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.'"

Comments

I have the answer

[For a Free Internet]

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!

Re:I have the answer

[reboot246]

The sun is pretty bright and hot. We'd have to go there at night.

Re:I have the answer

[unixisc]

I was wondering - couldn't we do fusion reactors, which involve protium & deuterium, and produce He-3 that way? We'd have plenty of supply for the baloons

Re:I have the answer

[Immerman]

Actually from what I can tell p-D reactions aren't among those normally considered for fusion power - I assume it probably has a very small cross-section so depends on the extreme conditions within a star's core to make it possible. And due to the binding energies He-3 is an extremely rare fusion product, you pretty much only get it if no other option exists

Of those reactions that are considered the only ones that produce He-3 are
4 H-2 -> He-3 + H-3 + H-1 + n0 (average result of multiple reactions)
H-2 + Li-6 -> He-3 + He-4 + n0 (one of four possible outcomes, relative probabilities unknown)
H-1 + Li-6 -> He-3 + He-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_and_candidates_for_terrestrial_reactions

Since the first two produce neutrons they will create considerably more low-level nuclear waste/J than a fission plant would, meaning they'll only be in use until we can manage aneutronic fusion instead. The final reaction is viable, but the uneven product masses complicate capturing the energy, so p-Li-7 or p-B-11 reactions that only produce He-4 are more likely to see commercial use.

That's why the waste of helium is so frustrating - while it's one of the most common elements in the universe it's extremely uncommon on planets - once released into the atmosphere its low density pretty much guarantees that it will drift into the upper atmosphere and escape, making it one of the very few truly non-renewable resources on the planet. Fusion (assuming we ever get it going) will get us He-4 as a byproduct, but replacing the 0.000137% of helium that is He-3 will require either mining the lunar regolith or fusing Lithium or Deutrium specifically for that purpose

Re:I have the answer

[icebike]

I was wondering - couldn't we do fusion reactors, which involve protium & deuterium, and produce He-3 that way? We'd have plenty of supply for the baloons

There is no shortage of Helium.
Nor is it particularly hard to extract.

The problem is that the US government had pretty much cornered the market on the gas, and then decided Blimps were not it its future, and started selling off the entire (enormous) reserve at below market prices. Soon this inventory will be exhausted, and production will resume by private industry just as it was done in the 30s.

This is strictly a manufactured shortage, due to a quirk of history. There is no more real shortage of Helium gas on earth than there ever was.

Re:I have the answer

[unixisc]

But I'm genuinely curious here - what are the other usages of Helium, aside from blimps & b'day party balloons?

Re:I have the answer

[user flynn]

Most important. A lot of superconductors are liquid helium cooled.

    It's very important for certain types of scientific instrumentation. Very.

Re:I have the answer

[Lucractius]

Yes its a manufactured shortage... But your forgetting the one small detail...
The source feedstock for the helium extraction process that the private industry manufacturers will need to use to produce it in commercially viable quantities is still a limited resource. A fossil fuel no less.
Helium is at present obtained through fractional separation of 'crude' natural gas where the natural gas contains a greater than 0.3% helium by volume due to current commercial costs.
Natural gas is a limited resource. The % availability of helium in the different types of natural gas deposit differs immensely based on geology and since I cant narrow the approximations down how I would like without more time consuming research I will have to use some USGS data as an approximate.

Since were dealing with petroleum related data I'll do the unit conversion here to keep things clear for anyone trying to check my math with the source data. (And where I'm using m^3 and ft^3 I'm referring to cubic volume not a math formula)
With typical natural gas fields measured in Barrel of Oil Equivalent and the typical BOE for natural gas stated by the USGS as 170m^3 (6000ft^3) of natural gas for one BOE we can work out roughly what the currently available and currently wasted helium is for the planet.

Current (CIA World Factbook proven reserves for 2011) global proven natural gas reserves equate to approximately 186.5*10^12 cubic meters

Using a few different estimates to average a rough range for the global percentage of content and to take into account the large number of gas reserves where the data is unavailable, the high mark of 2.5% by volume the average marks of 1% and 0.5% by volume and the low mark of 0.1% by volume i get the following prospective global total helium reserves.

High @2.5% - 4.662x10^12 cubic meters
Average @1% - 1.865x10^12 cubic meters
Average @0.5% - 932.5x10^9 cubic meters
Low @0.1% - 186.5x10^9 cubic meters

The USGS estimates are:
As of 2006 - USA reserves at 20.6x10^9 cubic meters
As of 2010 - Global Excluding the USA 31.3x10^9 cubic meters

Global proven natural gas reserves have increased since these 2 data points which would indicate the worst case low estimate is the most likely one for a global percentage. Pushing the numbers down a bit and using a volume % that is closer to the % represented by the reserve totals of the USGS estimates above - 0.05% by volume we get the following information...

Global production in 2011 was 3.3x10^12 cubic meters of natural gas.
From which using the above percentage of 0.05% by volume would yield 1.65x10^9 of helium removed from the reservoirs as part of natural gas.
USGS global helium production estimates for 2011 are 180x10^6 cubic meters of contained Helium.

Which means... That as we deplete the indisputably finite natural gas reserves from which we obtain helium, we are currently throwing away 90% of the worlds helium, literally into the air with every cubic meter of natural gas we extract and burn.

Its clearly a manufactured shortage... but the bigger issue in my mind is that were going to probably hit peak natural gas within the next 50 years... no big deal for most uses of natural gas, other forms of energy are able to fill the gaps.

However its our only practical source of helium... and when the gas stops, the Helium stops with it. Leaving us with as much as we have gathered and stored away up to that point to last us until mankind comes up with practical ways to obtain it in bulk from space.

And of note is this fact, there were 19 privately owned and operating helium plants in the USA alone in 1995 prior to deregulation of the helium reserve by the US government through the "Helium Privatization Act of 1996" (Public Law 104–273). Private companies are already supplying it commercially and making money doing so while competing with the artificially lower government stockpile price.

Re:I have the answer

[thrich81]

We never got He-3 commercially from natural sources -- just not enough of it around and too difficult to separate from He-4. All of the He-3 in use was made via fission reactors (mostly through production of H-3, which decays to He-3), and not just any old utility power generating reactor, either. Those reactors (government and mostly weapons affiliated) aren't doing so much anymore and there is a shortage of He-3.

Re:I have the answer

[necro81]

For the most part, He-3 isn't what people are using. There are uses for it (it makes for an excellent neutron detector, if I remember), but due to its scarcity it isn't used for much. Nearly all of what's available to us, on Earth, is He-4, which we get mostly from alpha decays of fissile elements (an alpha particle is a He-4 nucleus).

Re:I have the answer

[aurizon]

I think you are wrong. If we use the helium at the rate is i being made from decal, our use will fall to 1% of current use. We now use a stored resource and 100 times or more its replacement rate and once the US reserves of 1.9% Helium natural gas are gone, we are done.
The only hope is getting higher temperature superconductors that can use Hydrogen and have high current capability.

Re:I have the answer

[kmoser]

Don't be ridiculous. Just wear sunglasses.

Re:I have the answer

[SlippyToad]

This is strictly a manufactured shortage, due to a quirk of history

Given that Helium is the second-most-abundant element in the fucking universe it most certainly is.

It's a manufactured shortage born out of FREE-MARKET STUPIDITY, furthermore.

Re:I have the answer

[icebike]

When the Government holds more Helium than all other sources combined, and starts selling it below production cost, it takes a total idiot to blame any part of that on the free market.

What Free market? The government killed off the free market in helium in the 30s.

Re:I have the answer

[tolkienfan]

Don't worry about it: market forces will naturally push the price up.

Even the US government can't make more available than exists.

Re:I have the answer

[KingBenny]

jupiter might do or uranus (pun not intended)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/02/0241242/Project-Icarus-the-Gas-Mines-of-Uranus
how about not putting rare stuff in smartphones either for that matter then ?

Re:I have the answer

[habig]

Since the first two produce neutrons they will create considerably more low-level nuclear waste/J than a fission plant would, meaning they'll only be in use until we can manage aneutronic fusion instead.

I don't think it will be much of a problem. Fission waste is primarily the heavy daughters of the uranium: take that thing way up on the periodic table and split it semi-randomly in two parts, you get all sorts of stuff of varying nastyness. Now take that soup of middle-sized atoms and throw more neutrons at it, more problems.

However, if all you've got is a bunch of H and He isotopes in there fusing, tacking on more neutrons to them doesn't do much. Also, the neutrons released in these reactions don't have a whole lot of energy, so don't get very far. Much less of a problem.

Re:I have the answer

[Immerman]

Sure, works great for the short term. The problem with that approach for consumable resources with long-term value is that the current reserves are potentially all we have. Forever. Assuming we don't move to fusion in a big way, in a few hundred years we may not have large quantities of helium available at any price, and the next-best option is generally far less suitable.

Most resources don't actually get used up - iron, lithium, titanium - if there's a "shortage" a hundred or a thousand years from now it'll still be sitting around in our trash heaps for our descendants our descendants to extract. Even fossil fuels can be created synthetically if we have the will and energy - all the "parts" are still lying around, what we use up is just the energy stored in it, and there's *lots* of energy lying around for us as we learn to collect it.

Helium is unusual, practically unique, in that once discarded it actually leaves the planet, never to be seen again, and because the price is being held artificially low it's being thrown away at a phenomenal rate despite the fact that it's an extremely rare substance that would be trivial to recapture in most applications.

Re:I have the answer

[Immerman]

To be clear ideally there's three kinds of nuclear waste to worry about

"spent" fission fuel that in a responsible world just needs to be reprocessed

high-level waste which is the actual fission products that you want to lock away someplace for a couple hundred years until it cools off - your "heavy daughters" - it's all stuff smack in the middle of the periodic table alongside tin and silver, you just need to wait until it decays into more stable isotopes. This is the stuff fusion avoids producing.

Fusion avoids both of those nicely, where it doesn't look so good is the low-level waste - all the stuff that was in the neighborhood of the reactor while it was running - the lead shielding, the reactor itself, cooling systems and coolant - everything in the area is getting bombarded with neutrons and transmuting into radioactive isotopes. Perhaps not as long-lived as the mid-level waste, but still quite dangerous for years or decades to come, and there's a LOT more of this stuff since everything in the area is getting saturated. Unless you're managing a considerably more challenging aneutronic fusion reaction you'll be releasing a neutron with every reaction or two, and you're getting a LOT less energy per reaction than with fission (typically around 8-20MeV versus 200MeV with fission). Moreover virtually all of your neutrons will escape a fusion reactor, unlike fission which depends on them to maintain the chain reaction so that only a small percentage actually escape.

How to decide the fate of helium

[cellocgw]

There may be a free-market solution. Let's float a trial balloon and see how everyone reacts.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[kerrbear]

The solution is to use hydrogen instead! It was good enough for the Hindenburg.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Opportunist]

And what a lesson about the dangers of smoking it could teach our kids!

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hindenburg was designed for helium, and hydrogen was only used because supplies of helium were withheld from the operators for political reasons. If the Hindenburg had been designed with hydrogen in mind instead of inert helium the accident may never have happened.

I'm not going to say using hydrogen in a dirigible is a good idea but hydrogen shouldn't be completely written off as an operational substitute for helium because of one fiasco in the 1930s.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[tgd]

The Hindenburg was designed for helium, and hydrogen was only used because supplies of helium were withheld from the operators for political reasons. If the Hindenburg had been designed with hydrogen in mind instead of inert helium the accident may never have happened.

I'm not going to say using hydrogen in a dirigible is a good idea but hydrogen shouldn't be completely written off as an operational substitute for helium because of one fiasco in the 1930s.

The Hindenburg, and all the other Zeppelin airships had also done hundreds of trips for years, even with hydrogen.

The incident is burned into the public psyche not because it was particularly horrorific, or because it was some example of bad design held up for criticism -- its notable for one reason only. It was the first case of broad media overhype. It was the great-grand-daddy of all the shit we see on the "news" today.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, it was. Hindenburg would be flying for many more years to come if not for the flammable paint that has been used to cover it's baloon. Nowadays we can produce inflammable paints and there is nothing that should prevent us from using hydrogen in baloons again, apart from the memories left after the tragedy.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Rei]

It was not coated in explosives. It was not coated in thermite, either. These are myths. Which should be obvious given the number of pieces of Hindenburg skin that were recovered and sold as souveniers; they self-extinguished as they fell.

When the Mythbusters tested this out, they got "a" skin reaction, but nothing like when they used actual thermite - and on top of that, they had to totally bias the test in terms of a skin reaction, including having orders of magnitude higher of a skin/fuel ratio than the actual Hindenberg and only slowly feeding in the hydrogen to give the skin a chance to burn instead of just being ripped part almost instantaneously.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-inflammable paints would be better.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[krammit]

Inflammable means flammable? What a country!

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Ken_g6]

Exactly! Use liquid hydrogen to cool the large magnets inside MRI scanners.

Liquid hydrogen boils at 20.28 K. MgB2 superconducts at 39 K. (So neon would also work, but it has problems similar to helium.)

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Jessified]

I think that hydrogen birthday balloons together with birthday candles would be a lot of fun.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[cellocgw]

French, from Medieval Latin inflammabilis, from Latin inflammare
First Known Use: 1605

Origin of FLAMMABLE

Latin flammare to flame, set on fire, from flamma
First Known Use: 1813

-- from online Merriam-Webster.

So there!

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Sqr(twg)]

This is indeed a good idea. A baloon filled with hydrogen is not much more dangerous than one filled with air. If you hold it over a flame, it will make about the same pop as an air-filled baloon. The 0.3 g of hydrogen in a baloon is not enough to produce any serious amount heat as it burns. (We did this back in high-school chemistry class. We had an awesome teacher.) Hydrogen is cheaper than helium, and does not diffuse as easily through the baloon surface, so baloons would last longer.

There is some danger in the handling of cylinders. If hydrongen leaks out in a room with poor ventilation, there is a risk of explosion. However, the same is true for propane/butane gas which is used in kitchen stoves, and most people seem to be able to handle that.

Another danger is when stupid people inhale baloon gas and asphyxiate. With helium, this problem is commonly solved by adding some oxygen to the mix. Hydrogen cannot be safely mixed with oxygen, so you'd either have to tell the stupid people not to do that, or accept a slight decline in the stupid population as they figure it out for themselves.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Apparently you never had ANY respect for the mythbusters...or at least no enough respect to try to understand how the show works. They don't just fudge things like that and say "see, it happened just like the myth". When they don't get the expected reaction under the real life conditions, they then say "well, what conditions WOULD it take to make this myth happen?" They then ramp up things over and over again until they actually get the expected reaction. Then they say "the myth supposedly happens under condition A, but really you need 10*A + B + C to make it happen....myth busted".

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[flaming error]

Damn straight.

My dad was from a small town in the southwest founded by his ancestors, a town whose major industry was farming tumbleweeds, juniper, mesquite, and other naturally occurring firewoods and tinder. Fireworks were understandably illegal.

Most residents were kinfolk in some way or another, including the town marshal, who, many years ago, not knowing us out-of-staters well, misguidedly invited us to his son's birthday party.

Uncle Buzz was fairly skilled at extracting hydrogen from mixing household chemicals, and was pleased to offer his services in inflating a small flotilla of balloons for us. We saw no need to disclose to the good Marshal they were filled with gas less noble than Helium.

Come time, we all sing happy birthday. Young Sam blows out the candles, and we lit the balloon strings and released the bundle.

That kid's all grown up now, but he tells me he never had a better birthday present.

We still haven't been invited back, though.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[wolvesofthenight]

Citation needed. And, while I agree with the XKCD take on mythbusters, they are not a suitable scientific or engineering source to cite.

To back up the claim that the skin of the Hindenburg initiated the fire I will site Engineering Disasters - Lessons to be Learned, by Don Lawson. ISBN 1-86058-459-4, pages 3 to 19. One quote from this section of the book:

"Addison Brian's tests
"In 1994 Dr Bain managed to get samples of the outer covering of the Hindenburg and carried out tests. The outer covering of cellulose acetate butyrate dope and fine aluminum powder was similar to the rocket fuel he was familiar with at NASA. He found that the aluminum and dope had bled through the fabric in places and had combined with the iron oxide on the inner surface. The resulting mixture is similar to a thermite fuse mixture used to achieve high temperatures in welding.

"Dr Bain tested samples of similarly doped fabric for their potential to be ignited by an electrostatic discharge. When an arc struck down onto the fabric samples, it only resulted in local damage. Airships struck by lightning had shown similar localized damage. When the arc was parallel to the surface of the fabric, the electrical energy was sufficient to ignite the sample, which was quickly consumed by fire."

The reference provided for the above quote was: Bain, A. and Schmidtchen, U. (2000) Afterglow of a Myth: Why and How the Hindenburg Burnt, DWV, January, www.dwvinfo.de

Other parts of this section go into further detail, including other hypothesizes for what caused the disaster. If you read Engineering Disasters, he does not claim that they mystery is completely solved. Indeed, It will probably never be solved with 100% certainty. But the theory of lightning igniting the flammable skin appears to be the most probable cause of the start of the fire. Obviously once the ship was on fire the hydrogen burnt, no doubt making the fire far worse. Who knows, maybe Helium would have put out the fire...

Do you have a source better than Mythbusters (and better than Wikipedia and Snopes)? If so, I would be interested....

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

I read in a book how when the Graf Zeppelin arrived at Los Angeles on a round-the-world cruise in 1929, they were unable to refill with helium due to a ban on its sale to Germany; so a local company stepped in with a suitable replacement - 55% natural gas, 45% compressed propane. How more volatile than hydrogen that would be I'm not sure, but it definitely wasn't inert, either. People seemed to have a much more relaxed attitude towards handling dangerous materials then, and get a load of this account of the GZ's departure:

After slowly cruising down the California coast to land in daylight the next morning, Graf Zeppelin made a difficult landing at Los Angeles on August 26th, through a temperature inversion which made it difficult to bring the ship down, requiring the valving of large quantities of hydrogen. The lost hydrogen could not be replaced at Los Angeles, and the takeoff, with the ship unusually heavy, was even more challenging; Graf Zeppelin only narrowly missed hitting power lines at the edge of the field.

LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin history page.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[fnj]

The statement is correct, but the Mythbusters pop pseudo-science is, as usual, a very poor source.

The subject is treated exhaustively in the material linked to here. The Dessler and Overs/Dessler/Appleby papers are well researched, expertly informed, and painstakingly tested. They THOROUGHLY debunk the silly incendiary paint theory.

The envelope could and did burn as part of the HYDROGEN inferno, contributed substantially to the energy liberated in the fire, gave (together with the gas cells and other substances) the fire its brilliant color and added smoke, but absolutely did not constitute the initially ignited fuel, or drive the ferocious rapidity of the fire.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Rei]

Citation needed

Okay, if you want to go there, here you go: The Hindenburg Fire: Hydrogen or Incendiary Paint? (Dessler, Overs, & Appleby, 2005). And here's a more detailed writeup on the same thing.

To go into the particular aspects you mentioned:

1) "Rocket fuel" when not contained is actually not particularly intense-burning on its own. It only burns "like a rocket" when the pressure is confined.
2) Even rocket fuels would burn only a tiny fraction as fast as the Hindenburg burned.
3) The mix is not at all correct for a rocket fuel or for thermite; the ratios are all wrong.
4) The discharge Bain used to ignite the fabric is many orders of magnitude more intense than the method he theorized to produce it, and could ignite almost anything.
5) Any spark produced by his proposed method would jump in the wrong direction, a direction he says wouldn't work, and would nonetheless be three orders of magnitude too weak to ignite the skin.
6) The chemicals used are rated as self-extingishing, and in fact, countless fabrics of hindenburg skin did self-extingish.
7) Even in Bain's burn, driven by his powerful ignition source, for the skin to have burned fast enough to represent the Hindenburg burn, his sample would have had to be consumed in a mere 2 milliseconds, like flash paper. At the rate his sample burned, the Hindenburg would have taken 40 hours to be consumed.
8) The skin of the Hindenburg, and many other airships, were struck by lightning many times without ignition. Airship disasters tended only to happen when the ships were venting hydrogen (as the Hindenburg was).
9) The claim that helium airships burned the same is false. Bain cited the Macon, but the Macon crashed into the pacific with no fire; late while floating on the water, gasoline from the control car burned part of the wreckage in a small, relatively insignficant fire. The Navy blimp also had a gasoline fire, and the damage was both slow and confied only to where the gasoline fires were hitting.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[mspring]

So in your mind what should be the only legitimate sources to draw from for entertainment?
And isn't entertainment a lot about making an audience feel better than their objective reality would actually warrant?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Alex Pennace]

I am drifting dreadfully off-topic, but I have to ask: Was this incident what inspired you to choose the alias "flaming error?"

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[flyingfsck]

Well, actually they won't figure it out for themselves. Other people may figure something out, for example the guy with the burning cigarette, but his buddy who breathed the hydrogen gas won't.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[udachny]

Hydrogen filled balloons are impossible in a over-regulated, lawsuit happy society, it's just not going to fly (pardon the pun). It can't work, one single liability claim will wipe out the entire "Hydrogen in a kid's balloon" industry.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[mrmeval]

Hydrogen embrittles metals. There are some alloys that can mitigate the embrittlement but it's easier to use helium.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Pyrotech7]

If each WD hard drive used less helium....How many balloons could be filled?
Helium filled Hard Drives

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Hentes]

The problem with hydrogen is not that it's flammable (pure hydrogen is not very explosive) but that it's very hard to contain because of its small molecular size. Balloons would have to be made of expensive materials.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[sjames]

Hydrogen would be a perfectly good filler for kids balloons. In quantities that small, it's not that big of a deal even if it is deliberately burned.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[BitZtream]

Have you seen a hydrogen filled ballon ignite? That is NOT SOMETHING YOU WANT AROUND KIDS and its pretty easy to cause ignition.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Mike Buddha]

Mythbusters is pseudoscience at best. It's entertaining, which is its designed intent, but it galls me when Internet people hold it up as a paragon of scientific thought.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, 90+% of all popular science and science news material is mainly entertainment based. Topics are emphasized based on what people are interested in, not necessarily what is most important. Once you've seen what the interviews and filming of labs looks like from the other side, and see what makes it to the final cut, it can be quite illuminating. And while there are a bunch of problems with such presentations in terms of accuracy, being entertaining is not inherently in conflict with being educational (for example, try going to the open house of a university science department some time and see their demonstrations). Frequently the hard part is just reaching people and getting their attention. If they were interested enough in the science without the education factor, there are plenty of other sources of deeper information around for them too.

As a research physicist myself, what I find important about the Mythbusters in particular is not the results, but that they show a process. That can be really difficult to do in a half hour or hour time frame, in a manner that people will pay attention to. Of course most actual science work is a lot more careful and detailed, but also a lot more tedious (some of it bores me despite it being my passion). After all, a large number of people have sat through classes that covered such material, but it ends up going in one ear and out the other for many people, or worse, teaches them that they hate science as a subject.

(By the way, this topic has come up around the "water cooler" at several places I've worked at, and it seems like the vast majority of other physicists I've interacted with have a similar view of Mythbusters. Maybe they could use a little more consulting from experienced researchers, although we didn't know what material and budget they had to work with... possibly running out of time to redo things.)

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jschen]

How long do you need for a party balloon to stay filled? A normal party balloon will hold hydrogen just fine if the relevant timeframe is on the order of a few days. How do I know? I run an organic chemistry laboratory. My students use normal party balloons (much cheaper than balloons sold by lab supply companies, but equally effective) to set up reactions in a hydrogen atmosphere. Place the reaction flask under vacuum. Backfill the flask by connecting a balloon that was filled from a hydrogen tank. Voila... a reaction under an atmosphere of hydrogen. If everything is well sealed, then the party balloon will not leak an appreciable amount of hydrogen in a day. Mind you, these are party balloons being exposed to harsh organic solvents. In a typical home environment, they should hold up even better.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[gl4ss]

That's not science, and look how many morons modded you up thinking that changing the myth to bust makes the original myth busted. mythbusters is entertainment, not science. And no, I don't have a shred of respect for the show when we're talking about science. In fact the show does nothing but make a bunch of ignorant fools think they're smart.

it's usually not changing the myth. it's usually first dismissing the myth and then going "we need to blow some shit up".

it's part of what makes it fun. some parts are done better than some though.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Anonymous Coward]

When cooling superconductors, there is more than just passing the critical temperature. In addition to there being a critical temperature above which superconductivity stops, there is a critical magnetic field that will stop superconductivity if exceeded. Lowering the temperature even further beyond the critical temperature will raise the critical magnetic field, allowing more current to flow through the wires and stronger magnets to be made with less material. There are plenty of devices where you will see a superconductor that would be superconducting with LN2 still being used with liquid helium for this reason.

Plus, a little buffer room might be a good idea, since if there is a fault that causes the temperature to rise, you don't want to cross the critical temperature by accident. Suddenly all that current would be going through a resistance and further heat up the liquid, causing fast boiling and likely venting of it somewhere.

That said, we could probably design MRIs to work with liquid hydrogen, just expect it to be a lot more expensive due to being less efficient, more material constraints, and extra safety needed.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Sqr(twg)]

That would be a good argument, except helium diffuses out of the baloon much quicker than hydrogen does (because of its even smaller molecular size.)

I even mentioned this in my original post.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[LongearedBat]

Another danger is when stupid people inhale baloon gas and asphyxiate. With helium, this problem is commonly solved by adding some oxygen to the mix. Hydrogen cannot be safely mixed with oxygen, so you'd either have to tell the stupid people not to do that, or accept a slight decline in the stupid population as they figure it out for themselves.

Especially if they smoke...

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[wolvesofthenight]

Yep, those are interesting. Thanks!

Engineering Disasters was published in 2005; it does not cover these specific rebuttals. When discussing an older rebuttal he points out that 11 U.S. helium filled blimps were lost by fire (more details needed on this point).

After a brief review of your links, my comments are:

1) To conclude the validity of the different sources would take a large amount of time. By the time I could possibly finish, this /. conversation will be long forgotten.

2) Personally, I think any analysis of the burn rate must consider that everything was burning; on this point I disagree with Bain. A hydrogen fire would light the skin, and a skin fire would, once large enough, ignite the hydrogen. I think it would be good to know more about the design to determine how easily a skin fire could ignite the hydrogen.

3) The linked papers basically say that there could not have been a spark due to the panels being interconnected. But if there were a spark, here is its power. Something had to set that thing on fire. An electrostatic spark is the prime suspect, but it could well have been something else.

4) I think the analysis of the potential power available for electric sparks to initiate the fire fails to take into account the complexity of the situation. It assumes that if there were a spark it would be initiated by the charge on one panel. This is used for energy calculations which conclude there was not enough energy to light the fabric. No other options are pursued. But, as noted, the panels were interconnected. If a spark occurred it would have been between a group of panels of which were somehow isolated. And it would take consideration of an arc caused by the ropes to the ground. Deterring details would require knowledge of the exact design of the ship and possible defects. How were the panels connected to the airframe? How were they maintained? How well did the connections between them hold up? Could something have caused the electrical isolation of a large section of the ship? Proper connection and grounding of systems to avoid sparks is very complicated, and the paper does not consider the details of the Hindenburg design.

5) Engineering Disasters also notes that the German investigation of the disaster concluded that the cover was electrically isolated from the structure (and that the Germans concluded it was a hydrogen leak).

6) The linked papers also comment that contamination from sea-salt particles would affect the conductivity. I will note that these would be mostly on the bottom of the ship - giving an even harder to predict electrical behavior to the skin.


Anyway, this is just a quick review. Further reading might provide more answers (and more questions).

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[TiggertheMad]

Mythbusters is pseudoscience at best. It's entertaining, which is its designed intent, but it galls me when Internet people hold it up as a paragon of scientific thought.

Its good for non-scientists to watch, because it promotes logical thought and encourages testing of ideas.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[SuricouRaven]

The important question is not 'is it dangerous?'

The question that sellers of balloon ask is 'could I get sued over this?'

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[SuricouRaven]

The worst part is that it's probably the most scientific show on American television.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[sjames]

The birthday candles are probably more dangerous than a hydrogen balloon. The balloon will give a flash and a pop but the candles can actually set a fire. As for could they get sued, anyone can be sued by anyone for anything in the U.S. winning is another matter and depends on the roll of the dice.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Brewmeister_Z]

F@$king mod system, slip of this mouse and modded wrong but no option to change the mod other than piss it away by commenting. This site is coded stupid. I would love to use the slider on my phone's browser too...

Any way, I would love to do the flaming hydrogen balloon release for my boy's birthday. Let's hope for a good wet April next year just in case...

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Brewmeister_Z]

Need a "Sad But True" mod.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[girlintraining]

The incident is burned into the public psyche not because it was particularly horrorific, or because it was some example of bad design held up for criticism -- its notable for one reason only. It was the first case of broad media overhype. It was the great-grand-daddy of all the shit we see on the "news" today.

Actually, it was publicized for the same reason the Titanic sinking was -- a bunch of rich people died. There had been other airship accidents, and other naval accidents, but it wasn't newsworthy because nobody "important" had died... until then (respectively).

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[angel'o'sphere]

Regardless of your follow up posts, it is well known that the Hindenburg and similar Airships had an easy inflameable hull. It does not really matter if it is 'termite' like or a kid of 'rocketfuel'.
Point is: from Hydrogen alone you would not get sucha fire.
So while you might bring up some facts, your general argument: it was the hydrogen, is simply wrong.
Hydrogen can not cause a burning hell, dropping down to the ground and causing a kind of inferno there.
It is much much to light for that, it would just go up to the sky and burn into the height and not into the wide.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, this is nonsense. Both natural gas and propane are heavyer than air.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Immerman]

Heck yeah, floaty balloon and firecracker in one, kids would love it! Finally something to look forward to when your balloon starts getting "tired".

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[TuringCheck]

The problem with hydrogen is not that it's flammable (pure hydrogen is not very explosive) but that it's very hard to contain because of its small molecular size. Balloons would have to be made of expensive materials.

Actually the He atom is much smaller than the H2 molecule and difuses much easier. Helium difuses quickly through pretty much anything.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Donwulff]

Looking below this seems to have been hashed to death and back already of course, including Mythbusters this and that etc...
But just for the "Hydrogen burns, lulz" people who seem to have taken over Slashdot, hydrogen is indeed flammable, but it does not burn without oxygen and a source of ignition present. Thus hydrogen inside a balloon is entirely safe, unless you put oxygen and candle inside that balloon as well. Now when that balloon develops a leak it's a whole different story.
Also hydrogen flames burn in the ultraviolet spectrum and are hardly visible to the human eye. Thus it's clear something else was burning alongside the hydrogen when Hindenburg burned. Unknown to most people the American helium-filled airships suffered very similar burning accidents. Safety regulations were far laxer then than they are today, the main problems with Hindenburg were its design allowed large static charge potential differences to develop between its parts and it was not covered in flame-retardant fabric. In addition being part of the Nazi propaganda machine it was being pushed far beyond the stresses and uses its original developers intended, and likely to be leaking all over the place. "Hindenburg burns and crashes, people die, American trade embargo on helium to blame" was merely the politically correct (at least to the Nazi-party, and they worked hard to hide any evidence to the contrary) summary.
But where does this leave us with hydrogen balloons? Not sure, any current party balloon designs I can think of are highly flammable, and preventing a leak is not really an option. Luckily, there's one other option for flying your party balloons: Sky lanterns! There's no way anything could go wrong with those... (Apologies for being too lazy to make every word of last sentence a link to similar article... would be ugly, too:)

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Alomex]

but it galls me when Internet people hold it up as a paragon of scientific thought.

[citation needed]

People say is a paragon of a science-oriented entertaining show/

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Daetrin]

The reason they get respect is because they do science. They may not be the most accurate and exacting scientists,and they often make mistakes. But they still do science. The have a question, they make a hypothesis, they test the hypothesis, they analyze what happened and make conclusions, and they put the results up for peer review. And more than once they've gone back and revisited something because the result of that peer review was "you did it wrong."

So they do science, and they make it fun, and for a lot of the things they test they don't need the kind of accuracy that "real" scientist do for "real" science. In fact i'd argue that they're at least as accurate as an average kid's science project for school, and are you going to argue that we shouldn't reach kids science in school because clearly they're not able to maintain appropriate levels of accuracy?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[narcc]

The reason they get respect is because they do science.

That is precisely what they do not do.

You know what bugs me? The science cheerleaders who don't know the first thing about science -- though they think they do -- repeating total nonsense like it's gospel.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[narcc]

First, he's quoting from a book. You may want to try reading one someday.

Second, Natural Gas is lighter than air.

Get a clue.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[lurker1997]

Look up the amount of energy stored in a charged MRI magnet. The usual figure you hear is a the same kinetic energy as a 747 coming in to land. I think this is high, but there are 100's of amps of current flowing through an inductor made of many kilometers of wire. It's a lot of energy.

Now look up the term 'quench' in relation to supercon magnets. If a small part of the wire inside the coil stops superconducting, it suddenly is subject to resistive heating and sets off a chain reaction which rapidly brings the whole coil out of supercon mode, releases all the energy stored, and boils off the cryogens.

This is not a rare event and not something you would not want to happen with a magnet filled with an explosive element.

Also, just because something superconducts, it does not mean it can be economically drawn into a long thin wire for use in a MRI magnet. I think commonly use a Niobium superconductor for MRIs and I bet there is a reason.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[sjames]

The statement is correct, but the Mythbusters pop pseudo-science is, as usual, a very poor source.

Some people keep saying that, but never seem to state why. They hypothesize, test, and make a conclusion based on the results. Where flaws in methodology are pointed out, they revisit and correct the flaws. They are not always exhaustive, but if you think all 'serious' papers are, you've never refereed papers.

The most valid criticism is that their sample sizes tend to be small. If that concerns you, go apply for a grant and repeat with a larger sample. Can't get a grant for a test with a larger sample size? Neither could they.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[angel'o'sphere]

Everyone can quote from a book, want some bible citations?

Second, Natural Gas is lighter than air.
True enough, I mixed its weight up with butan, however a mixture of methan + propan is unlikely to lift a air ship.

Finally, where does your hatred come from, got kicked in the head by a german when you where a child?

Get a clue, grow up, get over it, get normal.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Ultracrepidarian]

One of the long-term problems with free market pricing is that future generations don't get to bid.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[flaming error]

Sorry, but the alias is another story.

They didn't really "flame", they just made a big white flash and a loud sound somewhere between a pop and a boom. But with lots of them,going off, it was pretty lively.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Pseudonym]

As TFA says, "balloon gas" is a mix of recycled helium and air. Presumably, you wouldn't use pure hydrogen gas in a party balloon either. If you mixed it with a non-oxidising gas, such as a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, wouldn't that mitigate the problem considerably? And of course you could use more non-oxidising gas and retain the same buoyancy as current balloon gas.

Incidentally, I've been to a lot of children's birthday parties in my time, and I'm yet to see a balloon popped by a candle. Not saying it couldn't happen, but AFAIK it has pretty much never happened.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[fustakrakich]

It was the first case of broad media overhype. It was the great-grand-daddy of all the shit we see on the "news" today.

This was one of many that preceded before it. The first really famous case of yellow press that rules today would be "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!" started by Hearst and Pulitzer.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[interkin3tic]

Remove the ad-homenim whining and you're left with "They're moving the target, so it's not science." To that I say: you misunderstand and should feel like an ignorant fool about it.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Anonymous Coward]

What about using it to make your voice squeaky?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[nedlohs]

This is not a rare event and not something you would not want to happen with a magnet filled with an explosive element.

That sounds like exactly sort of thing I'd want to happen. Assuming I'm at a reasonable distance and have a good view of course.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[nedlohs]

Next you'll claim asleep doesn't mean without sleep.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[sjames]

"Think about doing shit, then do shit, then think about the shit you did" I suppose if that's what they were doing, it might not be science, but that's not a good characterization of what they do.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[cyn1c77]

The reason they get respect is because they do science. They may not be the most accurate and exacting scientists,and they often make mistakes. But they still do science. The have a question, they make a hypothesis, they test the hypothesis, they analyze what happened and make conclusions, and they put the results up for peer review. And more than once they've gone back and revisited something because the result of that peer review was "you did it wrong."

So they do science, and they make it fun, and for a lot of the things they test they don't need the kind of accuracy that "real" scientist do for "real" science. In fact i'd argue that they're at least as accurate as an average kid's science project for school, and are you going to argue that we shouldn't reach kids science in school because clearly they're not able to maintain appropriate levels of accuracy?

Calling Mythbusters science is like calling a Red Ryder Wagon a race car. Kind of following the scientific method and selling it on TV is an insufficient condition to qualify as peer-reviewed scientific work.

And if you think that the show is science, I sincerely hope that you (1) do not have an advanced degree in science or (2) do not live and perform science in the same country as me.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[cyn1c77]

Hydrogen embrittles metals. There are some alloys that can mitigate the embrittlement but it's easier to use helium.

The great thing is that you can then use the heat from the resulting hydrogen-air explosion to heat-treat the metal and return it to serviceable condition!

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Graf Zeppelin Design and Technology

But Graf Zeppelin did incorporate one especially notable innovation, in the use of Blau gas fuel for its five engines. One of the challenges of lighter-than-air powered flight has always been the need to account for the loss of weight as fuel is burned by the ship’s engines. As gasoline or diesel fuel is consumed during flight, the ship becomes lighter, and without a means to compensate for this change, lifting gas must be vented to maintain the ship’s equilibrium. The Zeppelin Company’s innovative solution to this issue with Graf Zeppelin was the use of a gaseous fuel, similar to propane, named Blau gas after its inventor, Dr Hermann Blau. Since Blau gas is similar in weight to air, its consumption during flight did not significantly change the aerostatic balance of the ship, and so it was not necessary to valve lifting gas to compensate for Blau gas burned by the engines.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[tbird81]

I don't understand the point of the oxygen in balloons (other than it's cheaper)

Are people inhaling from balloons, exhaling into the air, inhaling from the balloon, exhaling to air for multiple minutes in a row? And would the amount of oxygen mixed in with the gas actually mitigate the damage from this?

I can potentially imaging someone breathing into and out of one balloon for a while, but then CO2 will build up causing increased respiratory drive.

Or is this mainly in case a tank's released into an enclosed small sealed space (e.g. car) or something?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[tbird81]

Who?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Sqr(twg)]

Interesting! So, I guess, while one hydrogen balloon is relatively benign, tying scores of them together is a bad idea, since this can generate enough heat to set the balloon shells on fire.

The flames seen in the video is burning rubber from the balloon shells. Hydrogen flames are blue and nearly invisible.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Xest]

Yes, in the UK shows like Horizon, the Royal Society lectures or just about anything presented by Brian Cox, or Marcus du Sautoy would clearly qualify.

Wikipedia has a decent list of their shows and similarly for Horizon.

If you're interested in things like geology, biology, anthropology, paleontology, or other natural sciences then there are even more candidates again. Things like Attenboroughs documentaries such as Life, Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and also stuff like Human Planet etc.

They're still not common enough for my liking though, personally. If I had my way we'd have at least 2 BBC HD channels dedicated to those sorts of shows and they'd consume most of the BBC's budget rather than shit like The Voice, Strictly Come Bollocks, and Eastenders because it's the one thing the BBC genuinely leads in globally and seems to do better than anyone else by quite a margin.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[DarwinSurvivor]

When a candle hits a hydrogen balloon it pops the balloon, quickly combining the hydrogen from inside the balloon with the oxygen outside the balloon.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[ChoirmasterWind]

Exactly! Use liquid hydrogen to cool the large magnets inside MRI scanners.

Liquid hydrogen boils at 20.28 K. MgB2 superconducts at 39 K. (So neon would also work, but it has problems similar to helium.)

While this is good news for the one company in the world making MgB2 MRI machines (in Italy)... [High Temperature superconductrors don't do persistent magnets, so they can't be used], there is a much more important problem. .. any physicist / materials engineer can see that that the resource depletion problem for Helium is of a different order than for fuels, mercury, zinc, nickel etc. etc. There is absolutely nothing, nothing at all in this universe, that liquifies at 5K or below.

It is truly unique, and while material substitution can be expected for some applications (cf. MRI above), there are some where it is not just technology, but p*hysics*, which is telling us that there are no substitutes. IR detectors for astronomy have to be cooled as cool as you can get: and while you could use direct conduction and a fridge, with a liquid Hydrogen shield, that makes the vibation problem harder.

Having said that, it is perhaps just a matter of price. In principle we can extract Helium from granite: it would just be very, very, very expensive. In a couple of hundred years it might be cheaper to make it from seawater Lithium using a handy fusion reactor (with MgB2 magnets, of course), or from Jupiter's atmosphere...

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Paradise Pete]

Seems a bit extreme to me. I suggest that Mythbusters lies somewhere in between that very wide range of pseudoscience and a paragon of science.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[actiondan]

How do you define the difference between 'science' and 'not science'?

What specific features must an investigation have in order to be classified as science?

Surely following the scientific method is the very definition of doing science. You can criticise the specifics of their approach but it's still science.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[actiondan]

>That is precisely what they do not do.

So what are they doing? They make a hypothesis, experimentally test it and then make conclusions. Sounds like the scientific method to me.

> You know what bugs me? The science cheerleaders who don't know the first thing about science -- though they think they do -- repeating total nonsense like it's gospel.

You know what bugs me? People who make assertions with nothing to back them up. You are asserting that they are 'precisely' not doing science and yet you don't provide any reasoning or evidence to support that assertion.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[swamp_ig]

I have actually.

I've had a hydrogen balloon explode about maybe a meter from my head. No harm done! Sure it's a loud bang, but it's not actually that dangerous.

If you mix the balloon with air (oxygen) the explosion is more dramatic, I'd probably plan on standing a couple of meters back from that one!

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[nicholasjay]

NOVA and Nature are two that I enjoy. But they're on PBS, so I guess they don't count since no one watches PBS.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[dywolf]

There are only two good things about Mythbusters.
Maybe four, now that Kari has been joined by that blonde chick.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Mike Buddha]

Attenboroughs documentaries such as Life, Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and also stuff like Human Planet etc.

They're still not common enough for my liking though, personally. If I had my way we'd have at least 2 BBC HD channels dedicated to those sorts of shows and they'd consume most of the BBC's budget rather than shit like The Voice, Strictly Come Bollocks, and Eastenders because it's the one thing the BBC genuinely leads in globally and seems to do better than anyone else by quite a margin.

BBC documentaries suck the life out of any subject. I'm a huge of fan of documentaries but I see the BBC ones and they're horrible. Not so much Attenboroughs stuff, though, but those could really use someone like Oprah Winfrey or Sigourney Weaver doing their voiceovers. That would really make them so much better...

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Mike Buddha]

People say it's a paragon of a science-oriented entertaining show/

Just like Ghost Hunters International. Not that snake oil Ghost Hunters, though.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[suutar]

Since you disagree with this usage of the word, would you care to present an alternative definition for peer review?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jonadab]

> Thus hydrogen inside a balloon is entirely safe, unless
> you put oxygen and candle inside that balloon as well.

There are other ways to make it unsafe besides that particular example. Taking the hydrogen balloons into the hospital room of somebody who's on oxygen, for example, would not be a particularly good idea, especially in dry weather (when static is more likely than average).

But yeah, in the general case, hydrogen in a tied-off balloon is no more dangerous than e.g. gasoline in a closed gas can, and we carry that stuff around all the time and use it to power our lawn mowers, no big deal. No big deal, as long as you make sure everybody knows it's significantly flammable. Gas cans are generally labeled in red and/or yellow, at least in the US, with the words "gasoline" and/or "flammable". This is a sensible precaution. Hydrogen balloons could have, I don't know, little neon orange "flammable hydrogen" collars tied onto the inflation nozzle, which as an added bonus could be designed to anchor the string. As long as people treat them with a modicum of respect (probably not a big problem for most Americans -- no more so than gas cans anyway -- since everybody's heard of the Hindenberg), the risks should remain pretty well controlled.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jonadab]

Oh, there was flame, believe me. When you react H2 and O2 with one another, there's flame.

However, if might not have been a particularly _visible_ flame (depending on what impurities there were in the hydrogen; if it was really pure, the primary color would be ultraviolet, I think), and, perhaps more relevantly, it would not have lasted very long. Individual party balloons are not large (so there's not much distance between the center and the edge), and there's plenty of oxygen in the surrounding air, so the reaction would have run its course in a relatively short period of time -- perhaps even too fast to catch the balloons themselves on fire (if they were even flammable -- traditional latex balloons would be, but foil party balloons might not).

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jonadab]

> Inflammable means flammable?

Technically it would be more accurate to say that "flammable" means "inflammable".

(Really. "Inflammable" is the older word, obtained by adding -able to a Latin verb that basically means burn. "Flammable" was coined later, derived from "inflammable" by shortening it, probably influenced also by the English word "flame". It means inflammable. Now you know.)

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jonadab]

Wait, so if you set something alight, that doesn't mean you make it heavy?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

If you mixed it with a non-oxidising gas, such as a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, wouldn't that mitigate the problem considerably?

The problem with the two gasses you mention is they are both very heavy. Of course there may be other options.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jonadab]

> (So neon would also work, but it has problems similar to helium.)

Actually, neon is sufficiently dense that it doesn't escape the atmosphere at anywhere near the rate helium dues; consequently, it can be recovered in quantity by fractional distillation of air. Even if we use up 100% of the natural gas deposits and all the helium floats away into the upper atmosphere and drifts off into space, we'll still be able to obtain neon. It's more expensive to get than helium currently is, because the current method of getting helium is significantly cheaper than fractional distillation of air.

For noble-gas applications where density doesn't really matter (e.g., in light bulbs), we can use argon, which is significantly denser than air and thus relatively easy to keep contained and to recover for re-use. Argon is effectively inert, being only just very barely more reactive than neon. It wasn't until 2000 that somebody finally figured out how to get it to form a compound with fluorine under highly exotic conditions, and the resulting compound breaks apart and gives you your plain old argon back if you let it warm up to 40 whole kelvins. Basically, argon is inert. (The fact that this compound can be formed says more about fluorine than it does about argon, IMO. I believe neon is the only element not yet known to form any compounds with fluorine, unless you count metastable elements with such short half-lives that their chemistry cannot be studied at all. Essentially, if you're trying to show that something is not entirely chemically inert, reacting it with fluorine is cheating. Yeah, it can be forced to react with fluorine. It could probably be made to react with antimatter too. So what?)

For low-density applications where chemical reactivity is unimportant, we can use hydrogen, which can be easily obtained in bulk by electrolysis of water. (I'm not sure if that's the cheapest way to get it, but it's a way that I know will work and can reliably provide preposterously large quantities of hydrogen.)

The applications we really have to worry about, in terms of running out of helium, are the ones where the non-reactivity and the low density are both important.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jonadab]

> There is some danger in the handling of cylinders.

Compressed gas cylinders are dangerous no matter what gas you put in them. Sure, some compressed gases are particularly nasty (HF springs immediately to mind), but even a compressed air cylinder is dangerous if you handle it improperly, or if the valve is in less than perfect condition, or if there's a fire, or if anything unexpected happens that suddenly changes its situation (e.g., by knocking it over on the ground). If a particular gas is only dangerous in a compressed gas cylinder, then it's not the gas that's dangerous: it's the cylinder.

Pure hydrogen, to be fair, is significantly more dangerous than air. Given a source of ignition, it reacts rather vigorously with oxygen, including the oxygen in the air, or any other high-quality oxidizer that's available. It's at least as reactive as gasoline. (If anything, being a room-temperature gas, it burns faster than gasoline, because it doesn't have to vaporize first to mix with the oxidizer.)

This doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea to use hydrogen in balloons. We use gasoline to power our cars, lawn mowers, etc. Practically every household in the developed world has some of the stuff sitting around. We keep it in specially marked containers, and we know it's flammable, and we treat it as such, but we don't refuse to use it.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[jonadab]

> How long do you need for a party balloon to stay filled?

Need, or want?

(Even if it stays aloft for three weeks, some kids are still going to cry when it comes down. Maybe someday they'll invent a hydrogen-based foam that will keep the balloon aloft for a year.)

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[slacka]

Exactly, pure hydrogen is no more dangerous to handle than a canister of compressed gas. This youtube video shows massive weather balloon purposely set on fire. The burning latex is more dangerous than the mild flame from the hydrogen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQvpK9cl0No
There are so many current scientific and medical uses for helium, it blow my mind that the government lets us waste them on party balloons. If safely is really the issue, then let's ban candles for birthday cakes. That poses a far greater risk than pure hydrogen party balloons.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[tolkienfan]

Which part of testing hypotheses and drawing conclusions isn't science?

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Hentes]

You are right, I was mistaken. In which case hooray for hydrogen balloons!

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[ap7]

When I was a kid, we could get plenty of hydrogen filled balloons. We would tie up a few of them together and then suspend a bit of burning plastic bag from the balloons at night and release them. In the darkness of the night, the sight of something burning while rising up in the air looked quite eerie. And when the heat from the burning plastic bag was enough to rupture the balloon, BOOM!

The show was spectacular. But now that I think about it, we were lucky to not have had one of those balloons blow up in our faces.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Panruru]

You know what bugs me? The smart asses who demean those less educated than themselves without contributing anything useful to the conversation.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Xest]

Which documentaries are you referring to?

I'm not so keen on their history stuff, but certainly their scientific stuff like Horizon, and Cox and Sautoy's stuff have all been brilliant.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Prune]

I don't even know why you bother. The problem with people like wolvesofthenight is that they can never admit they're wrong and will argue the most obvious lie just so that they can hold their ground and buttress their fragile ego. Just look at his comment history. This affliction, sadly, has become all too common on slashdot.

Re:How to decide the fate of helium

[Joce640k]

It's shenanigans like that that made me lose any lingering respect I had for Mythbusters.

Um, that was done in the part "recreate the myth" where they stop doing science and try to find out what conditions would be needed to recreate the myth (sometimes it gets ridiculous, yes).

H!

[opusman]

Using hydrogen for childrens' party balloons would solve the problem and make things potentially much more exciting!

Re:H!

[Longjmp]

Especially if you mix hydrogen with oxygen at a ratio of 2:1

Re:H!

[slashdyke]

I would agree with that except for the question of how much more helium would be needed as a result of the parties? Balloon pops, bursts into fire, house burns down, people sent to hospital in need of medical attention... I think we need a study to anaylize just how many additional MRIs would be needed as a result, so we can determine if we would be saving helium in the long run. Anyone have a few hundred million to invest in such a worth study?

Re:H!

[chronokitsune3233]

(Lights a match near where a balloon is being filled up.)

BOM!

Definitely exciting!

Re:H!

[JustOK]

di-hyrdrous monoxide? Do you know how many people that kills each day?

Re:H!

[Longjmp]

Sorry to burst a bubble, err, balloon here for you.
Pure hydrogen doesn't go "boom" in normal air. Sure, it will result in nice flames, but normal air doesn't supply enough oxygen for a big boom.

I've tried both, hydrogen and a mix of hydrogen and oxygen as a teen, and now guess which one resulted in a one week detention by my parents.

Re:H!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There are approximately 160 000 deaths every day, if I'm not mistaken. In all of the bodies, significant quantities of DHMO were found. Do the math.

Re:H!

[mark_reh]

You didn't read that post carefully. He didn't say BOOM. He said BOM. I have heard many hydrogen balloons exploding and they all said BOM!

Re:H!

[guises]

For a while I was thinking that could actually work - if something happened you'd get a little flare up, nothing too dangerous. But...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/04/exploding-hydrogen-balloons-at-armenian-political-rally-injure-many/

apparently it doesn't work out so well if you use a lot of them. I'm not sure there's a good solution for this, might just have to wait for advances in materials. Carbon fiber vacuum balloons could work maybe... Maybe. They'd have to be pretty big though.

Re:H!

[JustOK]

math is hard

Re:H!

[TheLink]

Apparently it was methane not hydrogen: http://www.tert.am/en/news/2012/08/01/joxovurd/

So someone will need to do a test with hydrogen this time ;).

Re:H!

[RevWaldo]

Jokes aside, might there be a mix of hydrogen, helium, other gases that would still float a balloon but still be (relatively) non-combustible?

.

Re:H!

[Zemran]

and have your seen the horrendous burns that it can cause in its gaseous state?

Re:H!

[Rei]

This guy is living in a fantasy world. Helium use as a lifting gas in *all forms* is only 7% of helium use. Of that, party balloons are just a fraction. MRIs, on the other hand, use up 28% of helium consumption. And how could they possibly use so much? Because they do essentially nothing to recover it as it boils off.

Perhaps they should clean up their glass house before they start throwing stones?

Also, it's not like helium will become unavailable as we use up current stocks. It'll just increase in price by 1-2 orders of magnitude as we have to switch to getting it from chilling it out of the atmosphere in tiny quantities, the same way we recover other nobel gasses (but requiring more concentration). Now, of course that sucks, but it means that people who run MRI machines and do other such tasks will be forced to clean up their acts concerning helium recovery instead of simply casting blame on others.

Re:H!

[Rei]

Depends on what you call a "big boom". I remember pure hydrogen balloon ignition from high school chemistry and it was no trivial burn. When the mythbusters tried it out on their Hindenburg special, they found that they couldn't use pure hydrogen on their model because it'd just rip the whole model instantly into shreds, contrary to their desire to present it as a steady burn (so they switched to just feeding-in hydrogen).

But yes, of course a ready-mixed fuel-air mixture gives a much more satisfying thud ;)

Re:H!

[evilviper]

Hydrogen is flammable, but slowing combustion is simply a matter of mixing it with some other gas that interrupts oxidation. Race car tires are filled with Nitrogen so that a blow out won't feed a fire. Carbon dioxide is also a common industrial gas which displaces oxygen.

Here's a list blatantly lifted from WP:

Reduction of heat:
    HFC-227ea (MH227, FM-200),
    Novec 1230, HFC-125 (ECARO-25),
    FS 49 C2

Reduction or isolation of oxygen:
    Argonite / IG-55 (ProInert)
    CO 2 carbon dioxide
    IG-541 Inergen,
    IG-100 (NN100)

Inhibiting the chain reaction:
    FE-13, FE-227, FE-25, MH227, FM-200, Halons, Halon 1301, Freon 13T1, NAF P-IV, NAF S-III, and Triodide (Trifluoroiodomethane).

Hydrogen is so buoyant, it should still be light enough in a mixture designed to be more difficult to combust, or burn slower and cooler.

Re:H!

[evilviper]

You won't ever be successful pulling it from the atmosphere. Helium is the lightest of noble gases, so it reaches high altitudes, and continues floating right on out into outer space.

Re:H!

[Rei]

No, helium exists even at the surface. But only at about 5 parts per million. But hey, we recover neon at 18ppm (it's rare for the same reason as helium - it escapes). Neon costs about $2k USD per kg. So to extrapolate linearly, you'd get about $7k per kg. Helium used to be cheaper, but today it's about $500/kg.

On the other hand, you'd be using much larger volume production, and there may be some tricks to recover it more cheaply than just a linear difference would suggest, so perhaps more like $4k USD per kg would be achieved. One can hope that it won't be too dear.

Re:H!

[ShanghaiBill]

Jokes aside, might there be a mix of hydrogen, helium, other gases that would still float a balloon but still be (relatively) non-combustible?

No. The only gases that will provide significant buoyancy in air are H2, He, CH4, NH3, H2O, and Ne. H2 and CH4 are flammable. NH3 is corrosive. H2O will condense. Neon is way to expensive. The only gas left is Helium.

Re:H!

[Electricity Likes Me]

The answer is don't make helium for sale to party stores.

The legitimate users of helium would have no problems going through the necessary actions to prove they have a need to buy it - after all buying an MRI is an enormous expense. But it's ridiculous that helium - an inordinately valuable resource at the moment - is just being sold off for parties because the US strategic reserve of the stuff is being dumped onto the market by Congress.

We all benefit from it being cheap, but only if it's used responsibly.

There's no pressing need for lighter-then-air gases to be a feature at parties at all.

Re:H!

[b1scuit]

Race car tires are filled with Nitrogen instead of compressed air because compressed is rife with water vapor, which expands when it heats up. This changes the pressure inside the tire, which can drastically affect handling characteristics over the course of a race, which is a Bad Thing. Using Nitrogen to fill the tires negates this, it has nothing to do with fire safety.

Re:H!

[fnj]

It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately physical reality rarely conforms to wishes. Any such mixture, sufficient to eliminate flammability, would detract so much from the lift of hydrogen as to render it useless for the purpose of lifting anything. It would never get off the ground.

Re:H!

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason it would not extrapolate linearly is these trace gases are usually separated by cryogenic means. The liquification temp of helium is ~4 K is memory serves. This is much lower than other gases and would require significant expenditure.

Re:H!

[flyingfsck]

It is just a fad really. They can just as well use dry air, but it is too cheap and doesn't sound sexy.

Re:H!

[evilviper]

It's far cheaper and easier to remove water vapor from air at the compressor, than buying nitrogen.

Re:H!

[flyingfsck]

As a teenager I made many hot air balloons, until one day when I put the mountain on fire...

Re:H!

[evilviper]

I never claimed it would ELIMINATE flammability, and either you're an idiot for coming away with that idea, or you're making up an obvious straw man.

Here's a couple quotes from my post:

"slowing combustion"

"more difficult to combust, or burn slower and cooler"

It was pretty damn clear that the idea is to make hydrogen-filled balloons just burn when lighted, and not turn into a massive raging fireball of your nightmares.

And it works well enough for kerosene in jet engines.

Re:H!

[DerekLyons]

Race car tires are filled with Nitrogen instead of compressed air because compressed is rife with water vapor, which expands when it heats up.

If your compressed air is full of water vapor - then you just add air dryers to your cycle. The USN Submarine Service has been doing this for decades to prevent a repeat of the USS Thresher accident.

They use dry nitrogen because it's cheap and routinely available since it's used for a large variety of industrial processes.

Re:H!

[CTU]

A few, but lack of it has also been known to be deadly. it is to addicting and there is no hope to go without once hooked.

Re:H!

[Sqr(twg)]

Helium and neon are 5 and 18 ppm by volume, but neon is 5 times heavier. If you extrapolate linearly, the price per kg would be $35k per kg.

But you can't extrapolate linearly (as has already been pointed out) because the boiling points are different. A better approximation would be that the cost of cooling is inversely proportional to the boiling point. This is approximately a factor of 6, so the price would be over $200k per kg.

Re:H!

[Rei]

You don't have to liquidy helium to isolate it; you have to liquify everything else. That said, helium is often desired in liquid form, since its largest use is cryogenics.

Re:H!

[jfengel]

Sounds like somebody set him up.

Re:H!

[SuricouRaven]

I've done both too. Hydrogen doesn't 'boom' exactly. It's more of a pop-FWOOSH! The initial bursting of the balloon disperses it a little, so what you get is really a very poorly-done fuel-air explosion. Hydrox, on the other hand... that stuff is fun.

Re:H!

[sjames]

The US helium reserves have it stored in the form of a gas. It has to be liquified anyway and is already part of the cost when it's ordered in liquid form.

Re:H!

[khallow]

Concentration is a better indication of difficulty than boiling point. After all, almost nothing has a boiling point anywhere near helium except neon and hydrogen. So one doesn't have to cool to the boiling point of helium to eliminate almost everything else.

Re:H!

[khallow]

The answer is don't make helium for sale to party stores.

An alternate solution is simply to let the US surplus run out. Party stores will stop using helium when the price goes up enough.

But it's ridiculous that helium - an inordinately valuable resource at the moment - is just being sold off for parties because the US strategic reserve of the stuff is being dumped onto the market by Congress.

Here's the real problem.

We all benefit from it being cheap, but only if it's used responsibly.

No, we don't. So-called "irresponsible uses" happen precisely because it is cheap. Don't make it cheap and you won't be sending price signals that it is ok to use it frivolously, whatever that may be.

There's no pressing need for lighter-then-air gases to be a feature at parties at all.

Happy children have a value as well.

Re:H!

[tibit]

Here's a hint as to how the MRI magnets are being cooled: there's a liquid helium bath, some insulation, and as the heat leaks into the system, the helium boils off to take the heat away. It's simply vented into the atmosphere. Given how much more helium MRI magnets use worldwide compared to all its uses as a lifting gas, combined, it's a 4:1 ratio. Per every vented helium baloon or blimp, there's 4 times as much helium vented from superconducting magnets. The only irresponsible users are those with superconductive magnets. Sorry to burst your bubbe.

Re:H!

[Zeroko]

Why would the byte order mark be at the end of the balloon instead of at the beginning?

Re:H!

[fnj]

Now now, don't get all defensive. The idea doesn't work. Period. Do you really think no one would have done it if it would work?

Your statement about kerosene in jet engines is not making any sense at all? Perhaps you would care to make it a coherent thought?

Re:H!

[b1scuit]

Probably, but when Joe McFastypants, multimillion dollar racing team crew captain, who's buying 12-32 $400 dollar tires every race weekend, says he wants nitrogen, you don't tell him it's cheaper to use scrubbed air that has MOST of the water vapor content removed: You put nitrogen in the tires. The difference in price is nonexistent when you look at a racing team's budget. And even if it was, the difference in price would have to be ABSURD for them to use an option that wasn't the absolute best.

Re:H!

[evilviper]

Helium has been cheap, and it's mostly used for it's attributes as inert, not buoyant. Balloons have been an after thought.

And your circular argument is logical fallacy, NOT proof. If you can't be bothered to provide sources or numbers to support your claim, you should just be quiet while the adults are talking.

Re:H!

[evilviper]

Then why not helium in those tires? A little less weight would be a huge advantage.

Re:H!

[tbird81]

Why do you want government intervention in this pretty much market driven problem?

Helium gets scarce, it gets expensive, people use helium less.

Re:H!

[troon]

You mean a water balloon?

Re:H!

[JustOK]

I said hyrdrous not hydrous, you dumb toenail clipping

Re:H!

[tftp]

It would leak out during the race. Probably that would be an undesirable outcome.

Re:H!

[ChoirmasterWind]

This guy is living in a fantasy world. Helium use as a lifting gas in *all forms* is only 7% of helium use. Of that, party balloons are just a fraction. MRIs, on the other hand, use up 28% of helium consumption. And how could they possibly use so much? Because they do essentially nothing to recover it as it boils off.

Perhaps they should clean up their glass house before they start throwing stones?

Also, it's not like helium will become unavailable as we use up current stocks. It'll just increase in price by 1-2 orders of magnitude as we have to switch to getting it from chilling it out of the atmosphere in tiny quantities, the same way we recover other nobel gasses (but requiring more concentration). Now, of course that sucks, but it means that people who run MRI machines and do other such tasks will be forced to clean up their acts concerning helium recovery instead of simply casting blame on others.

In Japan, Helium has been more expensive for a while. So the major MRI manufacturers already produce recondensing He MRI machines for that market. There is still some leakage of course.

Re:H!

[Inda]

In the UK we can fill our tyres with Nitrogen for a small charge (five quid for the whole car if I remember correctly).

* Air, as you said, contains water vapour. This leads to corrosion of the wheels.

* The molecules of Nitrogen are larger, leading to less pressure loss.

The AA support this new way of filling tyres. http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/safety/filling-tyres-with-nitrogen.html

Re:H!

[Urza9814]

Jokes aside, might there be a mix of hydrogen, helium, other gases that would still float a balloon but still be (relatively) non-combustible?

No. The only gases that will provide significant buoyancy in air are H2, He, CH4, NH3, H2O, and Ne. H2 and CH4 are flammable. NH3 is corrosive. H2O will condense. Neon is way to expensive. The only gas left is Helium.

You're answering a different question. He asked if there was some other possible _mix_ of gasses, and you answered if there was any other possible _pure_ gas.

As mentioned in TFS, balloons currently aren't filled with just helium. It's a mix of helium, nitrogen, oxygen, CO2...whatever gasses happen to be in the air. So there's a lot of things in there. The question the GP was asking was if you could find a ratio of, say, hydrogen and nitrogen (or hydrogen, nitrogen, and helium, or some other mix) that would not be particularly flammable (no oxygen for the hydrogen) but still buoyant.

Given that a pure hydrogen balloon won't be extremely flammable to begin with without added oxygen, at the very least you should be able to cut the existing mix with additional hydrogen without too many problems. Of course, you'd want to first remove the oxygen that is currently in the mix (which, as mentioned in other comments, may be problematic for people who like to inhale the stuff.)

Re:H!

[WillgasM]

I'd hate to be the first guy to take a hit off a hydrogen balloon.

Re:H!

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

NO! A dihydrogen monoxide balloon. If you had ever read the MSDS for dihydrogen monoxide you would know just how dangerous that stuff can be.

Ban dihydrogen monoxide!

"Simple" Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurry up and get those fusion plants up and running!

Re:"Simple" Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

"Interesting"? "Insightful"?
I'm touched, but I was joking. We'd never get a significant amount of helium before we boiled all our oceans in waste heat.

Re:"Simple" Solution

[f3rret]

Hurry up and get those fusion plants up and running!

Problem with that is that those fancy aneutronic fusion reactors they really want to build are going to need large quantities of helium-3 themselves.

Harvest the moon, it's the only way to go.

Re:"Simple" Solution

[newcastlejon]

Problem with that is that those fancy aneutronic fusion reactors they really want to build are going to need large quantities of helium-3 themselves.

Or cheap and plentiful boron.

Re:"Simple" Solution

[drwho]

Aneutronic fusion requires much higher temperatures that D-T or D-D (neutronic) fusion. There's also the possibility that more energy will be lost through brehmstrahlung radiation than generated in the fusion. This is worthy of research, but for practical, medium-term purposes, LFTR (fission) is the way to go. For short-term purposes, fracking is the way to go. For the very short-term purposes, I will just plug in to the 120VAC mains before the batteries on my laptop die.

Re:"Simple" Solution

[f3rret]

There's always at least one delusional space fruitcake in any thread that mentions space, helium or energy. The answer is NO. NEVER.

Aw your trolling makes me so mad and so sad, I shall go cry myself to sleep now.

Perhaps a little more constructive, well whether or not we end up going there - moon's filthy with helium, and if we're going to need a lot of it we're gonna have to get it from there.

Re:"Simple" Solution

[newcastlejon]

What sort of magic do you think it will take to get just one helium atom back from the Moon?

Sufficiently advanced technology.

Re:"Simple" Solution

[tuxicle]

Nobody doesn't like molten boron!

'balloon gas'

[queazocotal]

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.

Re:'balloon gas'

[Ogive17]

So why don't they do this instead of selling it to the balloon industry?

Re:'balloon gas'

[__aaltlg1547]

The balloon industry pays more?

Re:'balloon gas'

[Rostin]

The summary contains a hint. The US government keeps the price of helium artificially low. The article that the link goes to is an interview, in which it is stated,

The rich wells are in the USA, they contain up to 2 % helium within the natural gas. But the United States decided to sell their strategic helium reserve five years ago, driving prices down.

It's entirely possible that the price of purified He is currently so low that re-purifying it isn't cost effective.

Re:'balloon gas'

[Electricity Likes Me]

The price has been artificially deflated, since the US stockpiled helium in the National Helium Reserve. The whole thing has been declared too expensive and Congress ordered it sold off in 2007 at any price so of course the price of helium has plummeted and usage shot up like it'll last forever. Of course it won't, and one day we'll be back to collecting it from gas fields and it'll be worth 50x to 100x what it currently is.

Re:'balloon gas'

[Patch86]

The problem with helium is that it's cheap- undervalued, compared to what it should be worth, in the extreme.

So the cost of refining impure helium for scanners is greater than buying freshly mined stuff (or stuff being sold off from stockpiles). This is also the reason we're selling one of the rarest and most difficult to harvest elements on Earth on the higstreet for using at children's parties. And the reason, too, that medical scanners boil off helium rather than capturing and recycling it.

If helium were worth its value (lets say several thousand dollars per kilo), a lot of that would be fixed.

Re:'balloon gas'

[fnj]

It's not only possible; it's a simple fact. Helium is so cheap in the USA that nobody bothers to recycle it. In Europe and elsewhere, helium is more expensive, and recycling is SOP.

Re:'balloon gas'

[cheesybagel]

Helium is also used to start up rocket engines in most space launch vehicles. In those applications it is simply vented away. Nitrogen can also be used for this purpose but most rockets use helium because it has less density.

Re:'balloon gas'

[green1]

Which tells me that it all WILL be fixed... but not until the current stockpiles are depleted and the price returns to it's "natural" level. Once again, free market works, but the government stepped in and screwed it all up for all of civilization.

Re:'balloon gas'

[gl4ss]

..doesn't that there's 2% within natural gas mean that they have to either stockpile it OR sell it?

that doesn't seem like artificially keeping the pricing low really. it's just that way since it's supposed to end some day - but so is oil, coal and gas too - pricing them today on estimates for 2090 availability/pricing if you stockpiled it doesn't make that much sense really.

Re:'balloon gas'

[Donwulff]

Or vent it out because the stockpiles are being sold off at price below the cost of collecting and stockpiling it? Which is what they're doing now. Of course it would change once the current stockpiles are sold and price starts going up, right up until those helium-rich oil-wells dry up. There used to be a saying about keeping all your eggs in one basket, but I'm sure that's not appropriate here.

Re:'balloon gas'

[sjames]

Actually, no. The free market will squander the resource today and so make it unobtanium tomorrow, A sane approach would be to conserve when we know a shortage will come.

Re:'balloon gas'

[baegucb]

Actually, I think they've bee selling off the helium since 1996. http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medialib/blm/nm/programs/0/helium_docs.Par.80129.File.dat/pl104273.pdf

Re:'balloon gas'

[tbird81]

Yes, government intervention has certainly saved the day when it comes to He.

Re:'balloon gas'

[sjames]

It seems that the problem is that the government decided to stop intervening. If it halts the sell-off now, all is well.

Re:'balloon gas'

[jonadab]

> The US government keeps the price of helium artificially low.

You make it sound like making helium prices low was the express purpose of selling off the reserve. That was merely a side effect. Mostly, they didn't want to maintain the reserve any more, since it had long since become obvious that it was not going to be needed for military dirigibles after all, and its use as a coolant had also waned in importance, and it was costing a lot of money to maintain, and it just plain wasn't necessary. (In fact, knowing what we know now, it wasn't necessary to ever create the reserve in the first place. Also, the Vietnam war was essentially pointless. Isn't hindsight cool?) Frankly, the government would've been happier if there were more demand for the helium, so as to keep the price high, so they could recover more of their investment. They're not getting out what they put into it, which has to rankle. But what can you do? If there's not enough demand to support a higher price, how can you sell your stock for a higher price?

The artificially low price is also temporary, of course. It'll go back to where it was as soon as the reserve is sold off.

Re:'balloon gas'

[green1]

Or if it had never intervened in the first place the problem wouldn't have occured either.
They screwed up by getting involved, and screwed up again when they dumped all their reserves at once. either way, had they never been involved we wouldn't be in the situation we're in now.

Re:'balloon gas'

[green1]

Hardly, a company exists to make money, so they would never dump it like this, instead they would sell it off slowly at going rates instead of pushing the rates lower by dumping it. they'd get out of their stash, and make a profit doing it. (for example look at the OPEC nations who control the release of oil production to keep the price high instead of opening up production and driving the price down) Not to mention the fact that any 1 company is entirely unlikely to have managed to get it's hands on quite this same quantity in the first place.
The government on the other hand dumped all their holdings without trying to make a profit, they could have prevented the problem by selling their reserves slowly so as not to cause a major change in the price, it would have made them more money, and averted a global catastrophe. but governments don't work like that, so they dumped it and caused the price to plummet.

Re:'balloon gas'

[sjames]

A strategic reserve was justified at the time and the decision had nothing to do with manipulating the market.. Effectively they bought up a large mult-year supply and are selling it off now that it is no longer a significant military asset. Market manipulation is a side effect.

Re:'balloon gas'

[green1]

So not only did they buy yp and stockpile something it turned out they never needed, they also failed to understand the most basic of economic prinicples when selling it off. Sorry, the more you defend them, the worse they look.

Re:'balloon gas'

[sjames]

I'm certainly not defending the sell-off, I'm decrying it. As for the buy-up, hindsight is 20/20.

Where does it come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Where does it come from?

[Rosyna]

If there isn't a renewing source of helium, why hasn't all of it escaped into space yet?

It's also a byproduct of nuclear reactions/decay.

Re:Where does it come from?

[seven of five]

The Earth is constantly producing more through radioactive decay deep underground. Alpha particles steal electrons from neighboring atoms and become He. Some of it becomes trapped in oil and natural gas reservoirs making it easy to tap off in quantity. Anybody here know at what rate this happens, like, in liters per year?

Re:Where does it come from?

[pz]

The renewal is from radioactive decay in rocks, and the helium nuclei get caught in the small crystal grains in every rock. Extraction requires heating the crushed rock above 90C at which point the helium gets thermally liberated (there's an entire field of geology called thermochronology based on this fact; a good friend of mine has published a handful of Nature papers on the subject). Renewal is extremly slow, so that once we have mined the radiogenic helium, the replacement rate is essentially zero. It can be man-made in nuclear reactors (fusion and fission), but there are practicality issues with both approaches.

Re:Where does it come from?

[turkeyfeathers]

If comes from upsidasium mines in Frostbite Falls.

Re:Where does it come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why we need to get on fusion. The Helium crisis will be averted and the timescale of 30-50 years is well within when fusion will be available. I read that someplace in the 70's.

Re:Where does it come from?

[fnj]

The entire atmosphere contains vast amounts of radiogenically originated helium. It is a very small proportion of the atmosphere; about 5 ppm by volume, or 0.7 ppm by mass; but that still represents a truly enormous number of cubic meters. Earth's atmosphere has a total mass of 5×10^18 kg, and 0.7 millionths of that figure gives us 3.5x10^11 kg, or 2 trillion cubic meters, of helium.

Annual consumption of helium is around 200 million cubic meters (enough to fill 1000 Hindenburgs). The atmosphere contains an amount of helium equal to 10,000 years production at current rates. Even using 10% of that potential would give us a supply of helium to last at least as long as the supply of other important consumable natural resources.

Re:Where does it come from?

[ctime]

Jigga what? Jigga who?

Re:Where does it come from?

[meustrus]

I'd love to hear your plan to extract that helium, but only after you explain to me how to get a scrambled egg back in the shell.

Re:Where does it come from?

[fnj]

Oh, well as others have noted, it could be done in pretty much exactly the same way as we GET NEON. We extract neon from the atmosphere at 18 ppm. We could extract helium the same way at 5 ppm. Yeah, it would cost more than exploiting current sources, but don't act like it's some kind of mystery. It's basically just cooling and fractional distillation.

Re:Where does it come from?

[X0563511]

We may yet go that way, to obtain it. We can do fusion now, it's just not suitable for power generation.

Re:Where does it come from?

[nahdude812]

[Neon] is commercially extracted by the fractional distillation of liquid air. It is considerably more expensive than helium, since air is its only source.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon

And that's at more than 3.5x the concentration too.

Nevermind that the boiling point of Ne is 27K, while the boiling point of He is 4.2K (roughly 1/7 the absolute temperature). That makes fractional distillation dramatically more efficient for Neon than Helium even if they were at similar concentrations. Fractional distillation is also the process used to separate radiogenic He from natural gas reserves, but with much higher concentrations, yield per energy investment is much higher. Fractional distillation of He from atmosphere is expensive.

Re:Where does it come from?

[jonadab]

> If there isn't a renewing source of helium, why hasn't all of it escaped into space yet?

There is a renewable source of helium, just as there are renewable sources of petroleum and coal and natural gas and whatever else.

However, it renews more slowly than we are currently using it, by a significant margin.

Re:Where does it come from?

[jonadab]

> Anybody here know at what rate [helium formation due
> to radioactive decay] happens, like, in liters per year?

I don't think that's currently known. We haven't even really figured out the rate of oil or coal formation yet, let alone natural gas or helium.

I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit faster than the millions of years originally speculated, and I'm also pretty sure it's quite a bit slower than the rate at which we're currently using the stuff up, but there's a very large range of possible formation rates in between.

At a rough guess, I'd speculate that we've perhaps used a thousand years' worth of most of these things in the last century. But that's a VERY rough guess. It could easily be off by an order of magnitude or more.

The other thing is, some deposits are quite a bit easier than others to find, extract, and exploit.

So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[roman_mir]

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.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[JustOK]

... but it's not up to anybody to dictate to all people how they should live and die.

[citation needed]
Actually, all kinds of people have that power.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Anonymous Coward]

because at this point the price for He is low and the market sets the price.

Did you even read the summary? The exact complaint here is that the market does NOT set the price of helium. The government is meddling with the market to make it artificially low. Similar to what they do with various other subsidies.

If the market alone set the price, it would be much higher because it would reflect the actual scarcity of helium.

I know reading the article is too much to ask, but for fuck's sake, the summary is RIGHT THERE on the page.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting tired of people saying "the market will fix it". The market fixes nothing. It's a broken ecosystem. It works by positive feedbacks and constantly overshoots, which means periods of apparent prosperity followed by misery. The market needs regulation because it lacks other forms of negative feedback loops which are essential to make it a healthy system. The end result of letting the market decide can only be, shortages, very dire shortages, of any substance whose availability we mean to regulate through it. I say, if something is essential, DON'T leave it to the market.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again we see it demonstrated that the most apt definition of a "scientist" is "political activist that also wants to take credit for advances actually developed by engineers, entrepreneurs and lay inventors".

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[roman_mir]

It is nonsense that prices are kept artificially low by government, they were kept artificially high by US gov't until 1996, when US gov't decided to stop gov't intervention in He production and storage. Just like most people, who don't understand economics, you and the 'academic' in question are talking about natural gas mining AS IF it is subsidised by gov't, it's not.

In FACT the prices for natural gas fell sharply in USA over the decade. Here is an interactive graph, set the scale to 10 years. It's a hard to store and transport commodity, many companies went out of business. There is NO shortage of Helium, that's what the market says. The market in USA also says that there is (right now) no shortage of natural gas.

Here, I'll make it easier for you (I don't know if you can understand the easier version either, but hey, I'll try).

Helium is almost fully extracted from natural gas, which is mined for its other uses (like fuel production), and so if He is not collected from natural gas production, there won't be almost ANY supply of He available at any price.

So by creating an artificial price floor for He all you are going to accomplish is this: the consumption will be much lower and production will mostly cease to exist, which means Helium is going to be RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE and that's it, it's gone. The entire process of He extraction may be scrapped and there will be no way of getting any of it. So your MRI costs will go up, enjoy.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Anonymous Coward]

So these 'academics' then should buy all the helium and preserve it if they are worried,

Academics won't have a problem sourcing enough helium. It's medicine which needs the amounts in its MRI scanners. This is an example of "altriusm", something stupid libertarians don't understand.

because at this point the price for He is low and the market sets the price.

There is nothing like a free market in helium. Knowing this would have required a quick amount of research, something stupid libertarians don't do.

This Richardson person wants the market to artificially increase the price of He by a factor of 20.

No, he wants regulation to protect the supply of helium. The market doesn't "artificially" do anything - it's a contradiction in terms, something stupid libertarians wouldn't understand.

Who is this dude that he thinks he can dictate to the world how it must use its resources?

He has no authority on his own, but has as much right as anyone to petition the government, something a stupid libertarians would never do - unless it might make them more wealthy.

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,

You, Sir, are definitely an Internet kook.

but it's not up to anybody to dictate to all people how they should live and die.

Thank goodness! There was me thinking that you were dictating to the world.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[BasilBrush]

Let me put it this way, if the market decided to blow up the planet, nobody could prevent it, it would just happen.

Strangest argument for market forces I've ever heard.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

(/. comment limitation strikes again, thus my second account)
--

They can try and dictate it, but the market always wins at the end, it's a law of nature, like gravity. You can fight it for a while, but you can't stop it.

Any price manipulations will be met by higher prices but also by black markets, where the price will be set by the market given the conditions it has to operate within.

In case of He production, it just may cease to exist altogether, after all, it's mostly extracted during natural gas mining process, so if the prices are set at a level where nobody buys the gas, then why should anybody produce it? It's ridiculous to believe that a company must collect a worthless resources like that (worthless, because it's unsellable and thus unusable). What, a company would build bigger and bigger, more and more expensive facilities to store Helium for the future use? 50 years into the future? It's not a metal, it's a very light gas, it's very expensive to keep around.

Here, look at the natural gas prices, set the time line to "Max". The prices are falling even in this manipulated inflationary economy, so this means the supply is plentiful given the consumption level (and it can't be stored and transported easily, like oil can).

The end result of artificial floor at 20 times the current rate (which is what Richardson wants) would be near disappearance of the gas from the market, THEN the prices would go up much higher, not 20 times, maybe 1000 times or more, nobody knows, but here is what this will mean for people: MRI scans will become much more expensive and no more party balloons for kids, all while most of He will be just let out into the space. Congrats.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

My argument (second account, /. limits my comments on the first account) is that market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature, no amount of regulations can prevent the inevitable. But regulations can delay the inevitable and change it into something worse.

---

My actual arguments about He are here.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Anonymous Coward]

My argument (second account, /. limits my comments on the first account)

Please take the hint.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[BasilBrush]

The posting limit is there for a reason. It's Sunday: spend some time with the family, go out of the house and do something different. Maybe the quality of your arguments would be improved by some time away and a bit more selectivity.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

The ignorant comment that the AC made is moderated to +2 Insightful by people who also don't understand economics and don't know that US gov't was keeping prices for He artificially high for decades by buying up He from natural gas producers.

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.

The market brought prices down to where they should be, which again, is an example of how normal market works vs gov't.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Enter the Shoggoth]

...market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature...

Gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic... nope no market in there... citation required.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Anonymous Coward]

market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature, no amount of regulations can prevent the inevitable

My argument is that you are an Internet kook, ostensibly having had a bad childhood experience in the East and believing that the solution is an absolute diametric opposite. In this respect I have little more than pity for you.

And, FWIW, I am a mathematics graduate, I initially went into investment banking, and I can assure you that the "free market" is little more than taking advantage of information asymmetry and other forms of hoodwinking. I'm now a teacher (with an unusual amount of capital).

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[AK Marc]

Booms and busts happened long before central banks. Central banks were supposed to be a fix, but are managed by politicians or people selected by politicians.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

Combined voluntary will of the people is a force of nature, it's quite physical as well. It's why you have more leisure time, why you, personally, don't have to fish or hunt or farm to eat today, you can call it the force of self-interest.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[ColdWetDog]

They can try and dictate it, but the market always wins at the end, it's a law of nature, like gravity. You can fight it for a while, but you can't stop it.

You can't win.
You can't even break even.
You have to play the game.

Sound familiar? That's who wins. Not 'the market'.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

Well, if you are going to use thermodynamics you have to be more general than that, eventually all people will lose, we are all going to be destroyed by entropy eventually. However even in this Universe there are clumps of matter with stars and planets appearing out of gas and then even sometimes people (like us here). So eventually yes, everything will end, but as long as people exist and the have access to some form of external energy, the market will continue winning.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Anonymous Coward]

"Strengh of will" is the philosophical basis for fascism, not the sort of unfettered capitalism where everything can be made into a commodity and only the strongest survive... oh wait.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Combined voluntary will of the people is a force of nature, it's quite physical as well. It's why you have more leisure time, why you, personally, don't have to fish or hunt or farm to eat today, you can call it the force of self-interest.

Citation still required.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[ChrisMaple]

There are three possible reasons for falling prices, sans the use of force/intimidation: increased supply, decreased demand, and deflation (increasing the value of money deceases the nominal price of everything.) Deflation and decreased demand aren't happening.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Electricity Likes Me]

You do realize the rate of loss to space is actually negligible compared to human extraction and consumption?

That the reason helium is so cheap right now is because we've been storing huge quantities of it for years, and then the US congress suddenly decided to sell it all off at whatever price the market offered?

The whole idea here is that we can land softly from this by regulating it. That we can decree that we'll release helium from the strategic reserve such that the price stays at 20x the current rate, and thus our reserves will last that much longer and give us time to either open up alternate sources (the space mining people seem likely to stumble across a fairly efficient way to get it) or find alternate cooling solutions.

As in, your entire diatribe is completely ignorant bullshit because the reason helium is currently so cheap is that the vast majority of the world supply is owned by the US government which can effectively control the entire market, and has been artificially deflating the price since 2007.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Electricity Likes Me]

You don't think a producer, who actually just has an enormous but finite stockpile of helium and is selling it at infinite quantity for whatever price the market wants is going to effect the market?

Because that's what the US government is presently doing, and you the allegedly econonomically savvy tax payer should be outraged about it because they used your tax dollars to buy all that helium and are now pissing it away by not trying to control the market for it to ensure they make a profit. They could easily restrict supply, let the price rise then sell at the falling margin - and then all that tax money would not just be a free subsidy to any idiot who wants to have a balloon that rises to the ceiling.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[kaatochacha]

Economics laws exist as surely as physical laws.
They may be psychological based on human actions, and we may not understand them correctly, but they exist.
Pretending that they don't is silly.
Look at the beautiful housing bubble for a good example of what happens when you attempt to manipulate them.
We also shouldn't ascribe morals to them.
Nobody sits around cursing gravity as immoral. We just work with it.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[kaatochacha]

oddly enough, I remember having balloons as far back at 1975. Though, to tell the truth, being a child I don't know what they cost.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[kaatochacha]

Please explain to me how you would fix the markets with regulation intended to directly influence them, and I'll come back with a "law of unintended consequences".
Obama wants to spark new car sales: cash for clunkers.
Unintended consequence: lack of affordable used cars, thousands of serviceable vehicles destroyed. Used car prices are STILL higher than they should be because of this, and at the time I had dealers BEGGING me to sell them back my car I had bought two years earlier.
and that one wasn't even hard to figure out beforehand.

you regulate to make sure nobody goes outside the bounds, not to influence.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

Helium, just like health care, didn't exist until the market started providing it. The market provided people with Helium. The market provided people with health care.

In both cases governments intervened and increased prices for Helium and increased prices for health care. In both cases producer and tax payer has money removed from him by government and then the government uses that money to buy the supply of either Helium or health care at prices above the market level because the government can throw much more money at things, in any case the gov't can throw more money at anything than the market would.

This artificial demand reduces supply at normal prices, actually drives it to 0 at normal market prices, at this point only gov't can afford such things as Helium or health care.

In case of Helium the gov't was doing it because Helium probably was thought of as something useful for war. In case of health care it's just about taking more money out of people's pockets and as a side effect promising something for nothing, while increasing the prices, the costs, destroying the competition, creating more controls, growing the government and eventually turning a large portion of population into dependents, who will vote for the politicians promising more of the same.
----

Helium was STOLEN from people by using their own money! The tax payer had money removed from him by gov't, so that gov't could overpay for Helium, creating a large gov't controlled deposit of it, while simultaneously preventing the people, who are part of the market that provided this resource, from being able to access this resource. And it's done with their own money (*like all other things that gov'ts do*).

So the gov't has a large resource of Helium that it WAY overpaid for and that eventually the gov't couldn't subsidize storage of anymore, so it decided to get rid of the reserve, but almost nobody would buy at those elevated, monopoly prices. So gov't had to allow the market to set the price to get rid of this reserve of stolen commodity.

Helium is just another commodity. Health care is just another service. All of it is delivered for profit in a much more efficient manner than any government could. This has to be obvious to anybody - the gov't overpaid for Helium by at least a factor of 20 (never mind storage fees and various government positions created around it), so it's obviously not an efficient way to store or deliver this commodity and it's theft.

What is funny is how much dependency the government was able to breed in the population that the people now believe that the very government that is stealing from the economy is going to be a better steward of the scarce resources and provider of services. What's extremely funny is how screwed up the thinking is to believe that government is a 'moral agent' as opposed to free market. There is no more moral agent than free market, definitely not gov't, nothing that uses threat of violence in order to steal can be considered moral, this is a huge win for the Orwellian ideology - redefining meanings not only of words but of concepts.

----

Helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction and people who are participating in the market today are much more relevant to this market, they should be in a position to access the resources (given the price that market sets based on voluntary transactions) than anybody in either government or in a supposed future economy.

The belief here is that the future economy will be able to use Helium with a more, shall we say, moral authority! That is pure insanity - to deny the people who are participating in the market today, who are part of the market that creates the resource, from using the resource, while using the very productivity of the people that create the resource (their own taxes) to set monopoly prices and thus steal the resource from them. This is height of hypocrisy, this is complete lack of integrity.

There is nothing about it, everything about it stinks and screams: corruption of the mind.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

I have detailed enough responses that touch upon your questions.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Stirling Newberry]

No the market mechanism is not a law of nature, its an emergent effect of human behavior.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Stirling Newberry]

In the sense that a physical law is an archaic concept taught for historical compatibility, sure. Otherwise, no.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Stirling Newberry]

You should write shorter posts when starting with something as stupid as "Helium didn't exist until the market started providing it." First, Helium was discovered by science. The Helium content of the Great Plains concentration was discerned at the University of Kansas, and the US government set up the first Helium extraction plants. Science discovered it, the government extracted it, and demand, not the government is using it. The reason it is kept cheap is that the government has to pay for much of the use of it on the back end, which if MRIs were more expensive, would mean higher health care costs for the government. The small use of it for parties etc. is a minor by product. In fact the current "Helium shortage" is more about the size of an easily extracted deposit in the US, not general helium abundance on earth.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Stirling Newberry]

They were, in general, worse before modern monetary policy was evolved, with the exception of the Great Depression, which was at a time when business people dominated how Central Banks performed. There can be separation of church and state, but not market and state – government is an inescapable component of the market.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Stirling Newberry]

If you really believe that, move to some place with no functioning government and find out how much fun that is.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[snspdaarf]

Are you kidding? People have been using He in kids balloons since long before 1996. We had a tank of it at the local McDonalds in 1976 for filling balloons for kids parties.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[green1]

The very problem currently being discussed was caused by market interference by the government artificially decreasing the price, if the price were allowed to be set by the free market alone then instead of the current artificial low until a very sudden high when the reserves run out, we would be seeing a slow and steady climb allowing people to work on alternatives or adjust their habits accordingly.
You state that the answer is regulation, but that is the very thing that caused the problem in the first place. The free market will solve this one, It will only happen once the government reserves are depleted and the free market is allowed to operate (and assuming the government doesn't step in again and mess it all up again) and unfortunately due to the government interference it won't be as smooth as if they had stayed out of it all together, but it will be solved eventually.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[sjames]

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.

If you really wanna see some political heads explode, point that out to Homeland Security. Let's watch them pouring their resources into killing this market thing.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[green1]

so in other words I simplified and the government didn't screw everything up once, they instead screwed it up twice. But the end result is the same, it would have sorted itself out better had they left well enough alone in the first place.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[angel'o'sphere]

Why do you demand a citation for something that is obviously wrong???

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

The gov't was buying at the highest prices, which would divert almost all supply to the government rather than to private sector.

I suppose government had quotas on how much it would buy per month or whatever though, and the rest could be then sold at actual market prices in the normal market.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

Every government purchase comes with quotas, likely per time period. So a department would have so much money allocated per time period and then the money would be allocated again for the next time period.

For a commodity like Helium, which is expensive to store in large quantities it means that once the government fulfills its quota, it would no longer buy in that month or year for example, but the natural gas production does not stop. So the rest of the Helium for that time period can be sold at free market prices.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[AK Marc]

And when you read economics on Slashdot, you get lots of "free market" libertarians. Yet, they have no idea how much regulation it takes to enforce a "free market." It's always amusing to watch them as they realize they don't understand the term "free market" as a technical economic term. It's like I'm talking to my mother and she keeps calling the monitor "the computer" or the computer case "the CPU", correcting them doesn't help, but they obviously don't know what they are talking about.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[petermgreen]

The bit you are missing is that the reason He prices are so low is because the US government has been selling off their stockpile (the US government stockpiled helium when they thought airships would be strategically important).

I don't think the government should try to impose a price floor on all helium sales but I think it would be perfectly reasonable for them to put a price floor on selling off their own reserves.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[udachny]

I did not miss anything.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[shadowofwind]

They can try and dictate it, but the market always wins at the end, it's a law of nature, like gravity.

The same principle applies to something like sex slavery. Its true that the market always resists attempts to fight it. And its also true that when there's enough demand for something, attempts to control it become mostly futile. But it doesn't follow that people are utterly controlled by profit imperatives. The market doesn't prevent things like dumping toxic chemicals in communal drinking sources, and it doesn't prevent the squandering of easily accessible but non-renewable resources. Regulation can help with those things, even though regulation is less effective if people are disinclined to regulate honestly or respond to regulation honestly. The pretense that competitive advantage is the only principle that makes the world work is one form of that.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Oh, so you are a subsistence farmer?

This is not wikipedia, citation is not required. It is called 'thinking', but you can cite me if you like.

well at least I don't subsist on a exclusive diet of Ayn Rand

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[tbird81]

Thanks for your insight. I'm sure it's not as arrogant as it sounds.

We bow to your improved definition of "free market" which as yet remains undefined.

Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it

[AK Marc]

Go to your nearest university bookstore. Find an upper-level economics textbook. Check the glossary.

"an economic system that has low barriers to entry and perfect distribution of knowledge (and rational buyers)." Or something like that. M books are all still packed away from my last move.

I generally don't other to define it because anyone that feigns interest is usually there to attack why their definition of "free market" meaning "Laissez faire" (which is unregulated, and unrelated to "free market"). But they love the word "free" and don't like Laissez faire, so they argue about it, even when I quote and cite multiple sources, so I stopped bothering. Anyone who speaks on economics and doesn't know the basic definition of "free market" is obviously willfully ignorant, and I've never met such a person interested in a conversation.

Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!
 

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being a cry baby, it will take me the equivalent of 30 years to pay back a 2 bedroom, 70 square meters apartment in my country, no, its not a 3rd world country, but the government do try to make us one by raising taxes above 70% (direct and indirect).

So most of us can't really afford buying an apt, which makes rent even crazier because there's a shortage.

Can you guess where I live?

Israel.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[cyborg_zx]

Waaah!!!! First world problems suck!!!! Fuck starving people; where's my helium balloons?

Hilarious.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[Rei]

Where does this stereotype that efficient cars can't go fast come from? Especially anything with a modern electric motor in it tends to have tons of power (think Tesla Roadster, although that's far from as fast as they get!). Even the consumer-grade stuff using older brushed motors like the older-style hybrids - remember when Wozniak was arrested going over 100mph in his Prius?

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[AK Marc]

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

You can go 120 mph or so in a car rated at 50 mpg or so (though not getting that at 120 mph). I drive a 1.3l that goes 60 mph with ease, so long as it isn't loaded up with 5 adults and going uphill. Though for hills and passing it does make lots of noise and doesn't accelerate briskly at those speeds. In fact, the tricks that improve mileage mostly improve efficiency, and thus aren't tradeoffs for acceleration at 60 mph, but improve it (aerodynamics, engine efficiency).

Because of health concerns, I shouldn't salt my food to taste, or eat sugary treats,

In general, if you aren't pre-disposed to specific types of heart disease, salt will have no effect on you. The reason it was such a big deal is those who are affected by salt are greatly affected by it, so it shows up in larger populations (it's mainly blacks who have the salt sensitivity, but the initial studies did not correct for race, after all, it's somewhat odd to think of that being racially linked, and it was strong enough in those affected to skew the statistics for all). So salt to taste all you want. It'll likely not cause you any harm.

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.

Even after the bust, the prices are still high, which indicates that it isn't speculation. The real problem is that so many tax breaks exist for home buying that it encourages home ownership. It should be more expensive to buy than rent. In the US, it's more expensive to rent than buy, for most, because of tax deductions for real estate taxes and mortgage interest. The subsidies for home ownership lower the prices enough that everyone tries to buy, driving up the prices. If those were abolished, then the renting percentage would increase. As it is, there isn't nearly as much home renting in the US as other places. In the US, people rent apartments, but few people rent homes long-term.

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!

Yes, asking you to think before consuming is a horrible burden. The suggestion wasn't about banning the use for the parties in question, but to price it more according to the scarcity. I find it funny that you object to paying for the damage you do to the planet. The rich still have to pay for the damage, but they have enough money that they get to do more damage. Your problem is that you are mad they have more. Yes, the damage to the environment is being charged to you. Your parents weren't charged for it. But you are. Same as the national debt. You didn't make it, but you get to pay for it. Don't worry, your share is only a few times what you make in a year. And what gets you pissed off is someone trying to save some He for medical uses. Your outrage doesn't seem to be proportional.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[drwho]

Yup, you're pretty much hit the nail on the head. So, we outsource/offshore manufacturing jobs to lower-wages countries. Actually, this happened in the US before jobs were shipping overseas. I recently saw a political advertisement from a Boston newspaper from 1958, talking about how high costs of doing business were forcing Massachusetts jobs to lower-cost states, and taking jobs with them. It was true - jobs were moving to California, Arizona, Texas, etc. where the labor and environmental laws were less strict, and the increasing decay caused by the cost of a government infrastructure which could no longer be supported by the tax base caused taxes to go up, putting more pressure on businesses to move, etc. Detroit suffered similarly, but to a greater degree. The UK suffered as well, in times before. British capital fled to where costs were lower, which was primarily the USA. This accelerated after WW2.

It's not just costs, though, that business pursues overseas: it is new markets. This works only when the essence of value and control is kept by the originators. For instance, thee is not much US corporate capital interested in funding new Chinese factories for bamboo furniture. This is because there isn't any part of the production, sales, and use of bamboo furniture that requires US participation: no branding (trademark), no design innovations (copyright), or new inventions (patent). International Capitalism wants the world to be full of factories and consumers, with the capitalists, who own the intellectual property, getting a fraction of a percentage of each sale (well, they want more, but will often settle for much less). Merely having corporate capital invested in the factories is not enough - they want to make sure that competition in the producing country is eliminated, or at least greatly constrained (which intellectual property law accomplishes).

This should make clear why the WIPO, RIAA, MPAA, patent trolls, Apple, etc are so powerful - because of the capital value of intellectual property. In my opinion, it's spinning out of control. The fundamental idea sounded good but lately this has caused great economic dislocation in the US, UK, and other places. There is little in the way of good manufacturing jobs - even if a company could hire good workers for little money, the infrastructure and supply chain for manufacturing has already moved away.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't fuck starving people, that just makes more of them.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[ChrisMaple]

It should be more expensive to buy than rent.

Think it through. You are arguing that people who own houses and rent them out should lose money.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[koxkoxkox]

That's right, because at the end, they still have the house.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[AK Marc]

More expensive to buy than rent, but cheaper to own than rent. The issue with the US is that owning is so much cheaper because the "cost of capital" is negative. If you have the means to buy and don't, you are losing money. If you are buying to live and get a 30 year mortgage at 3% fixed interest with 10% inflation, it's cheaper to buy than rent (like my parents did when they locked in a low interest rate just before the inflation of the '70s, when the house was sold in about 2000, the taxes were more per year than the house payment). But when the cost of capital is more like 10% (where it is in places where the government isn't artificially keeping it down), and there are no tax breaks for ownership, and the returns for investments are around 5%, it's a good investment to buy a house with cash and rent it out for an 8% return. And it's cheaper to rent from that person than to buy the house yourself at 10% interest.

I've thought it through. Have you? I live in a place with no subsidies for buying, and many people rent houses. I know multiple people with multiple houses. The wage earners in the top 10% pay off their house as fast as possible on an ARM, generally under 10 years, and then buy another, paying it off as fast as possible, renting it out (at a loss) for those 10 years, and for a tidy profit after. After you have about 4 houses that way, you have a nice retirement plan. And when you retire, if you have problems, you can always sell a house for a nice cash infusion. Get about 5 and you should be able to live on 4 and have the 5th pay for a 6th, growing your principle while living off the rest of the revenue. Buy at a loss and rent for a profit.

I know more than one person who worked plenty and retired early with that plan. So yes, I have thought it through. Have you?

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[Osgeld]

aww, the kid is waking up to the truth ... life is just one pile of bullshit after another. go take off the rainbow glasses and get your ass back to work.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[ameoba]

Assuming you're an American, your parents grew up reaping the benefits of their parents winning WW2. Europe lay in ruins, Asia had not yet industrialized and America was making money hand over fist helping everyone rebuild, using the technology we discovered during the war.

Unfortunately, they got addicted to prosperity and, rather than work towards a long-term, sustainable situation, they were more than happy to outsource production & innovation to get cheap crap at Wal*Mart. They were more than happy to build their prosperity on the rapid consumption of non-renewable resources. They were more than happy to build sprawling suburban shitholes to create the illusion of property ownership.

Even looking at the Military Industrial complex as a source of jobs and wealth - they saw how well WW2 went for us so they wanted to replicate that. What did we get instead? The Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless wars nobody but those who served will remember. WW2 paid dividends - we helped modern, Industrialized nations defend themselves & made money rebuilding them. Since then, we've just been pissing money away in dirty Third World shitholes that will never pay us, as a Nation back (but definitely pad the wallets of the fat cats defense contractors).

It's not that opportunities are being taken from you, it's that we've spent the last 75 years living far beyond our means & these things you grew up expecting should never have been the norm.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[couchslug]

"And now I cant even get my kid a ballon for their birthday?"

Not the balloon, the filler gas.

As a kid I had plenty of balloons, with no expectation they'd be filled with helium. I even inflated most of them myself the old fashioned way, with lung power. It was "fun". Yes, I'm ancient.

Helium makes possible the rest of the "nice lifestyle" you want because it's vital to welding, and we live in a "welded" world. It's amusing that the biggest public concern with the helium shortage is balloons. When the price goes up, so does the price of welding gas mixtures using it (as well as pure helium used in a smaller subset of welding).

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Congratulations, you got it. America is turning into the third world.

1) Decreased access to education (the masses are being priced out and we're dismantling the public school system.)
2) Decreased access to medical care (masses are priced out and "insurance" companies don't pay enough to keep you from going bankrupt if anything really bad happens)
3) Concentration of all the wealth at the top, and erosion of the middle class.

The third-worldization of the US isn't complete yet, but we're getting there at a fast pace. The sad thing is, is that the rich will get richer quicker if there's a strong middle class to buy their stuff. If no one can afford the stuff that the rich is peddling, well, they won't be so rich, right? A strong middle class makes the rich richer. Thus, as a class, the rich would be better off championing the cause of the middle class "seemingly" at their own expense. However, the rich seem to be just as short sighted and stupid as everyone else, and seem to want to cannibalize the middle class for a temporary boost in their own wealth.

--PM

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[dogganos]

Oh, haven't you got the memo? The American Dream is long over. Seems like the earth is not able to sustain a life like that that you think you deserve.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[ChoirmasterWind]

Learn some physics. Then you may understand this one.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[Urza9814]

Ah, so renting should be cheaper than buying if you assume that the people who buy the house just...demolish it when they're done with it or something?

Most people sell or transfer their houses at some point. Frequently before they die so they can move somewhere more sensible (ie moving out of a three floor house when you can no longer walk up stairs) or into a nursing home or something. Other times they'll use the value of their property to take out loans with the understanding that they can die with that debt and have their house sold by their family to pay it off. Or they pass it along as inheritance. Point being, the entire point of buying a house rather than renting is, when you're done, _you still have the house too!_

Also, usually people who are renting want to recoup the cost of purchase pretty quickly. Doesn't do you much good to buy a house then rent it out if you won't see profit from it for fifty years.

So no, it doesn't make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying. The reasons to not rent a house are the same as the reasons to not rent a TV or computer or furniture. Sure, some people do for convenience. Most people do because they don't have the money to purchase one outright. They can afford $x/month but not $x*y right now and can't wait y months to make the purchase, so they rent. Or they do it because they only plan to use it for a short time period, but that's a different issue.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[cyborg_zx]

You have the right to be upset over stupid things if you choose. I retain the right to point out it is stupid.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[cyborg_zx]

It is interesting that anonitards have assumed "starving" = "third world" as if starving people were non-existent in rich countries filling helium balloons for kids - regardless of whether or not it may be put to better uses because damn it, if you can't use precious resources for trivialities then we might as well just be scratching in the dirt.

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[cyborg_zx]

You do realise that regardless of anything else that filling a balloon with helium for pleasure is hardly fucking important in the grand scheme of things?

Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse!

[cyborg_zx]

There's none; and no that doesn't make it a strawman. A strawman would be constructing an argument to knock down that resembles the opponent's. Here I am merely pointing out that it is not even possible to take a man seriously who gets upset over the prospect of not being able to fill balloons with helium for his child as if that were the worst possible thing imaginable.

Oh no

[sonamchauhan]

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.

The actual solution...

[cirby]

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").

Re:The actual solution...

[imsabbel]

Actually, not quite.

The reason helium is cheap is becaue the US had a HUUUUUGE strategic stockpile during the cold war (many times the total yearly helium production, IIRC), that is being sold off, massivly pushing down the price.

And it is not that easy with the reseves. Helium shortages are a reality! I have colleques that could not fill their helium cryostats because Air Liquide told them that currently they cannot deliver, as hospitals got first priority and the supply was to thin for weeks. They ended up renting a truck to carry dewars from the other end of the country!

Re:The actual solution...

[rubycodez]

which has nothing at all to do with the balloon gas grade crap being sold for children's balloons. the only shortage we have is because most helium is vented at wells. The amount used in balloons is miniscule and doesn't matter either way. This stupid professor is advocating symbolism over substance.

Re:The actual solution...

[Grayhand]

Considering all the fracking going on there have to be massive amounts being released into the atmosphere without any attempt being made to extract it. Even if only a few percent of the wells had viable amounts of helium there are still massive reserves. Like with most things it's the political will that is needed to build extraction plants. Here's a thought, oil and gas companies want the wells? Any well with a certain percentage of Hellium make it a condition of drilling that they extract the Helium. The gas companies will throw a fit because it cuts into profits but the Helium is a resource they are wasting. Odds are they'd make a profit on the arrangement just not as much as the gas.

Re:The actual solution...

[rubycodez]

why bother, 75% of the helium from wells is vented into the atmosphere. the waste product sold as "balloon gas" doesn't matter.

Re:The actual solution...

[tazan]

I'm confused. How can it the government be selling off massive stockpiles and driving the price down and there be a shortage at the same time. Surely they can't both be true.

Re:The actual solution...

[couchslug]

" The amount used in balloons is miniscule and doesn't matter either way."

It certainly matters to Airgas and other commercial gas vendors, hence their sales policies.

Re:The actual solution...

[toddestan]

Middlemen?

"the gas is kept artificially cheap"

[Fauntleroy]

So you're telling me that Helium prices are... inflated?

Laudable view, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[cirby]

Increasing the number of scans per machine doesn't increase the usage of helium by any great amount - the major consumption of the gas is from ongoing leakage.

Once you have enough MRI machines in a given market, consumption is fairly stable.

On the other hand, once you have a saturated market in MRI hardware, the price of scans drops dramatically, which is why doctors here "overuse" the machines. That's also why you can get a walk-in appointment to get a full-body MRI for a few hundred bucks in much of the US, while it's a several-month wait list in most of the world (if it's available at all).

At one point, there were more MRI clinics in Orlando, Florida than there were in the entire United Kingdom - and quite a bit of the Orlando market was from people flying there from the UK and Canada to get immediate scans.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am appalled that you think that increasing the cost of medical care in the U.S. would be in any way beneficial.

The medical establishment in the U.S. does not overuse testing technologies because they are cheap. They do it because the patient's health insurance and the physician's malpractice insurance almost completely divorces the true cost of the procedure from the benefit to the patient's health.

Thus, if you increase the cost of the MRI, health insurance premiums rise, and perhaps some arbitrary group of people who might actually benefit from cheap MRI scans become completely unable to use one. The usage does not actually change much.

The physicians working in the U.S. are, for the most part, smart folks that are influenced to implement questionable practices because idiots with money and/or power punish them for practicing medicine in a manner that would otherwise be considered prudent, efficient, and effective.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...yea cause only 10's of thousands of lives have been saved by "unnecessary" MRI's that caught cancer early. What kind of doctor is appalled by the overuse of technology that results in a net saving of lives and an overall reduction in the cost of the technology by increasing the availability?

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[ColdWetDog]

On the other hand, once you have a saturated market in MRI hardware, the price of scans drops dramatically, which is why doctors here "overuse" the machines.

If by 'here' you mean the US, then not exactly. Prices are essentially set by Medicare with a bit of whining from the private insurers. So when doctors overuse the machines, you just get more money going to the machine's owner / financier. If you really over saturate a market then you get some downwards price pressure for cash customers (the well heeled folks from out of town) but you don't save the system a dime.

But that's a small edge case and has little to do with the economics of healthcare delivery in the US. It is much more of a 'build it and we will bill insurance" philosophy than anything remotely sane.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[ColdWetDog]

...yea cause only 10's of thousands of lives have been saved by "unnecessary" MRI's that caught cancer early. What kind of doctor is appalled by the overuse of technology that results in a net saving of lives and an overall reduction in the cost of the technology by increasing the availability?

No, those lives haven't been saved. Quit reading advertising copy. When you start running around and doing random MRIs (or CTs) on people, you find very few cancers and save very few people. You do end up poking around inside of people and having the occasional 'surgical misadventure' that runs up costs and actually hurts patients.

Remember, images from these machines don't say 'here's a cancer' - they show a grainy, black and white image of an indistinct process. The vast majority of the time that process is benign but when the doc says 'you might have growth there, son' and suggests surgical removal, the tendency is to go along with the idea and hopefully the doctors won't take out anything really important in the process.

Cancer screening is a very, very complicated subject. The idea that you can just go randomly look for things and expect to actually help the patient (as opposed to the bank account of the hospital and providers) has been debunked quite clearly.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[Trepidity]

full-body MRI for a few hundred bucks in much of the US

Where is this? I've never seen a full-body MRI for under $1000 anywhere in the US, and often considerably higher than that. Or are you referring to just your copay amount, with the rest covered by health insurance?

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[cirby]

There were billboards all over Orlando for a while, offering whole-body MRIs for $500 cash.

You see, when you have a million-dollar machine, it's better to have an extra $500 in hand than an idle piece of hardware and no income.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[zippthorne]

What is the downside of an MRI, other than the cost? Also, if we cut the MRI scans, what will happen to the number of CT scans?

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[zippthorne]

Seems like the real solution is to do even more extensive screening, to get an idea of what fraction of the interesting features actually turn out to be dangerous. Perhaps even finding a way to further refine the scans to find features that are dangerous.

Ignorance is a pretty lame tool for preventing negative medical outcomes....

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[dj245]

full-body MRI for a few hundred bucks in much of the US

Where is this? I've never seen a full-body MRI for under $1000 anywhere in the US, and often considerably higher than that. Or are you referring to just your copay amount, with the rest covered by health insurance?

You need to stay out of the hospitals and go with an independant imaging company. I needed an MRI a few weeks ago, and an independant imaging company would have done it for about $300 cash if I was uninsured (I have not gotten the bill yet after-insurance). I know the local hospitals charge over $1200 (before insurance).

The hospitals need to cover all the care they have to provide for the uninsured. Seeking out only providers who do not provide care for the uninsured and have no ties to hospitals is how I have been approaching healthcare lately.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[whoever57]

Seems like the real solution is to do even more extensive screening, to get an idea of what fraction of the interesting features actually turn out to be dangerous. Perhaps even finding a way to further refine the scans to find features that are dangerous.

Not when the followup diagnostics and unneccessary treatment are harmful to the health of those many, many people subject to false positives from MRI scanning.

Re:Laudable view, but ...

[zippthorne]

It just means we're not dealing with the information correctly. Ignorance is not a legitimate health care paradigm.

Yes, let the price rise

[Dr. Spork]

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.

Re:Yes, let the price rise

[imsabbel]

Actually, Helium recory is a reality. Most of it IS recovered, otherwise we would have total chaos.

Re:Yes, let the price rise

[Rich0]

Yes, but better to have the price rise now to a reasonable level that encourages conservation, than sell it all off at subsidized prices and then once it runs out we're paying through the noses to retrofit everything in a panic as half the hospital MRIs shut down in the meantime.

If prices are expected to go up it only makes sense to gradually work them in than to force everybody to go cold turkey.

Right now I'm sure there is some recycling but with the prices so cheap it isn't that high a priority - cheaper to just buy more new gas, er liquid.

Re:Yes, let the price rise

[green1]

If prices are expected to go up it only makes sense to gradually work them in than to force everybody to go cold turkey

So what you're saying is the government never should have been involved in the first place and the free market could have handled this...

Re:Yes, let the price rise

[Rich0]

Not sure that was true "in the first place" - I can't imagine there was that much demand for helium back in the 50s.

Government regulation of markets isn't automatically a bad thing. However, it certainly is the case that it can lead to harm down the road.

Turn the issue around!

[XB-70]

Let's make this a learning experience for kids: rather than use helium, sell (or make) home hydrogen production kits.

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!!

Re:Turn the issue around!

[ColdWetDog]

And thermite. Teach the little monsters how to make thermite.

Remember "Don't be dull".

Re:Turn the issue around!

[Peter5930]

Not a great idea

Tell my kids that, Tom!

[adosch]

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."

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[chichilalescu]

kids will have fun whenever the adults give them the attention they deserve. including when they will be forced to play with balloons filled with regular air.
please think before you teach your kids to be wasteful.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[Chysn]

We should redesign medical equipment and phase out existing medical equipment because we don't want to explain the lack of helium balloons to children? I think your priorities are a little out of whack.

How about we use the helium for the MRIs, and teach children not to expect floating balloons. Balloon animals are a good alternative, if balloons need to be involved at all. I've got four young kids, and they're pretty easy to please.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[mianne]

I would agree that medical use trumps party use; but how difficult would it be to retool an MRI to use, say, liquid nitrogen for cooling?

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[Rich0]

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.

Even at today's artificially low rates, helium is still QUITE expensive for things like MRIs, as is the associated maintenance/downtime/etc - and the small risk of destroying the million dollar magnet every time you fuss with it.

If somebody could think of a better way to cool them, trust me, they would.

Do you have any concept of how cold liquid Helium is? At atmospheric pressure we're taking around 4K - four degrees above absolute zero. In some applications it is operated under reduced pressure to get it down to super-critical temperatures lower than that. If you stuck an MRI magnet in deep space it would be warmed up by cosmic background radiation to a higher temperature than that (though you probably could practically operate an MRI at the ambient temperature of DEEP space, it would take an age for the magnet to cool down on its own and you'd need huge radiators to disperse the heat generated by the procedure to keep it that way - plus it isn't terribly convenient for patients to have to travel past the Ort cloud for their test).

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[ceoyoyo]

The mods think you're being funny. I really hope they're right.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[adosch]

Aww, sounds like Mom and Daddy didn't give you hugs AND were God haters. Yikes. I bet you have some problems.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[evilviper]

Fill those balloons with hydrogen... They'll get even more lift, and the party could get extremely memorable, if one of those balloons gets close to a party candle.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[Dzimas]

The idea of giving a child a five cent balloon that's filled with regular old air has obviously escaped you. They're far more fun than the helium-filled variety because they don't just soar to the roof if you let go and you can play games with them. Nice, atheistic physics games.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[mianne]

BSCCO seems to be a huge step in the right direction. It becomes superconductive at 108K. It's been used successfully at LHC (albeit at around 35K) since 2005.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[ColdWetDog]

I would agree that medical use trumps party use; but how difficult would it be to retool an MRI to use, say, liquid nitrogen for cooling?

All you need is a breakthrough in superconducting magnets and you're golden (and rich, did I say rich?). They often use liquid nitrogen to precool the magnets but it's just not cold enough. Liquid hydrogen would probably work, but that's rather a bitch to use.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[cellocgw]

I would agree that medical use trumps party use; but how difficult would it be to retool an MRI to use, say, liquid nitrogen for cooling?

Well, as soon as you start producing your patented superconductor material which both supports the field strength required in an NMR (fuck that "MRI" name) and operates at 77K, we'll be happy to switch. Just how ignorant are you, anyway?

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[Chysn]

I would agree that medical use trumps party use; but how difficult would it be to retool an MRI to use, say, liquid nitrogen for cooling?

Sigh. Shouldn't this be, "I would agree that medical use trumps party use; so how difficult would it be to decorate with something else?" One thing is orders of magnitude easier than the other, and I'm sure you can figure out which is which.

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[Rich0]

Based on that article it sounds like this material isn't really ideal for making high-power magnets. I know more about the practical use of these magnets than their materials, so I'll have to defer to a physicist to comment on that. Superconductors don't like strong magnetic fields in general (Google the Josephson Junction), so a higher critical temperature alone doesn't make a superconductor more useful when building magnets.

In fact, I think modern magnets incorporate copper in the wire perhaps at the cost of superconductivity simply so that the wires don't completely melt if the magnet quenches. These magnets can cost millions of dollars to build, so accident-tolerance is a useful property. Of course, going back to the topic of this article, if the magnet does quench there goes a small fortune in liquid helium...

Re:Tell my kids that, Tom!

[ChoirmasterWind]

Yes, BSCCO and YBCO and all the High Temperature Superconductors can't do persistent joints. This means that you need to put the electric current into them constantly instead of just closing the loop at startup and letting the current run all by itself.

This isn't a problem about energy use, it's an issue about stability: a persistent current in an s/c magnet is incredibly stable, so you get a nice sharp MRI image.

There is one company making MgB2 MRI machines, and they run them at about 10K so far as I remember, using direct conduction instead of imersing them in a cryogenic liquid. You want to run the machine as cold as you can because then the current-carrying capacity of the s/c goes up.

Hydrogen

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

hmm

[buddyglass]

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?

Re:hmm

[green1]

It will... right as soon as the US government stops dumping helium on the market at artificially low prices... Once again, free market works, except when the government steps in and messes it all up.

Re:hmm

[buddyglass]

Why is the U.S. govt. dumping helium at sub-market prices instead of asking the going rate?

Re:hmm

[green1]

It is the "going rate" unfortunately the going rate is scewed by the massive quantity the government is dumping. if the US government released for sale small amounts at a time they would have little effect on the going rate, however by selling off massive amounts at whatever price the market is willing to pay they are artificially lowering prices. once the stockpile is gone the rate will immediately correct itself and helium prices will skyrocket. had the government not got involved in the first place the price of helium would have been more likely to climb slowly and steadilly as it became harder to obtain instead of being set at artificial prices by one organization hoarding it then selling.

Summary:

[folderol]

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.

Re:Summary:

[udachny]

ORLY? Scientist cannot produce helium (he can produce hot gas, but not of that type), while a commercial operation that extracts natural gas can produce (extract) Helium from their gas and sell it in the market.

For decades gov't has been overpaying for Helium using tax payer dollars to build up this 'strategic reserve' for war, what else? So the market produces a good and gov't steals it from the market by stealing money from tax payers and overpaying for that good, thus denying the market that produced that good from access to that very good.

A humanitarian would not say: do more of that, take more of tax payer money to buy up the product that people apparently want for some uses at inflated prices, thus denying those very people access to that very product.

If the gov't simply sets a floor price on Helium without buying it from the natural gas producers, then they will simply be dumping the gas into the space, because they are not going to store something they can't sell, and they won't be able to sell almost any of it at prices that this Richardson 'academic' wants. (he wants the prices to be 20 times what they are today at least).

A humanitarian? A humanitarian is not somebody who denies people access to things they want by using threat of government violence (that is what all laws are based upon).

A humanitarian? The same type of humanitarian that says that health care should be only provided by government, because it's "not a market good"? Well, let's put it this way, before market provided people with Helium, nobody provided people with Helium. Before market provided people with health care, nobody did. Then various governments came and took away those goods from people by using tax payer money to create artificial demand and raise the prices. This is as true for Helium as it is for health care, people used to be able to buy health care out of pocket and it was cheap. Once government got involved, it became almost impossible to buy for most people out of pocket. Same with insurance.

Actually same with the houses right now, same with credit right now, same with anything that government gets into.

A true humanitarian would be speaking up for free markets with all his passion, he wouldn't be trying to dictate to people.

I mean how Orwellian is it, that the markets, that provided the actual goods to the people in the first place, are called 'immoral' and 'evil', while governments, that actually stole the goods from the people are considered 'moral' somehow? Stealing from the people, to buy up a resource so that people cannot afford to buy it on their own (both, because their money is taken away from them in taxes and because gov't can pay much more for a resource and thus it buys up the entire supply). This is moral? This is schizophrenia, people who believe such things need help.

Re:Summary:

[kaatochacha]

Whenever I hear from some all knowing sage telling me what's good for me, I take his advice with a grain of salt. I don't completely write it off, but history is full of people telling other people what they should do for the good of the first.

Use Nitrous Oxide for party balloons instead

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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 . . .

Don't do this.

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

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.

Re:Don't do this.

[f3rret]

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.

Do that with oxygen and acetylene, wear ear protection.

Fun, loud, times.

Re:Don't do this.

[Electricity Likes Me]

This is oddly reassuring, seeing as how, after reading about the shortage of helium (ironically from pondering where exactly it comes from and then reading about the shortages) I've been wondering how safe it would be to fill my remote control airship with hydrogen instead.

Re:Don't do this.

[SuricouRaven]

I would suggest a failsafe valve - in the event of loss of control and inability to maintain safe altitude, release the gas in some way. Even just release the entire envelope to float off into the stratosphere. The mechanical section would come crashing to the ground, but you'd avoid potentially landing the bag-o-boom in a populated area.

Pricing

[pubwvj]

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.

Nonrenewable

[puddingebola]

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.

Wait, there is a Balloon Association?

[ryzvonusef]

How do I become a member? Do they offer newsletters I could subscribe to?

oh the humanity

[Joe_Dragon]

oh the humanity just don't let them have to much fun.

Balloon gas is recycled from medical uses

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

Re:Balloon gas is recycled from medical uses

[wonkey_monkey]

As anyone would know if the read the whole of the summary...

Re:Balloon gas is recycled from medical uses

[Rich0]

Yup, but it could be recycled for additional medical use instead of vented into the atmosphere where it ends up floating into space...

The natural sources of helium are somewhere around 2% pure. Party balloons are something like 90%, and medical use is over 99%. If you can make 99% helium from 2% helium, you can certainly make it from 90% helium.

Math class is tough

[tepples]

math is hard

Let's go shopping.

I've heard this before and wondered...

[sootman]

... 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.

Re:I've heard this before and wondered...

[ColdWetDog]

... 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.

I've got it! Attach a balloon filling station to every MRI in the country - as the helium boils off, just stuff it in balloons. Bonus points for charging 10x the going rate because it's now a 'medical procedure'.

There, that's market forces working for everyone!

Re:I've heard this before and wondered...

[petermgreen]

The US government made a strategic stockpile of helium (driving up the price at the time) when they thought they would need it for airships. Now that airships are no longer considered of military interest are selling off that stockpile depressing the price.

Is coercion really the answer?

[Tony Isaac]

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.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[Rich0]

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.

It is, at least right now. You're talking 4K - liquid helium is REALLY cold. You need superconducting magnets that can operate in multiple Tesla magnetic fields. If you read up on superconductivity you'll find that magnetic fields disable superconductors - so you need temperatures as low as you can get them to counteract that.

Trust me, the helium is already plenty expensive at the scales they operate on. If somebody had another way to cool these things down that was remotely practical it would be adopted all over the place.

That said, they already do try to recycle it. The problem is the recycled stuff tends to get used in balloons since it is cheaper to resell for that use than to reprocess it, largely because the cost of helium is artificially low.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[ceoyoyo]

"Is helium really the only way to cool MRI machines?"

Currently, yes. It's presently the only practical way to get a reliable large scale high field superconducting magnet. It's easy to say someone will invent something. That something is a high temperature superconductor (that is malleable enough to be made into wire and wrapped into a coil). People have been working on that for a long time without a lot of success. Are you feeling lucky?

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[Tony Isaac]

It is, at least right now.

That was my point...it is the only way right now. Superconductor research is advancing rapidly, with new advances leading, step by step, towards room-temperature superconductors. Even if that holy grail is never achieved, the temperatures required certainly are going up. There are, I'm sure, many other opportunities for refinement of the technology.

There is nothing like high cost to spur innovation! Who would have thought that, just a few years after the human genome was first fully sequenced, at a cost of billions of dollars and years of time, others would invent machines that could do it for just a few thousand dollars, in a week? Could the people involved in the original project have envisioned this? Hardly.

All I'm saying is, we should not be too hasty to get the government involved in making rules to relieve such a shortage. Cost has an amazing way of bringing out the creativity in people.

the cost of helium is artificially low.

Therein lies the real problem...some intellectuals in the past deemed it helpful to artificially lower the cost of helium. The government props up the market, and causes an artificial shortage.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[Rich0]

Superconductor research is advancing rapidly, with new advances leading, step by step, towards room-temperature superconductors.

Sure, but it is foolish to squander what we have and need RIGHT NOW in the hope that we won't need it later. Better to conserve now, and then just have extra helium to spare later if it isn't needed.

My understanding is that the higher-temperature superconductors are not capable of withstanding the large magnetic fields required in an MRI. While most people understand that superconductivity is sensitive to high temperatures, it is also sensitive to the presence of magnetic fields (obviously an important consideration in a magnet!).

Superconducting electromagnets have been around for decades now and are somewhat ubiquitous. However, the designs haven't really changed in any revolutionary sense. They might change in the future, but it seems more wise to plan on incremental improvement.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[tibit]

What about using conducting magnets? How much power would a MRI magnet dissipate during operation if the windings were from copper?

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[ChoirmasterWind]

Yes, an ordinary copper electromagnet would "work", but the energy requirement would be huge, and the resource requirement (all that Copper or Silver) would be huge, and the field would nto be as stable as the persistent field in a closed-loop s/c magnet so the image would be worse: so forget cheap MRI scans at "only" a few hundred $$..

There are MRI machines made using a 3 tonne permanent magnet - which is "low field" and OK-ish for wrists and ankles.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[tibit]

?! So you're saying that copper piping is more expensive than superconducting alloys? Well, that's news to me. As for the energy requirement: well, pray tell, how huge would it be. As for the stability of the field: well, what's so magical about a superconducting magnet that it'd have a more stable field? I presume a superconducting magnet needs a much smaller current from the power supply (orders of magnitude smaller) to maintain the field, but you silently presume that we can't make power supplies that keep things stable within 10ppm or better.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[ceoyoyo]

Resistive magnets are used. They have the advantage that they can be shut off easily, but they're not practical above a few tenths of a Tesla because of heating, stability and uniformity problems. Standard clinical scanners are 1.5 T. Research scanners go up to about 8 T for humans, 11 or 12 T for animals. Spectrometers can go even higher.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[ceoyoyo]

Superconducting magnets don't heat up. When your field needs to be uniform in the parts per billion range, a little bit of restive heating is a big problem. And a high field resistive magnet, even if you could make one that didn't melt immediately, would suffer from a bit more than a little resistive heating.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[tibit]

Superconducting magnets don't heat up. When your field needs to be uniform in the parts per billion range, a little bit of restive heating is a big problem. And a high field resistive magnet, even if you could make one that didn't melt immediately, would suffer from a bit more than a little resistive heating.

Electric power is generally cheap. Even if that thing would be wasting tens of kilowatts, it's no biggie. I presume as long as it's cheaper than lost helium at projected helium prices, one is ahead financially, and that's what counts.

The coil is wound around a stator. Resistive drops in the wiring won't affect field uniformity, not even at ppb level I'd think. The "wiring" would be a pipe, and most of the current would flow in the copper, and there the temperature would be pretty stably distributed I'd think due to heat exchange with sodium coolant. Thus the current distribution in the pipe would be axisymmetric, and that's what counts. The exact absolute field strength doesn't need to be maintained to ppb I don't think because the gradient coils aren't that accurate (good luck generating a sine wave or in fact any amplified waveform to 1ppb). It wouldn't be all that much of a problem since we can measure field strength to such an accuracy and you could maintain a feedback loop to keep it stable to such a level if you really wanted to.

If you want to be really clever, you can recover heat from the sodium coolant and use it to locally generate some of the power needed to power the coils. Since such a system would run pretty much in thermal equilibrium, at well known operating points, it could be optimized to have thermodynamic efficiency better than, say, a car engine. 50% of discount on a power bill is always nice ;)

Alternatively, there could be an option of dumping the heat into a steam circuit -- after all, large hospital campuses probably have a power plant and steam circuits, and dumping heat there would be OK. That steam powers the chillers in the summer, too, after all.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[tibit]

Ok then, how many amp-turns does a typical 1.5T clinical scanner need? Let's crunch some numbers.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[ceoyoyo]

I don't know. Go ahead and figure it out. 1.5 T field, air core, a uniform field in the core of at least 50 cm diameter and length.

Re:Is coercion really the answer?

[tibit]

So normal medical magnets don't use a stator (core)? Well then, you need 750kA-turns to get 1.5T inside a 60cm long solenoid. I'll take a bit oversize solenoid at 60cm length and 60cm inner diameter. Let's see how realistic it'd be.

Assume standard 1inch O.D. copper tubing and 33mm pitch with some insulation between each turn. We have alternating 18 and 17 turns per layer due to triangular packing of cross sections. Say we'd want a 50cm thick winding ring (outer radius - inner radius). Assuming triangular tiling, we have 28.6mm diametral layer-to-layer spacing, so we can fit 16 layers. That's 280 turns, and the current is 2.7kA.

The length of the tube is approx. 1200m. Assume type K tubing with 0.065in or 1.651mm wall thickness, operating at ~70C average temperature (due to rise in resistance, the heat load in the hotter part of pipe, closer to outlet, will be higher than in the cooler part, but that's OK -- I specify average over length). The cross-sectional area of copper is 254.9mm^2. The cross-sectional area of sodium coolant is 1772mm^2. Copper's resistivity is 20.2nOhm*m, thus its resistance is 95mOhm. Sodium's resistance at ~61nOhm*m resistivity will be 41mOhm. Those are in parallel and the resistance is 29mOhm.

Given that the dissipated power is I^2*R, we have P=(2.7kA)^2*0.001=211kW. That's 175W/m of tubing. Sure a lot of power, but it can be dealt with as far as cooling is concerned -- each layer can have its own heat exchanger, dumping 13kW. Now let's see how much would it cost. At average US 15 cents/kWh, we have $18 cost to operate per hour, assuming all the power is dumped outside. That's nothing much. Even if we'd add inefficiencies in the power supplies and pumping losses in both sodium and cooling air.

I'd need to write out the equations symbolically and figure out where is the sweet spot with power dissipation vs. pipe diameter, presumably I haven't hit the most optimum design. Too lazy to figure it out right now.

Note 1: Mercury has resistivity an order of magnitude worse than sodium, so pretty much sodium is what you need for coolant.

Note 2: With water cooling, you can't but expect galvanic corrosion, unless there's some passivation scheme that would work -- I wouldn't count on it. In such a system, hot spots would be very destructive since the power supply can pretty much dump 200kW of heat in one hot spot if you're unlucky. A split power supply, supplying each layer separately, would of course help with that, but still even a 1in O.D. pipe won't cope with 13kW in a small spot for very long, and as soon as cooling water would start to boil, you're done for. This becomes a non-issue when using sodium, but of course I don't know how well copper pipes play with sodium flowing in them...

Note 3: The power supplies won't be a walk in the park to design, since you pretty much need a switcher with synchronous rectifiers being paralleled (slow!) mosfets to keep the resistance low enough, and then you still need a linear post-regulator that would waste at least 10% of incoming power. It certainly wouldn't be cheap to design and prototype, you can't get a random appnote-copying switcher jockey to put one together ;)

We will also have a shortage of gasoline

[Underholdning]

"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.

Incentive

[Zeroblitzt]

Isn't this incentive to work on fusion reactors with more fury? Am I wrong in saying H + H => He?

Re:Incentive

[newcastlejon]

Am I wrong in saying H + H => He?

Yes, 1 + 1 != 4 (or 3).
It's actually closer to 2H=D (twice) then D+H=He3 (also twice) and finally 2He3 = He4+2H. There are some photons, neutrinos and positrons flying around there too, but that's the general idea.
See here.

Re:Incentive

[PPH]

Now that fusion research has the Bozo The Clown lobby behind it, maybe they'll start making some headway.

Helium vs "Ballon-gas"

[Attila the Bun]

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.

Re:Helium vs "Ballon-gas"

[lurker1997]

I worked at a research MRI lab for a number of years and have visited many others. I have never seen helium be recycled, it boils off and the magnets are refilled. I know the technology exists to recycle He and have seen it advertised, but it is not in common use, at lease in the research circles I travelled in.

It's like a million voices all cried out...

[MrKaos]

in a ridiculous helium voice saying "is this an inappropriate use of helium?"

They're "balloons", yes, but they are my balloons

[Latent Heat]

How much helium is used in party balloons anyway?

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?

a drop in the ocean

[mothlos]

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.

Re:a drop in the ocean

[DNS-and-BIND]

But it's an important part of social activism to hit people where it hurts - their daily lives. The actual helium saved is irrelevant. What matters is to make people feel bad. And just think of all the smug environmentalists who now have another issue to shit all over people about. "Balloons at your party? You know there are medical patients not able to get helium due to your rampant waste? Tut tut tut." Don't underestimate this part, enviros love looking down on others who don't meet their standards. It's the same feeling that religious nuts get by looking down on those of loose morals or bad behavior.

Re:a drop in the ocean

[swillden]

What does the military use helium for?

Re:Solution? Use Hydrogen instead.

[Rei]

Probably the ultimate solution for party balloons will be to use lighter membranes so that you can use weaker lifting gas mixes - a small amount H2 or CH4 plus a couple percent H2O and the rest N2. H2 burns at 4% concentration in air and CH4 at 5%, but of course they'll dilute from whatever ratio they're at in the balloons when air gets mixed in, so you could probably have several times that amount without risking a burn. And a small burn is probably acceptable anyways, just not a rapid, powerful conflagration. I bet you could deal with something like 20% CH4 or 14% H2 safely.

Of course, using much lighter membranes would probably mandate the use of CH4 instead of H2. Balloons already have enough trouble stopping He from escaping even with current, heavier membranes, and H2 escapes much more readily than helium.

This preservation effort

[pcgfx805]

Seems to be all up in the air at the moment.

Many replacement options

[PerMolestiasEruditio]

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%

Helium reserves and market based solutions

[WaffleMonster]

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.

*Sigh* The real reason helium is in short supply:

[109 97 116 116]

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.

I smell a regulatory commission a comin'

[flyneye]

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...

Invest now!! SELL GOLD, BUY HELIUM!

[drwho]

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..

[tokencode]

In other news Tom Welton, a professor of sustainable chemistry at Imperial College has been diagnosed with a severe case of OCD

Re:Hydrogen mixture for ballons?

[Sulphur]

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.

If you got the balloon cold enough, then the gases would separate.

Every bit adds up.

[bussdriver]

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.

Re:Every bit adds up.

[Lemmy Caution]

Except when the public learns that they banned party balloons while the military kept using the lion's share of helium, they'll rightly turn on the scientist who called for the ban as the miserable kill-joy he really is.

Re:Every bit adds up.

[Phroggy]

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.

But banning party balloons won't help us to not run out of helium so soon. It's such a small percentage, the difference would be imperceptible, and yet you're asking millions of people to sacrifice a fun tradition just so you can feel like you're "doing something" without any real benefit to the public.

My suggestion: tax it, just like cigarettes and gasoline. Artificially driving up the price will encourage people to waste less and recapture more, and the additional revenue can contribute to deficit reduction.

Raise the price??

[p51d007]

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.

Re:Raise the price??

[joh]

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.

Works pretty good actually. With helium it would work even better since making it a bit more expensive would make recycling and extracting (instead of just releasing) it economically sound.

Anyway, helium is a finite resource, once released into the atmosphere is just goes away into space and since it is an element, there's no way to synthesize it. This should be more than enough reason to put some thought into using it because the market just totally doesn't care for what happens in a few decades.

Helium from Fusion

[edibobb]

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/

Re:Helium from Fusion

[mark_osmd]

I bet if you actually fused enough H to He to account for the current world usage of helium the required fusion energy would be WAY huge (as in dead, glowing earth huge)

Wait. Balloons are actually pretty cool...

[gardas]

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...

Currently? Nigh Impossible.

[zippthorne]

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.

Helium Balloons are Evil

[anorlunda]

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.

the opposite will happen

[stooo]

>> 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.

We need welding, we don't need balloons.

[couchslug]

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.)

roman_mir making shit up again

[damn_registrars]

(udachny is a sock puppet for roman_mir)

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.

Re:roman_mir making shit up again

[gmhowell]

they will tell you that you are full of hot air.

He's full of something denser and browner.

Re:roman_mir making shit up again

[damn_registrars]

He's full of something denser and browner.

I particularly love how he bitches about being some kind of oppressed minority viewpoint here on slashdot, even though no politician in the history of time has received as much free positive slashvertising as his lord ron paul, and he just got multiple comments moderated way above reason where he made shit up out of thin air and was promptly disproven by multiple people.

Hydrogen wasn't the problem

[Immerman]

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.

Wait wait wait!

[Kaenneth]

Childrens party ballons are filled with MEDICAL WASTE?

Getting new helium is easy

[roc97007]

All you have to do is fuse hydrogen. We should have the technology in 50 years.

There is a simple solution

[roc97007]

Fill party balloons with hydrogen instead. They'll still float, and parties will be much more exciting when they pop.

self-righteous poppycock

[Tommy Bologna]

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.

Re:self-righteous poppycock

[cyborg_zx]

Wow, I see the anonmitards have been out in force on this one but really - if you think the defining quality of a first world country is whether or not you've got easy access to helium filled ballons for a children's birthday and that if for some reason you did not that was indicative of a serious problem then you require a massive reassessment of your life and society in general.

In short if you're the type of fool who will demand luxuries at the expense of necessities *YOU* will hasten regression of the "first world" into a "thrid world".

Dear scientists and engineers

[OrangeTide]

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.

Helium features

[Immerman]

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.

Re:Helium features

[cazzazullu]

Helium-3 is used in neutron detectors. Very handy if you want to monitor whether your collider or neutron source is behaving well.

Re:Helium features

[necro81]

Other features include:

High Thermal Conductivity - this is another reason why it is such a good coolant, it is able to pull a lot of heat easily. This is one reason why it is a candidate working fluid for new (fission) reactor designs and for Stirling engines. It's low reactivity also makes it ideal in this regard.

Low Viscosity - helium very closely hews to an ideal gas in terms of its flow behavior. Its low density and low viscosity make it really easy to move around using pumps and convection. This, again, makes it an excellent coolant (in liquid or gaseous form) or working fluid.

Re:Helium features

[aurizon]

I would like to know how much Helium there is in fracked gas? I expect there might be more as the solid rock the gas comes from has a lower mean free path for Helium, and so it diffuses out more slowly. The large gas liquification plants that use fracked gas may know this?

This link gives us a little more data

http://tinyurl.com/d9trqef

10% Free Floats

[SluttyButt]

Why, flatulence constitute roughly 10% of free-floating gas on this planet? Someone should go out and capture it for the party balloons.

Fusion is the answer

[sethrosen]

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.

Not in western europe

[aepervius]

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.

What a job!

[sqldr]

John Lee, chairman of the UK's Balloon Association

John, if a girl asks you what you do for a living, just tell her you're an accountant.

Helium is a waste for party balloons....

[scharkalvin]

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.

Don't Worry!

[Fieryphoenix]

Russia has huge unannounced helium fields that they discovered back in the 70's.

Dirty helium?

[ukemike]

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.

Well it's up to the scientists.

[Palamos]

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.

"Scientists" should stfu about balloons

[ToddInSF]

...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.

Re:How delicious. Look over there!!!

[couchslug]

There is no OTHER way to sell used helium cylinders unless you know a welder who uses pure helium or connects helium cylinders to their own gas mixer. Mixers are rare and most welders default to ordering standard mixes.

I did my homework, Anonymous Cretin. :)

Cracked.com

[DanielBMS]

Mod up if Cracked.com made you aware of this first!

Hmm,

[Meski]

What would Dejah Thoris say about wasting Helium?

MRIs waste helium (why not recycle it?)

[Prune]

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.