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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
You consider using helium for MRI machines a waste?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
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.
The US has maintained the Strategic Helium Reserve for about ninety years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
John
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.
Note from TFA that the disagreement that Senator Cruz had with the bill was that he and the House supported the version of the bill that said that the money from Helium sales should go to defecit reduction and the bill that passed that he voted against had the money going for national parks and "environmental issues."
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!
Helium isn't produced from natural gas, it's found trapped underground in natural gas fields. So unless you can power a hydrogen fusion plant with renewable natural gas, we only have what we can find in the ground for the time being.
So he voted against a bill that earmarked the funds in favor for a version that uses the funds for "deficit reduction" which is political speak for money into my pork project. Funding is fungible and no one knows how to use smoke and mirrors to hide budgeting irregularities like a congress person.
At least he didn't waste anyone's time by filibustering it and then voting for it immediately afterwards.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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 am pretty sure that Helium is not produced from natural gas but is extracted from it. Helium is produced and trapped underground via radioactive decay and it happens to get trapped in the same areas as the natural gas gets trapped. The gases being produced in landfills via decay are not helium. Just because you have natural gas doesn't mean you have helium.
"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.
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you are free associating and winding up at an incongruous thought
helium is associated only with old, deep natural gas deposits. it collects there because radioactive elements decay deep in the earth, releasing helium, and that helium has to go somewhere. if it doesn't percolate up and vent into the atmosphere, it collects with likewise entrapped methane gas deposits
meanwhile, natural gas from landfills would not have this helium, as it is a much more shallow and much more recent source of methane, it hasn't been around long enough to gather very slowly formed byproducts of radioactive decay
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Helium isn't produced from natural gas, it's found trapped underground in natural gas fields. So unless you can power a hydrogen fusion plant with renewable natural gas, we only have what we can find in the ground for the time being.
OTOH, the earth creates a great deal of new helium every year, as a byproduct of the decay of various radioactive elements in the crust and core. It's not an unlimited resource, but neither is it something we're easily going to deplete even though close to 100% of the helium we use for various purposes ends up being released into the atmosphere and floats off into space.
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Funny. I feel that environmental issues is political speak for putting money into pork projects like Solyndra.
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.
National parks have a fixed budget. For FY14 they only requested $2.6 billion dollars (an increase of $ 56.6 million dollars from last year). Even with this budget they had to lower their employment levels by 242 FTE (basically a labor force reduction of approximately 242 people). The NPS manages 84.4 million acres of protected lands spread across every state in the US. They existed since 1916 and their total operating budget is barely a blip on the radar inside a $3.8 trillion dollar budget. Since 42 national parks have or will soon have natural gas wells, it seems only fair that the national park system have some financial benefit from having to monitor these projects (Helium is extracted from natural gas, especially from states like Wyoming where the Grand Tetons are located).
Pork projects tend to be a short-term investment for the benefit of a very small region. Like a new bridge in Alaska, Light Industrial Zone (with only a single customer) in a southern state, a project to document the history of minority colleges in the deep south, or 22 very expensive fighter jets that the DOD says they don't need.
"Deficit reduction" actually means if we get 16 billion dollars of income from helium, we have 16 billion dollars to spend on anything we like before we reach that imaginary debt ceiling.
You didn't notice they used the term "deficit reduction" instead of "debt reduction". If it was for debt reduction then all the money would go towards the principal of debt already owed. This is not the case.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Natural decay only produces so much helium so fast, much like petroleum and coal. It's definitely possible to use up what we've got and then not have enough for what's important.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
No, but we can deplete all the helium that is economical to extract. Then prices will go up. A lot.
Oddly enough, that's essentially what at least 2 of the big 3 industrial gas suppliers suggested during the month or so leading up to the new bill - that they would pay 100% of the costs to run and maintain the facility. But the government (or at least BLM) told them they couldn't do that.
Once it is gone, it is irrevocably gone. We should be a LOT more careful with this resource.