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Congress Reaches Agreement ... On Helium
Despite the wrangling that's resulted in a government shut-down, Congress managed last week to agree on one thing: Helium. Reader gbrumfiel writes: "The U.S. holds vast helium reserves which it sells to scientists and private industry. According to NPR, a new law was needed to allow the helium to continue to flow. Congress passed it late last week, but only after a year-long lobbying effort and intense debate (and in the end, Senator Ted Cruz opposed the measure). Can a new bipartisanship rise out of this cooperation? Or will hot air prevail on Capitol Hill? (Insert your helium joke here.)" Apparently, helium is not yet so scarce that it's not available in balloons at the grocery store.
Children's balloons use recycled or low grade helium which can't be used for other more worthy purposes. It's not really a waste.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Thank god we have politicians in America willing to stand up for not doing their jobs.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
How did the U.S. start stockpiling helium? I see no mention in the article of the actual process for collecting and storing it.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
You consider using helium for MRI machines a waste?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I consider the number of machines we keep constantly running at super-cooled temperatures compared to the overall usage rate a waste.
I plan to do some deep Scuba dives next month and I will be breathing high quality, pure Helium mixed in with my Oxygen and Nitrogen to prevent Nitrogen narcosis at depth. I'm glad the supply will continue in the future and I hope there is a plan to replace what the US Government has stockpiled.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So you think the supply outweighs the demand, can you back that claim up? I was under the impression most hospitals were profitable and would not keep around an expensive machine if it weren't being used. However, I just did a quick search and cannot find any evidence either way.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Apparently, helium is not yet so scarce that it's not available in balloons at the grocery store.
Depends where you look. Many outlets around the region of Montreal stopped selling helium balloons because of the scarcity. Some voluntarily due to local hospitals having difficulties keeping their MRIs runnings and some due to prices going up.
If helium can be produced from renewable natural gas, for example landfills, why not sell off the entire stockpile?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The Strategic Helium Reserve began in the early 20th century as a gas supply for airships, and because the prime source of coolant for the space/missile programs of the Cold War. Most of our helium is collected during natural gas production.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Comparison to any other first world nation?
Profitable doesn't imply that it isn't consuming a resource. It just means that the price charged covers the current costs of that resource, and still yields profits to the machine owners. As the supply of He dwindles, its price will go up, and MRI machines will become increasingly expensive to operate. Those costs will be passed to the patients (and their insurance companies.) Eventually the procedures will become unaffordable, and some hospitals will shut them down as a result.
Meanwhile, engineers will continue to look at alternate cooling solutions, such as liquid hydrogen. As hydrogen is the most abundant element on the planet, we won't be limited by availability. However, the hazards of liquid hydrogen will certainly increase risks, and those will come with their own costs.
So the lesson our management is taking away from all this is: get your MRIs now, while they're cheap! :-)
John
The reality is as long as America wants a for-profit health-care system, and each hospital is an independent entity, you're never going to fix this.
There is no room in the US for efficiencies in the system, because the system is being ran as a bunch of separate businesses. Nobody is going to stop running their very profitable MRI machine to conserve helium or for any other reason unless there's a benefit to them.
In the parts of the world which have a single-payer public system, they mostly shake their heads over the US and their attitude to this.
Your system is set up so that whoever can pay the most can get treated first, and the rest are welcome to suffer and go without.
For a 'civilized' country, America is shockingly indifferent to the fate of the rest of the populace. Which means any time the US does something altruistic, you have to assume there's a financial angle you're not seeing.
America has elevated being a selfish bastard to a religion. Which is what this is about is one group loudly saying "we should be completely selfish bastards and fuck the rest of the country".
Which in some circles makes your Republicans essentially terrorists because they're goal is to more or less undermine society and let the rest burn. In their mind, as long as the rich stay rich and government is small, the rest of the consequences are irrelevant.
So as long as your politicians idealize profits at any expense, and not giving a shit about people, this is what you'll get. And, quite frankly, what you deserve.
"I'm cranky and off-topic. Listen to me because of how much I hate those I disagree with"
One problem in American healthcare is that, despite designs to the contrary, there is little intelligence or justification behind capital equipment purchases. That is, a hospital is going to buy and use an MRI machine whether there is sufficient medical demand for it or not. As you say, such machines are expensive, and so in order to be profitable, they need to be used. At the same time, there is a phenomenon that excess capacity in a system, particularly medical systems, tends to get used whether it is needed or not. Result: more MRI scanners are out there than are strictly needed for diagnostic purposes. But, being out there, they tend to be used to their fullest capacity, which means a lot of unnecessary MRI scans going on, which is a lot of unnecessary medical spending. Hospital planners then look at all of their MRI machines being used 20 hours a day, and their competing hospital down the road installing a new machine, and suddenly decide that they, too, need a new machine.
This is one reason why the U.S. has per capita medical spending several times that of the rest of the developed world.
Helium production is just lacking. There is more than enough helium - at reasonable concentrations - in many natural gas fields to cover all of the demand on the planet for literally thousands of years, at current rates.
There are also some helium extraction plants either under construction or in the process of coming on line right now. There's a new one, in Qatar, which will account for 25% of the world's production when it's fully on line. Russia is expanding their own production, and India is starting to build helium extraction into their natural gas production lines.
The only thing that kept the big natural gas producers in the US from adding helium extraction equipment to their production stream was the artificially-low price mandated by the Federal helium reserve. Some US companies already have their extraction equipment in use, and others are starting to build them. It's not hard - basically 1920s tech.
"I'm cranky, off-topic, and immediately conclude people who aren't as dumb as me are a category of people I hate."
This is America. Competition among hospitals is a big part of what makes our healthcare system the envy of the developed world.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Does every competing hospital in my region need to run its own MRI machine(and yes, that's the biggest use of helium) wasting dozens of kilograms of liquid helium a year? That won't lower the price of my procedure substantially, but it does throw away literal tons of the most irreplaceable resource on the planet.
When it counts, you can always count on congress to come together, and do the wrong thing.
If it's a closed system then none is wasted.
"Dozens of kilograms" is nothing, eg. look at how much The Mythbusters have wasted over the years....
No sig today...
They aren't closed systems. That's the end of that.
I've heard people say this not as a joke before.
Federal grants to buy machines such as MRI mean getting one can be dirt cheap for a rural or poverty zone hospital. However, by act of congress, these grants are for the equipment only, not for training or paying for operators or maintainers, which still has to be funded locally, and is an ongoing cost that can eventually eclipse all the original costs. Having the item offline for lack of trained personnel by definition means actual working supply may or may not exceed demand, but if you include the stuff that is installed and just awaiting actual workers, (or in many cases, still sitting in crates), you get a much bigger number for supply. A real economic analysis would also have to include situations where scarce technician support means a hospital or clinic gets to run a machine for, say, 4 hours every second wednesday, and that one area tech gets paid (inefficiently) to drive to multiple locations each day..
How this affects helium use is a different issue. I'd figure if it's not hooked up yet, it's not being kept supercooled while just sitting around, but if it's being run on a very part time basis, it probably entails a seriously less efficient use of Helium..
Who is John Cabal?
This is America. ..our healthcare system the envy of the developed world.
I'm not envious, I live in the UK and our healthcare system works fine, thank you very much - and it's much cheaper per person.
The government is hard at work wrecking it at the moment but, the NHS being the biggest organisation in the country, a wrecking job like that takes time and it's still going strong.
If He were a little more expensive, a helium recovery system would be economical. Those machines are feasible in most scientific institutions in Europe, University physics and chemistry departments typically share a mains of helium reflow pipes, leading to a huge rubber bladder, and when that's full (once a day or whatever) they spin up the compressors and liquify the stuff again.
The only reason that politicians idolize profits is because the voters do the same, and it wins the election. It is a conditioned reflex. You won't get any better politicians without voting for them. They don't just waltz in and take over.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
is *through the planet core*. So far, we've hardly scratched the surface, so to speak. The vast riches beneath the crust are there for the taking.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Here's a Chemical and Engineering News article from last month about it.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i37/Helium-Headache.html
The problem isn't the amount of helium in the earth. It's the dislocation caused by the government selling it at an artificially low price for some years, thus undercutting building new refining capacity. This current mess that we just mostly avoided would have been from suddenly shutting off the government supply and causing a price/availability problem.
Full Disclosure: This effects me directly. I work with Dean Olson, the guy quoted in the article. Unavailability of helium (the price wasn't so bad, but it just wasn't available. i.e. The supplier says it costs N dollars a liter of liquid helium, but you need X liters, and we have one fourth that amount available.) kept a new NMR system here offline for some months, thus delaying a bunch of research (And of course, that has a knock on effect of increased cost down the line. You have to keep paying the salaries of the researchers while they wait and do something else.)
Hopefully we can get back to our usual form of governmental funding neurosis soon rather than reaching a new and interesting level of insanity.
Don't ever make the mistake of linking medical profitability with ANY other metric in the US. It's completely divorced from reality and impossible to pin down.
Rather like the US Government budget. And people say we don't have socialized healthcare.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Or will hot air prevail on Capitol Hill? (Insert your methane joke here.)"
FTFY
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Seems pretty energetically expensive. Is He in Europe so expensive that compressing it down is economically feasible given your traditionally high energy costs? Or is compression not that difficult (from a power expenditure view)?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You consider using helium for MRI machines a waste?
Yes. There is little evidence that they lead to better health outcomes for patients, especially if you consider the alternatives. Heart disease is our number one killer, but the most effective remedy is not fancy technology that can build a 3D model of the arteries, but low dose aspirin at a cost of $4 per year. But there is no profit in that, so we get the fancy technology instead.
Profitable doesn't imply that it isn't consuming a resource. It just means that the price charged covers the current costs of that resource, and still yields profits to the machine owners. As the supply of He dwindles, its price will go up, and MRI machines will become increasingly expensive to operate. Those costs will be passed to the patients (and their insurance companies.) Eventually the procedures will become unaffordable, and some hospitals will shut them down as a result.
Meanwhile, engineers will continue to look at alternate cooling solutions, such as liquid hydrogen. As hydrogen is the most abundant element on the planet, we won't be limited by availability. However, the hazards of liquid hydrogen will certainly increase risks, and those will come with their own costs.
So the lesson our management is taking away from all this is: get your MRIs now, while they're cheap! :-)
Not only that, but helium is basically subsidized by the US government. Our consumption of it is higher than it should be, because the cost is artificially low.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The most effective remedy is to get people to stop pigging down pizza and fries, but every time the government tries to do something about that someone starts screaming 'nanny state!' and 'The Gubmint wants to stop parents raising their children!' That, and the corn industry has a very, very good lobby.
Because flying someone to a hospital 2+ hours away to get an emergency MRI is a good idea? MRIs have become fairly regular such that a hospital isn't quite a hospital without, more like a glorified clinic.
[...] Meanwhile, engineers will continue to look at alternate cooling solutions, such as liquid hydrogen. [...]
This doesn't work. There's no viable substitute for helium, not even hydrogen. The reason helium is so useful is that it boils at 4 K (by far the coldest boiling point of any substance), remains liquid all the way down to absolute zero at standard pressure, and becomes superfluid at 2 K (the only bulk superfluid achievable on Earth).
The boiling point is important because that's how cryogenic cooling works: when you use a circulating liquid coolant, the temperature of the (coolant plus apparatus) system cannot exceed the boiling point of the coolant until the coolant has entirely boiled away, so you get a very consistent and predictable temperature (right up until the coolant is gone). 4 K is below the critical temperature of the most common materials for superconducting electromagnets: niobium-titanium (10 K, relatively cheap) and niobium-tin (18 K, highest known T_c for a traditional superconductor). Hydrogen is not a substitute, because it boils at 20 K; that's noticeably too warm for any traditional superconductor, and even if it weren't, superconductors can handle stronger magnetic fields the colder you chill them, so they'd be less useful in an MRI machine. And you can't chill hydrogen much colder than its boiling point before you hit its melting point, 14 K, at which point it stops circulating and becomes much less useful as a coolant.
The superfluidity is not quite as useful day to day, but it's used to study the behavior of other quantum mechanical systems, such as neutron star interiors, that we can't recreate in a lab. It also forms a rigorous analogy with superconductivity, especially in the case of fermionic He-3, so it gives us a chance to play with a bulk fluid that propagates fluid currents in the same way that superconductors propagate electrical currents. Nothing else can replace it for this purpose.
(Side note: helium is not a truly expendable resource. Of the helium present on Earth, not a single gram is left over from the formation of the solar system; Earth doesn't have the mass to retain helium in its atmosphere. All our helium comes from the alpha particle decay of heavier radioactive elements, like radon. When the alpha particles relax and become neutral helium gas, the gas is trapped by the same gas-impermeable rock formations that trap natural gas. However, the natural recharge rate from radioactive decay is much slower than the rate that we're extracting it and venting it, so if we don't curtail our waste we're going to run out regardless.)
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
So, the older, less efficient, and smaller system boils off a bit of helium only when the MRI is actually collecting data, and the monstrous new scanner nearly never needs to have helium added to it.
Although it's getting scarce, it's still very cheap.
I went out to buy a pound of helium, and they wound up paying me $50.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
The energy use is mainly a function of the quantity and not the pressure (within reasonable limits).
I don't see how a hospital that provides emergency services can get around having an MRI machine. I don't think "We'd love to see what's going on with your child's brain as a result of the crash, but we thought buying an MRI machine would be a waste of helium" is really going to fly.
Once it is gone, it is irrevocably gone. We should be a LOT more careful with this resource.
How much contact have you really had with the NHS? People I know in the UK who've actually had nontrivial health problems (back surgery and heart problems) weren't happy with it at all. One guy described it as "third world quality". I get that the NHS has its fans, but mostly when I ask why what I hear is "when I have a sore throat I just show up and flash my card".
Considering it costs millions of dollars for the installation of an MRI in a hospital, and it produces tens of thousands of dollars a day in revenue for the hospital, and that before this agreement the price of liquid helium has jumped to $25-30 per litre from $8 last year., I doubt that it would significantly affect the cost or availability of MRIs.
It takes quite a bit of time and liquid helium just to cool any cryostat not to mention a full body MRI. The larger the thermal mass the more time and helium you'll need. The ideal is to pre-cool with liquid nitrogen, then do a helium fill but even so - you still have probably 100+ kg of rf coils and magnets. I imagine manufacturers of the MRI units also design them to only go through a limited number of cool down / warm up phases considering you have in-vacuum assemblies at low temperatures. So eventually after x number of warm up / cool downs a superconducting coil may no longer be superconducting and a quench will occur. That's a costly repair and serious down time. This isn't my primary field of work but I'm familiar with similar technologies and these are typically the issues I've heard about.
If you have any sources about the number of machines and usage feel free to share I'd be curious to know.
of course they all reach agreement on Helium it's the one thing they all have in common, and they are full of GAS
So many Americans actually believe this that it's more tragedy than comedy.
I meant... helium