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 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's also a byproduct of nuclear reactions/decay.
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?
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!
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.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
The sun is pretty bright and hot. We'd have to go there at night.
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
My argument (second account, /. limits my comments on the first account)
Please take the hint.
If comes from upsidasium mines in Frostbite Falls.
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.
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.
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!
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
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
XML - A clever joke would be here if