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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
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
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."
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.
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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.
"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."
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
Funny. I feel that environmental issues is political speak for putting money into pork projects like Solyndra.
To be somewhat more precise, there isn't a mandated price, in the sense of formal price controls. But the federal helium reserve accumulated huge stockpiles, and has been slowly selling them off since 1996, which has kept the price low by flooding the market. On the one hand, that discourages private investment, but on the other hand, it's not clear it's entirely a bad thing: if we don't actually need this helium reserve lying around forever, selling it off slowly seems like a reasonable thing to do.
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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...
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.