only 90% pure, it is useless to the medical profession is rather ridiculous.
Refining this gas back to 99.99% helium is almost trivial, compared to extracting it from sources where the helium content is in parts per million.
If there isn't a renewing source of helium, why hasn't all of it escaped into space yet? It is small enough to even seep through solid containers, given enough time. If the US has a stockpile of the stuff that it's selling off, how did they acquire it? Can't they do it again?
So these 'academics' then should buy all the helium and preserve it if they are worried, because at this point the price for He is low and the market sets the price.
This Richardson person wants the market to artificially increase the price of He by a factor of 20. Who is this dude that he thinks he can dictate to the world how it must use its resources?
Let me put it this way, if the market decided to blow up the planet, nobody could prevent it, it would just happen. Using He for balloons may just mean that the planet will blow up later on because of more wars, who knows, but it's not up to anybody to dictate to all people how they should live and die.
You can't handle the truth.
it makes me and my friends feel.. CoORrkyyYYYYY!
This is just a small item, but it goes to a bigger theme, as a 26 year old, I have been told that I cant have a nice life style because its bad for earth or a waste of resources or bad for your health.
Because of cow pies, we are supposed to eat less red meat, or ideally none at al!
because of global warming (which I do think is real), Im supposed to drive a tiny little car that has a hard time going over 60 MPH
Because of health concerns, I shouldn't salt my food to taste, or eat sugary treats,
Because of speculation in the market and salarys not going up with inflation, the nice home that cost my parents the equivalent of about 2 years post tax post med insurance take home pay will now cost me 4 years of the same.
And now I cant even get my kid a ballon for their birthday? What the fuck is this? Its almost like the west is becoming the new third world. I just want a decent life like my parents and their parents had. The sickest part is the people telling us we shouldn't have the good life use exotic luxuries private jets and limos. Its an outrage!
It's much more plentiful than Helium and it's even more fun for the kids.
My plans for selling billions of small helium-filled personal orbs is at risk. :)
Like the 'Keno' from the late unlamented 'Stargate Universe', they would follow their owners around at shoulder height, interacting with sound, marquee messages on the orb's surface and changing orb color. The electronics, cameras and micro propellors etc. would be powered by a small induction-charged battery topped up by floating 'visits' to a fixed charging station.
Build more helium extraction plants in natural gas refineries.
Really.
The reason helium was (relatively) cheap was that the US built a nice large extraction plant at a natural gas field with a very high concentration of helium. That field is starting to run out, so prices are naturally going up.
Helium is not, however, limited to that one field. There are many other natural gas fields with varying concentrations of helium, and all you need to do is add a cryogenic helium extraction plant to a natural gas refinery to pull that helium out of the existing gas feeds. This is already happening in a few places, and with current technology, it's not that expensive to build more plants. It's only cost effective in a field with higher concentrations of helium - but there are quite a few of those.
The United States has proven helium reserves of about fifty years... and unproven reserves of about a thousand times that. ("Proven" means "we know it's there," and "unproven" means "we're pretty sure it's there, but haven't gotten around to it yet for economic or legal reasons").
So you're telling me that Helium prices are... inflated?
Maybe a mixture of "many parts" hydrogen, "a few parts" helium, and "a very few parts" nitrogen (or something along this lines) would address this problem while at the same time preventing party balloons from doubling as IED's.
I bet the gasses would separate while in the balloon. This method would probably not be a solution.
As a medical doctor working outside of the US I am appalled at the amount of over-investigation that goes in within the US medical profession. There are probably thousands of unnecessary MRI scans undertaken every month in the US. Perhaps with the scarcity of a required gas, this might bring rates of MRI scans back in line with normal.
I have a feeling that as soon as helium got expensive, we'd suddenly have all kinds of good ideas about how to recycle it more effectively. I mean, it's a noble gas, it's not like it gets "used up" in any medical or industrial application! I know it can escape through even the smallest cracks, but it doesn't seem so hard to build some kind of secondary containment around medical imaging machines. Separating helium from air is trivially easy with a gas centrifuge. This could probably be done on site.
Making a little hydrogen at home (enough for a few balloons) solves the problem of having tanks of potentially explosive gas around.
Also, if hydrogen catches fire, it burns UP, not down. It can also make a fun way to end the party: light the balloons with the birthday candles!!
*** Don't be dull.***
Balloons are every kid's enjoyment for birthdays, special event or talking like an oompa-loompa, fun-hater Tom Welton. Good luck explaining that Hellium is essential to MRI equipment because it's low boiling point and keep magnets cool to kids who just want a Mylar balloon that says "Happy Birthday".
I think we need to reevaluate what's wrong and focus research towards re-engineering MRI machines or use different mediums to cool these differently. I've seen this in the news for almost the last decade and if it's such a dilemma. What's that famous Albert Einsetin quote? "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Why don't we just harvest it on the moon? If we hurry up with cloning technology, we don't even need regular people to supervise the mining process.
Fill the birthday balloons with all the hot air coming from professor Tom Welton.
Hydrogen is a valid substitute to helium in many recreational uses. Just keep it outdoors and away from dirigibles. When I see lighter than air balloons filled with helium I always think of hydrogen. Besides, hydrogen is lighter making it superior for intended use anyway.
If Helium is scarce and there are actual shortages, shouldn't the price rise to correspondingly high levels? High enough, perhaps, to make it not economically feasible for use in kids' balloons?
Scientists with long-term humanitarian concerns have independently suggested there may be a problem. Commercially supported organisation with short-term financial interests says there isn't.
Of course, the balloons do not float like Helium balloons. But if you pop a few of the balloons in a closed room, nobody gives a damn anyway . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Long ago, I worked at a commercial lab where tanks of H2, 02, and N2O (nitrous oxide) were used for flame or plasma ion detectors. For fun, we used to launch "Hindenburgs" ... large trash bags filled with hydrogen plus a latex glove filled with the oxydizer and trailed by a fuse of burning paraffin film. The balloon would sail off into the night sky and detonate at a safe altitude and distance downwind. Usually. Our antics abruptly halted when one exploded prematurely just a dozen feet off the ground. The concussion and heat convinced us to give up our fun.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
This is all about pricing. If it is really a shortage then the price goes up and people waste less. The free market really does work - as long as government's are messing with it by subsidizing things. Eliminate the low cost availability of helium from the US government, and probably others, and then the price will float up to it's natural higher level. Demand will drop as will consumption.
Helium is the worlds nonrenewable resource. I don't think kids are going to give a shit if there aren't balloons at their parties.
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I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
...is like a lot of hot air.
oh the humanity just don't let them have to much fun.
At the bottom of the BBC article, it is stated that the gas used in balloons (which is not pure helium) is waste gas from medical and other uses.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
math is hard
Let's go shopping.
The market solution to a subsidy is to buy up all the subsidized supply and then either consume from the stockpile or re-sell it at a higher price.
Thus the solution is to build your own helium storage facility. Unfortunately, due to the prevailing political climate, it is more likely that the interested parties will instead plow that money and effort into lobbying congresses, assemblies, and parliaments to produce a solution that ruins helium for everyone.
Because it's not like anything could possibly be scarce.
Once a resource is abundant, it is always abundant!
You're complaining about wealth disparity, by the way, not resource allotment. You would be happier if everyone else had these restrictions. Of course, fixing that issue is gonna look a lot like socialism...too bad you can't see the forest for the trees.
... if it's so valuable and scarce, why is it so cheap? You would think that this is the kind of thing that really would get itself sorted out by the market, and I don't think there's "big helium" or government subsidies happening behind the scenes to mess things up.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Professor Welton says that because there is a shortage, we should (essentially) make rules against using Helium for "trivial" purposes like party balloons. This seems rather draconian to me. Is helium really the only way to cool MRI machines? I'll bet that, if prices rise enough, somebody will invent a new method not involving helium. Should partiers give up helium balloons? I'll be that, if prices rise enough, they will stop using them without being coerced.
"When you see that we're literally just letting it float into the air, and then out into space inside those helium balloons, it's just hugely frustrating". Well, it's a good thing we're not burning fossil fuel by letting cars run around in a circular track, round and round, just for the heck of it.
Underholdning.info
Isn't this incentive to work on fusion reactors with more fury? Am I wrong in saying H + H => He?
Mr. America walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America walk on by the minds that won't be reached
The grade of the helium is entirely irrelevant. The helium used to cool superconducting MRI magnets is recycled over and over: it doesn't wear out, and impurities are automatically removed during the liquefaction process. Wasting "old" helium is just as bad as wasting fresh.
in a ridiculous helium voice saying "is this an inappropriate use of helium?"
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Wrap the Earth in Mylar and paint "Happy Birthday" on the outside.
a world we want to live in? The MRI can save your life but only in a world without balloons. Time to rethink why we want to live so long in the first place.
You would think that most of the helium waste has little to do with the party balloon industry and a lot to do with the natural gas industry.
Are there natural gas wells with useful amounts of helium, but the helium is not being recovered because of the price structure. Maybe the price of helium should be propped up so that more natural gas isn't just burned without recovering the helium, but why pick on party balloons?
Do these concerned scientists even know how much He is used in party balloons?
B-b-but what about the helium hard drives that are set to be released in the near future? :(
No time to dig up the figures, but I encourage folks to actually look at the useage rates of helium. The military is far and away the greatest consumer followed by medicine and commercial uses. Party baloons are a small fraction of use and loss of helium in the economy. This doesn't even mention how much helium is lost due to non-capture from hydrocarbon gas deposits simply because it isn't economical to do so. This is the same sort of small-minded thinking which makes people think that if we all just recycle our home waste and set the thermostat a few degrees lower than we will solve environmental problems. Please stop busying people with activities which reduce demand for actual solutions.
Seems to be all up in the air at the moment.
Helium is also available from the atmosphere for several $1000/kg. So we won't run out.
Most Cryogenic applications like MRI magnets can use Hydrogen 14K or Neon 24K instead.
But I agree save the helium for more important uses.
Instead use Neon - its a renewable resource from the atmosphere, and would only cost about $300/kg of lift or a couple of $ per balloon - not much worse than helium, and well within typical retail margins, also won't leak away as quickly.
For bigger lift applications use methane. Dirt cheap, commonly available, not poisonous, less leaky than hydrogen or helium and would work fine for most lift applications. Downside is flammability, though far less dangerous than hydrogen, and rises quickly in air to disperse in an accident. A party balloon with 4 litres would only release 100kJ when burnt - though that is more than the 20kJ from an equivalent hydrogen balloon. It is much harder to ignite methane - only ignites in a relatively narrow range of air-methane mixes, spanning about 4-15%, vs hydrogen 4-75%
If scientists don't like kids having helium ballons they should figure out how to make cheap vacuum ballons to replace helium. With this approach everyone wins.
And it could very well be scientists won't win afterall... if demand is sufficiently reduced supply will follow they may actually end up needing to pay more to foot the bill for infustructure necessary for production and processing parents have been helping with all these years.
As long as civilization continues to mine huge amounts of hydrocarbons from within the earth helium will continue to be cheap. As the cost rises more effort shall be placed into increasing recovery effeciency. When this practice eventually stops or shrinks the price of helium will skyrocket and your kids won't get no stinkin helium balloon because YOU won't be able to afford one.
The specifics of current US production are no different than Chinas monopoly on rare earth production... If the US supply went away others can and will step in to fill the void.
First off, this was last reported in March in the UK's Guardian as well.
More to the point, the US Gov. had a surplus of it from the 1920's that it sold off much of in the late 1990's so part of this is self imposed.
Also, much of current day helium is being used for vacuum chamber leak testing for semiconductor production, aerial surveillance balloons,
UAV's and regular old heli-arc welding in factories and shops all over the world.
I'm guessing the use for the surveillance balloons and stockpiling to support them is more to blame than any number of little party balloons.
What you're seeing is a lag in time from the Fed Gov's helium privatization program where private industry has not yet ramped up production
to meet a decades standard level of consumption.
Not some scientists opinion where little kids balloons are affecting a world resource market.
When in doubt, they'll regulate it.
Not to worry though,if history is any indicator Wal-mart will sell you a tank of Hydrogen for your kiddies Birthday parties.(Just don't get too close to the candles on the cake.)
After the Magic Kingdom burns,(oh, the humanity!)I predict Disney won't see the utility of regulation and will march on a conquest of the other 49 states and inter anyone not found to be a mouseketeer in work camps. But the world won't get involved until Canada and Mexico have fallen and the Mouse marches on Europe.
Look for alliances with the Asian Disneys and the entire country of France.
Funny , how shit like that goes down...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I can see it now, the ads...yup, a precious gas instead of precious minerals. Keep a few dozen tanks in your backyard.
In other news Tom Welton, a professor of sustainable chemistry at Imperial College has been diagnosed with a severe case of OCD
> the helium its members put into balloons ... "... is not pure,' says Lee. ...."
> 'It's recycled from the gas which is used in the medical industry
So, kids, remember -- when you inhale that balloon gas, you're getting air from a hospital.
Heard those drug-resistant bacteria stories?
What's the worst that could happen?
It is easier to charge the public more or ban something wasteful like children's balloons than it is to get the military or industry to do anything. Remember, the military and industry have a history of KILLING PEOPLE rather than change their ways - and you want them to change over a small resource supply problem? The military complex can't even stop wasting money when we run out of money.
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This sort of thing is a continuing reminder of the lack of concern for facts in the scientific community today. Scientists pay far too much attention to source and sensationalism, and not very much to actual data anymore.
What I find funny is a so called scientist saying the price should be raised, to keep people from wasting it. Oh, sort of like raising the price of gasoline to keep people from wasting it? LOL.
Those concerned with helium supplies running out should be aware that twice every day, operators at hundreds of weather stations around the world fill very large balloons with helium, attach these little devices called radiosonde, and then release the balloons. The balloons ascend to about an altitude of 30k meters, then pop, releasing the helium, while the radiosonde and the popped balloon fall back to earth. The radiosondes measure temperature, humidity, and other physical parameters in the upper atmosphere, and the data is used for important things like weather prediction, and climate research, but if there is anything that will put a dent in the supply of helium, it's these weather balloons.
We can get Helium from all the Hydrogen fusion power plants. It might just be a little too hot to handle. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/fusion-energy-breaking-even/
The hadron collider uses crazy amounts of helium, which it has had to procure all over the world. I understand the scientists want to play with all the helium, but I say balloons for children are pretty important too. I'd rather keep children's balloons to a number of scientific endeavors...
The superconductors that work at LN2 temperatures don't work very well if the magnetic field strength is high, which is the whole point of an MRI.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm a blue water sailor. I've never seen floating trash out at sea. However, hardly a day goes by when I don't see a partially deflated helium balloon floating hundreds of miles from shore.
When a child looses a balloon they go up in the sky and drift with the wind. Within a few days they loose enough gas to sink to the surface. However, they retain enough gas to float on the water. The Mylar ones can last and float for years, surviving all weather and storms. They either wash ashore someplace, or they are swallowed by some creature which then may die. Rubber balloons do the same thing but they only last weeks, rather than years.
I can't help thinking that if mothers knew about the ultimate fate of those party balloons, they wouldn't buy them in the first place.
There was a recent article about a similar topic in my local newspaper last summer:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/University+Alberta+looks+become+leader+helium+recycling/6937916/story.html
It sounds like the University of Alberta may already be able to re-purify "balloon gas" (and other helium sources) into something usable by their hospitals and researchers, and make it totally economical at the same time.
>> High enough, perhaps, to make it not economically feasible for use in kids' balloons?
Not at all.
A balloon needs a very low quantity, while a MRI needs the equivalent of perhaps many tens of thousands of balloons. (in liquid form)
If the price rise, the huge buying power of 100 000 overpriced balloons will surpass the buying power of 10 MRI labs, and the labs will close.
And that's free market.
aaaaaaa
Decorative balloons are pure waste, from plastic to filler gas.
Helium is vital for welding in pure and mixed-gas processes, for example. Welding is far more important even than medical uses.
The solution is to attack the idiotic custom of party balloons, or fill 'em with compressed air then hang them in place.
One bright spot is that commercial gas providers often deny helium to non-industrial customers due to the shortage.
(Keep an eye out for full or partially full helium cylinders on Craigslist . I've bought 'em cheap then sold the contents to desperate gift shops then exchanged the empty cylinders for argon and mixed gas for my welders and made money doing it.)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The reason people could even start using He in balloons or whatever is because finaly in 1996 US gov't stopped artificially inflating (no pun intended) prices on Helium, because it stopped buying it from natural gas companies and even put it up for sale on the market.
Helium was used in party balloons for children well before 1996. Just because your church meetings tell you otherwise does not make it so. Ask anyone who was alive in the US before 1996 and they will tell you that you are full of hot air.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Roman_mir / udachny (the same person) has no idea what he is talking about, and shows it clearly here:
So these 'academics
The article is about the need for helium in medicine. Medical grade and research grade helium are two very different things. Any person of reasonable intelligence on the matter could tell you that.
should buy all the helium and preserve it if
Ever hear of the ideal gas law? You went to a public state funded university, so you should have taken at least a semester of chemistry and another of physics, one would hope. A corollary to the ideal gas law is that to compress an ideal gas (and Helium is the model ideal gas) takes energy (and hence creates heat). So if you want your helium at a volume small enough to be practical for storage (ie, not taking up entire buildings) you need to compress it, which takes energy. Otherwise you need huge buildings dedicated to helium storage.
but it's not up to anybody to dictate to all people how they should live and die.
You have, on more than one occasion, demonstrated a willingness to let people die without concern for how they reached a mortal situation. You are not one to claim that people do not have the right to dictate to people how they should live and die, when you see yourself as somehow endowed with the right to do exactly that.
Treated respectfully hydrogen is reasonably safe. The real problem was that the Hindenburg was designed to use helium, and so lacked the most basic safety precautions you would want on a hydrogen-lifted airship, even by the standards of the day. Helium-filled airships were cheaper to build, and hydrogen-filled ones cheaper to fill - when the price of helium started to climb the cheapskates decided to just use hydrogen in their helium-designed airship, and the resulting fiasco (combined with the soaring price of helium) devastated one of the most promising transportation industries we've come up with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Childrens party ballons are filled with MEDICAL WASTE?
Helium comes as a side-effect radioactive decay. We would have tons of helium available if it wasn't for the idiotic Sierra Club and those Anti-Nuke morons.
OP is either stupid, misguided, or evil.
All you have to do is fuse hydrogen. We should have the technology in 50 years.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Fill party balloons with hydrogen instead. They'll still float, and parties will be much more exciting when they pop.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Damn those people in the first world. Damn them and their industriousness, their striving for a quality education, and their ability to organize and cooperate effectively at a societal level. Those bloody whiners better not wake me during my siesta. If you're so morally elevated, get off the internet and feed someone.
How about you invent a better MRI machine that doesn't require a constant supply of helium? Maybe make it cheaper too while you're at it so poor people can get early medical treatment when early detection dramatically improves the prognosis of the patient.
When the big fat medical and research industries are weened off Helium, maybe we can build some mining robots to collect it from the Moon to support the carnival industry.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
First: "The solution is to attack the idiotic custom of party balloons, or fill 'em with compressed air then hang them in place."
Second: ... I've bought 'em cheap then sold the contents to desperate gift shops ...
Hey, look over there, somebody is wrecking things. It's not me. It's not me. It's not me.
Look over there!
The atmosphere is is about 5ppm helium. That is pretty low grade, but it is extremely plentiful. By comparison, CO2 is about 400ppm.
The vast majority of Helium is 'wasted' since it is never recovered from the natural gas well stream. If you want more Helium to be recovered, you need to find more uses of it so the price will rise.
Liquefied natural gas plants are among so of the biggest energy projects going right now. It seems to me that these plants would have waste stream very rich in helium.
H (Hydrogen) + e(electron) = He (Helium)
H + e = He
Profit!
If this guys worries about the future, and is so intelligent, why the fuck doesn't he realize there will be something else besides MRI machines 50 years from now. And those machines will most likely not need helium. Stuuuuppppiid
Fuck you.
Why not just make more by nuclear fusion? Stars do it all the time.
Let's give kids nitrous balloons instead!
Basically the big features of helium are:
Low density - good for helium balloons and airships. It's twice as dense as hydrogen gas, but that doesn't actually make much difference as it's the much greater mass of the air it's displacing that provides buoyancy, and the hydrogen's volitility calls for additional safeguards.
Low reactivity - as a noble gas it's almost completely inert, making it useful as a protective atmosphere for everything from welding to growing silicon and germanium crystals, to producing titanium and zirconium, to diluting breathing gas for deep-sea diving so oxygen doesn't destroy your lungs and cause explosions. For the last application density factors in again since you have to carry your breath-gas with you, and the next-lightest noble gas (neon) is five times denser.
Low boiling point - this is one of the currently most useful features, at 4.22K it has the lowest boiling point of any known substance - hydrogen has the next lowest and it's almost five times higher at 20.28K, which isn't nearly as useful for cooling superconductors or exploring low-temperature physics. Plus helium's low reactivity factors in again here since you don't want it to chemically react with whatever it is you're cooling off.
It also has other interesting properties which may eventually prove useful - for example it's the only known superfluid in existence.
I think there's also some special applications for the He-3 isotope beyond its usefulness in fusion research (where it takes part in some high-cross-section reactions), but I can't think of what they might be at the moment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
But John Lee, chairman of the UK's Balloon Association, insists that the helium its members put into balloons is not depriving the medical profession of the gas. 'The helium we use is not pure,' says Lee. 'It's recycled from the gas which is used in the medical industry, and mixed with air. We call it balloon gas rather than helium for that reason.'
Dishonest fuckers. How else is one to reliably self euthanise without access to nitrogen etc from welding supply?
Why, flatulence constitute roughly 10% of free-floating gas on this planet? Someone should go out and capture it for the party balloons.
When the folks over at EMC2 build a full scale PB-11 polywell fusion reactor then there will be more then enough 100% pure helium to go around. Three helium atoms are released for every proton boron-11 fusion.
If you are not in danger (danger count also brain cancer) then yes it can take a few weeks. But if they search for some specific lethal stuff , clot, cancer, you get the appointment almost immedaitely. For example I live in a very small city in germany (100K inhabitant) and the hospital there got a MRI scanner. Got an appointment for the next day. Heck even when they were only wanted to evaluate the evolution of what I got in my brain (something benign), I got an appointment within a few days. Same in France for my parents. So I dispute your argument that "while it's a several-month wait list in most of the world (if it's available at all)". It is a diagnostic tool it is useless to use it when not indicated for a diagnostic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...when commercial fusion reactors are operating in, oh, 20 years.
John, if a girl asks you what you do for a living, just tell her you're an accountant.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Why not use hydrogen for party ballons? The amount of gas in a party balloon is so small that there is really no fire danger. There would be some risk at the filling site, but a container of compressed hydrogen is not any more dangerous than the tanks of propane used for the outdoor BBQ grill.
Russia has huge unannounced helium fields that they discovered back in the 70's.
The helium we use is not pure,' says Lee. 'It's recycled from the gas which is used in the medical industry, and mixed with air. We call it balloon gas rather than helium for that reason.'"
This is nonsense on a massive scale. Helium is inert. It hasn't been used up and it isn't dirty. It could be easily separated from the air and used again.
-- QED
If these worried scientists got their collective arses in gear and worked out how to making fusion happen then they'd have all the helium their heart's desire. They should put more time into actually doing something useful and less time into warning us what might happen if they sit about all day complaining.
Welton is correct: Helium is too valuable to waste on toy balloons. Helium is like land; they ain't making any more.
Remember back in College when you would visit your professor to ask for an extension or to drop off a bottle of Chivas to get that extra half point to make that GPA you needed?
Put that image in your head...
Anytime you hear from the intelligentsia... remember that professor as the appropriate grain of salt to whatever he/she is proclaiming. That messy office. That bad joke. That smell of weed/booze/or worse...
Did they strike you as really busy? (don't visualize a grad student that was actually doing the work)
Sometimes you need to look behind the curtain.
It's what I go for at bedtime... a "sleep".
Your parents gave you "detention"? Perhaps this is your dad?
...and let's talk about how MRI's waste massive amounts of helium, when any MRI system should have helium recovery built into it.
The headline should read "More Idiot Scientists Show Us Why Headlines About What Scientists Say Should Be Ignored.
Many of you simply don't get it. Helium is a very useful technological tool, and CANNOT be produced. It is very limited on earth, and once it is gone, it will be gone forever. Any use for He that simply disposes of it, as in balloons, must be stopped NOW.
Mod up if Cracked.com made you aware of this first!
What would Dejah Thoris say about wasting Helium?
MRIs just let it boil off instead of recycling it. Considering MRIs use between a quarter and a third of all helium produced, and balloons a tiny percentage, I'd say professor Welton is a giant hypocrite.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."