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Scientists Speak Out Against Wasting Helium In Balloons
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Tom Welton, a professor of sustainable chemistry at Imperial College, London, believes that a global shortage of helium means it should be used more carefully — and since helium cools the large magnets inside MRI scanners it is wrong to use it for balloons used at children's parties. 'We're not going to run out of helium tomorrow — but on the 30 to 50 year timescale we will have serious problems of having to shut things down if we don't do something in the meantime,' says Welton. 'When you see that we're literally just letting it float into the air, and then out into space inside those helium balloons, it's just hugely frustrating. It is absolutely the wrong use of helium.' Two years ago, the shortage of helium prompted American Nobel Prize winner Robert Richardson to speak out about the huge amounts of helium wasted every day because the gas is kept artificially cheap by the U.S. government and to call for a dramatic increase in helium's price. But John Lee, chairman of the UK's Balloon Association, insists that the helium its members put into balloons is not depriving the medical profession of the gas. 'The helium we use is not pure,' says Lee. 'It's recycled from the gas which is used in the medical industry, and mixed with air. We call it balloon gas rather than helium for that reason.'"
There is a lot of Helium in the Sun, so go to the Sun and get some and bring it back. Dear Laura: Wowza, you look great!
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There may be a free-market solution. Let's float a trial balloon and see how everyone reacts.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Using hydrogen for childrens' party balloons would solve the problem and make things potentially much more exciting!
Hurry up and get those fusion plants up and running!
The notion that because gas is only 90% pure, it is useless to the medical profession is rather ridiculous.
Refining this gas back to 99.99% helium is almost trivial, compared to extracting it from sources where the helium content is in parts per million.
If there isn't a renewing source of helium, why hasn't all of it escaped into space yet? It is small enough to even seep through solid containers, given enough time. If the US has a stockpile of the stuff that it's selling off, how did they acquire it? Can't they do it again?
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").
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.
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.
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
(/. 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.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
My argument (second account, /. limits my comments on the first account)
Please take the hint.
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.
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.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
...market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature...
Gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic... nope no market in there... citation required.
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
"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.
in a ridiculous helium voice saying "is this an inappropriate use of helium?"
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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%
...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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.