Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Speak Out Against Wasting Helium In Balloons
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Tom Welton, a professor of sustainable chemistry at Imperial College, London, believes that a global shortage of helium means it should be used more carefully — and since helium cools the large magnets inside MRI scanners it is wrong to use it for balloons used at children's parties. 'We're not going to run out of helium tomorrow — but on the 30 to 50 year timescale we will have serious problems of having to shut things down if we don't do something in the meantime,' says Welton. 'When you see that we're literally just letting it float into the air, and then out into space inside those helium balloons, it's just hugely frustrating. It is absolutely the wrong use of helium.' Two years ago, the shortage of helium prompted American Nobel Prize winner Robert Richardson to speak out about the huge amounts of helium wasted every day because the gas is kept artificially cheap by the U.S. government and to call for a dramatic increase in helium's price. But John Lee, chairman of the UK's Balloon Association, insists that the helium its members put into balloons is not depriving the medical profession of the gas. 'The helium we use is not pure,' says Lee. 'It's recycled from the gas which is used in the medical industry, and mixed with air. We call it balloon gas rather than helium for that reason.'"
There is a lot of Helium in the Sun, so go to the Sun and get some and bring it back. Dear Laura: Wowza, you look great!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
There may be a free-market solution. Let's float a trial balloon and see how everyone reacts.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Using hydrogen for childrens' party balloons would solve the problem and make things potentially much more exciting!
Hurry up and get those fusion plants up and running!
The notion that because gas is only 90% pure, it is useless to the medical profession is rather ridiculous.
Refining this gas back to 99.99% helium is almost trivial, compared to extracting it from sources where the helium content is in parts per million.
If there isn't a renewing source of helium, why hasn't all of it escaped into space yet? It is small enough to even seep through solid containers, given enough time. If the US has a stockpile of the stuff that it's selling off, how did they acquire it? Can't they do it again?
So these 'academics' then should buy all the helium and preserve it if they are worried, because at this point the price for He is low and the market sets the price.
This Richardson person wants the market to artificially increase the price of He by a factor of 20. Who is this dude that he thinks he can dictate to the world how it must use its resources?
Let me put it this way, if the market decided to blow up the planet, nobody could prevent it, it would just happen. Using He for balloons may just mean that the planet will blow up later on because of more wars, who knows, but it's not up to anybody to dictate to all people how they should live and die.
You can't handle the truth.
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!
Build more helium extraction plants in natural gas refineries.
Really.
The reason helium was (relatively) cheap was that the US built a nice large extraction plant at a natural gas field with a very high concentration of helium. That field is starting to run out, so prices are naturally going up.
Helium is not, however, limited to that one field. There are many other natural gas fields with varying concentrations of helium, and all you need to do is add a cryogenic helium extraction plant to a natural gas refinery to pull that helium out of the existing gas feeds. This is already happening in a few places, and with current technology, it's not that expensive to build more plants. It's only cost effective in a field with higher concentrations of helium - but there are quite a few of those.
The United States has proven helium reserves of about fifty years... and unproven reserves of about a thousand times that. ("Proven" means "we know it's there," and "unproven" means "we're pretty sure it's there, but haven't gotten around to it yet for economic or legal reasons").
So you're telling me that Helium prices are... inflated?
As a medical doctor working outside of the US I am appalled at the amount of over-investigation that goes in within the US medical profession. There are probably thousands of unnecessary MRI scans undertaken every month in the US. Perhaps with the scarcity of a required gas, this might bring rates of MRI scans back in line with normal.
I have a feeling that as soon as helium got expensive, we'd suddenly have all kinds of good ideas about how to recycle it more effectively. I mean, it's a noble gas, it's not like it gets "used up" in any medical or industrial application! I know it can escape through even the smallest cracks, but it doesn't seem so hard to build some kind of secondary containment around medical imaging machines. Separating helium from air is trivially easy with a gas centrifuge. This could probably be done on site.
Making a little hydrogen at home (enough for a few balloons) solves the problem of having tanks of potentially explosive gas around.
Also, if hydrogen catches fire, it burns UP, not down. It can also make a fun way to end the party: light the balloons with the birthday candles!!
*** Don't be dull.***
Balloons are every kid's enjoyment for birthdays, special event or talking like an oompa-loompa, fun-hater Tom Welton. Good luck explaining that Hellium is essential to MRI equipment because it's low boiling point and keep magnets cool to kids who just want a Mylar balloon that says "Happy Birthday".
I think we need to reevaluate what's wrong and focus research towards re-engineering MRI machines or use different mediums to cool these differently. I've seen this in the news for almost the last decade and if it's such a dilemma. What's that famous Albert Einsetin quote? "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
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.
Long ago, I worked at a commercial lab where tanks of H2, 02, and N2O (nitrous oxide) were used for flame or plasma ion detectors. For fun, we used to launch "Hindenburgs" ... large trash bags filled with hydrogen plus a latex glove filled with the oxydizer and trailed by a fuse of burning paraffin film. The balloon would sail off into the night sky and detonate at a safe altitude and distance downwind. Usually. Our antics abruptly halted when one exploded prematurely just a dozen feet off the ground. The concussion and heat convinced us to give up our fun.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
This is all about pricing. If it is really a shortage then the price goes up and people waste less. The free market really does work - as long as government's are messing with it by subsidizing things. Eliminate the low cost availability of helium from the US government, and probably others, and then the price will float up to it's natural higher level. Demand will drop as will consumption.
"When you see that we're literally just letting it float into the air, and then out into space inside those helium balloons, it's just hugely frustrating". Well, it's a good thing we're not burning fossil fuel by letting cars run around in a circular track, round and round, just for the heck of it.
Underholdning.info
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.
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.
in a ridiculous helium voice saying "is this an inappropriate use of helium?"
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.
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%
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.
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.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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.
Decorative balloons are pure waste, from plastic to filler gas.
Helium is vital for welding in pure and mixed-gas processes, for example. Welding is far more important even than medical uses.
The solution is to attack the idiotic custom of party balloons, or fill 'em with compressed air then hang them in place.
One bright spot is that commercial gas providers often deny helium to non-industrial customers due to the shortage.
(Keep an eye out for full or partially full helium cylinders on Craigslist . I've bought 'em cheap then sold the contents to desperate gift shops then exchanged the empty cylinders for argon and mixed gas for my welders and made money doing it.)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Childrens party ballons are filled with MEDICAL WASTE?
Basically the big features of helium are:
Low density - good for helium balloons and airships. It's twice as dense as hydrogen gas, but that doesn't actually make much difference as it's the much greater mass of the air it's displacing that provides buoyancy, and the hydrogen's volitility calls for additional safeguards.
Low reactivity - as a noble gas it's almost completely inert, making it useful as a protective atmosphere for everything from welding to growing silicon and germanium crystals, to producing titanium and zirconium, to diluting breathing gas for deep-sea diving so oxygen doesn't destroy your lungs and cause explosions. For the last application density factors in again since you have to carry your breath-gas with you, and the next-lightest noble gas (neon) is five times denser.
Low boiling point - this is one of the currently most useful features, at 4.22K it has the lowest boiling point of any known substance - hydrogen has the next lowest and it's almost five times higher at 20.28K, which isn't nearly as useful for cooling superconductors or exploring low-temperature physics. Plus helium's low reactivity factors in again here since you don't want it to chemically react with whatever it is you're cooling off.
It also has other interesting properties which may eventually prove useful - for example it's the only known superfluid in existence.
I think there's also some special applications for the He-3 isotope beyond its usefulness in fusion research (where it takes part in some high-cross-section reactions), but I can't think of what they might be at the moment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.