Scientists Speak Out Against Wasting Helium In Balloons 589
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.'"
I have the answer (Score:3, Funny)
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!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I have the answer (Score:5, Informative)
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
Helium features (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I have the answer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I have the answer (Score:5, Informative)
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.
How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Funny)
There may be a free-market solution. Let's float a trial balloon and see how everyone reacts.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Funny)
And what a lesson about the dangers of smoking it could teach our kids!
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
The question that sellers of balloon ask is 'could I get sued over this?'
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Informative)
The Hindenburg was designed for helium, and hydrogen was only used because supplies of helium were withheld from the operators for political reasons. If the Hindenburg had been designed with hydrogen in mind instead of inert helium the accident may never have happened.
I'm not going to say using hydrogen in a dirigible is a good idea but hydrogen shouldn't be completely written off as an operational substitute for helium because of one fiasco in the 1930s.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
The Hindenburg was designed for helium, and hydrogen was only used because supplies of helium were withheld from the operators for political reasons. If the Hindenburg had been designed with hydrogen in mind instead of inert helium the accident may never have happened.
I'm not going to say using hydrogen in a dirigible is a good idea but hydrogen shouldn't be completely written off as an operational substitute for helium because of one fiasco in the 1930s.
The Hindenburg, and all the other Zeppelin airships had also done hundreds of trips for years, even with hydrogen.
The incident is burned into the public psyche not because it was particularly horrorific, or because it was some example of bad design held up for criticism -- its notable for one reason only. It was the first case of broad media overhype. It was the great-grand-daddy of all the shit we see on the "news" today.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Funny)
I think that hydrogen birthday balloons together with birthday candles would be a lot of fun.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Funny)
Damn straight.
My dad was from a small town in the southwest founded by his ancestors, a town whose major industry was farming tumbleweeds, juniper, mesquite, and other naturally occurring firewoods and tinder. Fireworks were understandably illegal.
Most residents were kinfolk in some way or another, including the town marshal, who, many years ago, not knowing us out-of-staters well, misguidedly invited us to his son's birthday party.
Uncle Buzz was fairly skilled at extracting hydrogen from mixing household chemicals, and was pleased to offer his services in inflating a small flotilla of balloons for us. We saw no need to disclose to the good Marshal they were filled with gas less noble than Helium.
Come time, we all sing happy birthday. Young Sam blows out the candles, and we lit the balloon strings and released the bundle.
That kid's all grown up now, but he tells me he never had a better birthday present.
We still haven't been invited back, though.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
I am drifting dreadfully off-topic, but I have to ask: Was this incident what inspired you to choose the alias "flaming error?"
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Interesting)
The incident is burned into the public psyche not because it was particularly horrorific, or because it was some example of bad design held up for criticism -- its notable for one reason only. It was the first case of broad media overhype. It was the great-grand-daddy of all the shit we see on the "news" today.
Actually, it was publicized for the same reason the Titanic sinking was -- a bunch of rich people died. There had been other airship accidents, and other naval accidents, but it wasn't newsworthy because nobody "important" had died... until then (respectively).
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Informative)
It was not coated in explosives. It was not coated in thermite, either. These are myths. Which should be obvious given the number of pieces of Hindenburg skin that were recovered and sold as souveniers; they self-extinguished as they fell.
When the Mythbusters tested this out, they got "a" skin reaction, but nothing like when they used actual thermite - and on top of that, they had to totally bias the test in terms of a skin reaction, including having orders of magnitude higher of a skin/fuel ratio than the actual Hindenberg and only slowly feeding in the hydrogen to give the skin a chance to burn instead of just being ripped part almost instantaneously.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Interesting)
To back up the claim that the skin of the Hindenburg initiated the fire I will site Engineering Disasters - Lessons to be Learned, by Don Lawson. ISBN 1-86058-459-4, pages 3 to 19. One quote from this section of the book:
"Addison Brian's tests
"In 1994 Dr Bain managed to get samples of the outer covering of the Hindenburg and carried out tests. The outer covering of cellulose acetate butyrate dope and fine aluminum powder was similar to the rocket fuel he was familiar with at NASA. He found that the aluminum and dope had bled through the fabric in places and had combined with the iron oxide on the inner surface. The resulting mixture is similar to a thermite fuse mixture used to achieve high temperatures in welding.
"Dr Bain tested samples of similarly doped fabric for their potential to be ignited by an electrostatic discharge. When an arc struck down onto the fabric samples, it only resulted in local damage. Airships struck by lightning had shown similar localized damage. When the arc was parallel to the surface of the fabric, the electrical energy was sufficient to ignite the sample, which was quickly consumed by fire."
The reference provided for the above quote was: Bain, A. and Schmidtchen, U. (2000) Afterglow of a Myth: Why and How the Hindenburg Burnt, DWV, January, www.dwvinfo.de
Other parts of this section go into further detail, including other hypothesizes for what caused the disaster. If you read Engineering Disasters, he does not claim that they mystery is completely solved. Indeed, It will probably never be solved with 100% certainty. But the theory of lightning igniting the flammable skin appears to be the most probable cause of the start of the fire. Obviously once the ship was on fire the hydrogen burnt, no doubt making the fire far worse. Who knows, maybe Helium would have put out the fire...
Do you have a source better than Mythbusters (and better than Wikipedia and Snopes)? If so, I would be interested....
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, if you want to go there, here you go: The Hindenburg Fire: Hydrogen or Incendiary Paint? [colorado.edu] (Dessler, Overs, & Appleby, 2005). And here's a more detailed writeup [colorado.edu] on the same thing.
To go into the particular aspects you mentioned:
1) "Rocket fuel" when not contained is actually not particularly intense-burning on its own. It only burns "like a rocket" when the pressure is confined.
2) Even rocket fuels would burn only a tiny fraction as fast as the Hindenburg burned.
3) The mix is not at all correct for a rocket fuel or for thermite; the ratios are all wrong.
4) The discharge Bain used to ignite the fabric is many orders of magnitude more intense than the method he theorized to produce it, and could ignite almost anything.
5) Any spark produced by his proposed method would jump in the wrong direction, a direction he says wouldn't work, and would nonetheless be three orders of magnitude too weak to ignite the skin.
6) The chemicals used are rated as self-extingishing, and in fact, countless fabrics of hindenburg skin did self-extingish.
7) Even in Bain's burn, driven by his powerful ignition source, for the skin to have burned fast enough to represent the Hindenburg burn, his sample would have had to be consumed in a mere 2 milliseconds, like flash paper. At the rate his sample burned, the Hindenburg would have taken 40 hours to be consumed.
8) The skin of the Hindenburg, and many other airships, were struck by lightning many times without ignition. Airship disasters tended only to happen when the ships were venting hydrogen (as the Hindenburg was).
9) The claim that helium airships burned the same is false. Bain cited the Macon, but the Macon crashed into the pacific with no fire; late while floating on the water, gasoline from the control car burned part of the wreckage in a small, relatively insignficant fire. The Navy blimp also had a gasoline fire, and the damage was both slow and confied only to where the gasoline fires were hitting.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Informative)
The statement is correct, but the Mythbusters pop pseudo-science is, as usual, a very poor source.
The subject is treated exhaustively in the material linked to here [colorado.edu]. The Dessler [colorado.edu] and Overs/Dessler/Appleby [colorado.edu] papers are well researched, expertly informed, and painstakingly tested. They THOROUGHLY debunk the silly incendiary paint theory.
The envelope could and did burn as part of the HYDROGEN inferno, contributed substantially to the energy liberated in the fire, gave (together with the gas cells and other substances) the fire its brilliant color and added smoke, but absolutely did not constitute the initially ignited fuel, or drive the ferocious rapidity of the fire.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Informative)
The statement is correct, but the Mythbusters pop pseudo-science is, as usual, a very poor source.
Some people keep saying that, but never seem to state why. They hypothesize, test, and make a conclusion based on the results. Where flaws in methodology are pointed out, they revisit and correct the flaws. They are not always exhaustive, but if you think all 'serious' papers are, you've never refereed papers.
The most valid criticism is that their sample sizes tend to be small. If that concerns you, go apply for a grant and repeat with a larger sample. Can't get a grant for a test with a larger sample size? Neither could they.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? Apparently you never had ANY respect for the mythbusters...or at least no enough respect to try to understand how the show works. They don't just fudge things like that and say "see, it happened just like the myth". When they don't get the expected reaction under the real life conditions, they then say "well, what conditions WOULD it take to make this myth happen?" They then ramp up things over and over again until they actually get the expected reaction. Then they say "the myth supposedly happens under condition A, but really you need 10*A + B + C to make it happen....myth busted".
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
Mythbusters is pseudoscience at best. It's entertaining, which is its designed intent, but it galls me when Internet people hold it up as a paragon of scientific thought.
Its good for non-scientists to watch, because it promotes logical thought and encourages testing of ideas.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
So they do science, and they make it fun, and for a lot of the things they test they don't need the kind of accuracy that "real" scientist do for "real" science. In fact i'd argue that they're at least as accurate as an average kid's science project for school, and are you going to argue that we shouldn't reach kids science in school because clearly they're not able to maintain appropriate levels of accuracy?
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly! Use liquid hydrogen to cool the large magnets inside MRI scanners.
Liquid hydrogen boils at 20.28 K. MgB2 [wikipedia.org] superconducts at 39 K. (So neon would also work, but it has problems similar to helium.)
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen embrittles metals. There are some alloys that can mitigate the embrittlement but it's easier to use helium.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When cooling superconductors, there is more than just passing the critical temperature. In addition to there being a critical temperature above which superconductivity stops, there is a critical magnetic field that will stop superconductivity if exceeded. Lowering the temperature even further beyond the critical temperature will raise the critical magnetic field, allowing more current to flow through the wires and stronger magnets to be made with less material. There are plenty of devices where you will
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Interesting)
This is indeed a good idea. A baloon filled with hydrogen is not much more dangerous than one filled with air. If you hold it over a flame, it will make about the same pop as an air-filled baloon. The 0.3 g of hydrogen in a baloon is not enough to produce any serious amount heat as it burns. (We did this back in high-school chemistry class. We had an awesome teacher.) Hydrogen is cheaper than helium, and does not diffuse as easily through the baloon surface, so baloons would last longer.
There is some danger in the handling of cylinders. If hydrongen leaks out in a room with poor ventilation, there is a risk of explosion. However, the same is true for propane/butane gas which is used in kitchen stoves, and most people seem to be able to handle that.
Another danger is when stupid people inhale baloon gas and asphyxiate. With helium, this problem is commonly solved by adding some oxygen to the mix. Hydrogen cannot be safely mixed with oxygen, so you'd either have to tell the stupid people not to do that, or accept a slight decline in the stupid population as they figure it out for themselves.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Informative)
That would be a good argument, except helium diffuses out of the baloon much quicker than hydrogen does (because of its even smaller molecular size.)
I even mentioned this in my original post.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with hydrogen is not that it's flammable (pure hydrogen is not very explosive) but that it's very hard to contain because of its small molecular size. Balloons would have to be made of expensive materials.
Actually the He atom is much smaller than the H2 molecule and difuses much easier. Helium difuses quickly through pretty much anything.
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:5, Informative)
French, from Medieval Latin inflammabilis, from Latin inflammare
First Known Use: 1605
Origin of FLAMMABLE
Latin flammare to flame, set on fire, from flamma
First Known Use: 1813
-- from online Merriam-Webster.
So there!
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Insightful)
Next you'll claim asleep doesn't mean without sleep.
Re: (Score:3)
First, he's quoting from a book. You may want to try reading one someday.
Second, Natural Gas is lighter than air.
Get a clue.
H! (Score:5, Funny)
Using hydrogen for childrens' party balloons would solve the problem and make things potentially much more exciting!
Re:H! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:H! (Score:5, Funny)
di-hyrdrous monoxide? Do you know how many people that kills each day?
Re:H! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:H! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:H! (Score:5, Informative)
This guy is living in a fantasy world. Helium use as a lifting gas in *all forms* is only 7% of helium use. Of that, party balloons are just a fraction. MRIs, on the other hand, use up 28% of helium consumption. And how could they possibly use so much? Because they do essentially nothing to recover it as it boils off.
Perhaps they should clean up their glass house before they start throwing stones?
Also, it's not like helium will become unavailable as we use up current stocks. It'll just increase in price by 1-2 orders of magnitude as we have to switch to getting it from chilling it out of the atmosphere in tiny quantities, the same way we recover other nobel gasses (but requiring more concentration). Now, of course that sucks, but it means that people who run MRI machines and do other such tasks will be forced to clean up their acts concerning helium recovery instead of simply casting blame on others.
Re:H! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, helium exists even at the surface. But only at about 5 parts per million. But hey, we recover neon at 18ppm (it's rare for the same reason as helium - it escapes). Neon costs about $2k USD per kg. So to extrapolate linearly, you'd get about $7k per kg. Helium used to be cheaper, but today it's about $500/kg.
On the other hand, you'd be using much larger volume production, and there may be some tricks to recover it more cheaply than just a linear difference would suggest, so perhaps more like $4k USD per kg would be achieved. One can hope that it won't be too dear.
Re: (Score:3)
Helium and neon are 5 and 18 ppm by volume, but neon is 5 times heavier. If you extrapolate linearly, the price per kg would be $35k per kg.
But you can't extrapolate linearly (as has already been pointed out) because the boiling points are different. A better approximation would be that the cost of cooling is inversely proportional to the boiling point. This is approximately a factor of 6, so the price would be over $200k per kg.
Re:H! (Score:4, Informative)
You don't have to liquidy helium to isolate it; you have to liquify everything else. That said, helium is often desired in liquid form, since its largest use is cryogenics.
Re:H! (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer is don't make helium for sale to party stores.
The legitimate users of helium would have no problems going through the necessary actions to prove they have a need to buy it - after all buying an MRI is an enormous expense. But it's ridiculous that helium - an inordinately valuable resource at the moment - is just being sold off for parties because the US strategic reserve of the stuff is being dumped onto the market by Congress.
We all benefit from it being cheap, but only if it's used responsibly.
There's no pressing need for lighter-then-air gases to be a feature at parties at all.
Re: (Score:3)
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/04/exploding-hydrogen-balloons-at-armenian-political-rally-injure-many/ [rawstory.com]
apparently it doesn't work out so well if you use a lot of them. I'm not sure there's a good solution for this, might just have to wait for advances in materials. Carbon fiber vacuum balloons could work maybe... Maybe. They'd have to be pretty big though.
Re: (Score:3)
Hydrogen is flammable, but slowing combustion is simply a matter of mixing it with some other gas that interrupts oxidation. Race car tires are filled with Nitrogen so that a blow out won't feed a fire. Carbon dioxide is also a common industrial gas which displaces oxygen.
Here's a list blatantly lifted from WP:
Reduction of heat:
HFC-227ea (MH227, FM-200),
Novec 1230, HFC-125 (ECARO-25),
FS 49 C2
Reduction or isolation of oxygen:
Argonite / IG-55 (ProI
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Race car tires are filled with Nitrogen instead of compressed air because compressed is rife with water vapor, which expands when it heats up. This changes the pressure inside the tire, which can drastically affect handling characteristics over the course of a race, which is a Bad Thing. Using Nitrogen to fill the tires negates this, it has nothing to do with fire safety.
Re:H! (Score:5, Interesting)
Pure hydrogen doesn't go "boom" in normal air. Sure, it will result in nice flames, but normal air doesn't supply enough oxygen for a big boom.
I've tried both, hydrogen and a mix of hydrogen and oxygen as a teen, and now guess which one resulted in a one week detention by my parents.
Re:H! (Score:5, Funny)
You didn't read that post carefully. He didn't say BOOM. He said BOM. I have heard many hydrogen balloons exploding and they all said BOM!
Don't do this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Jokes aside, might there be a mix of hydrogen, helium, other gases that would still float a balloon but still be (relatively) non-combustible?
No. The only gases that will provide significant buoyancy in air are H2, He, CH4, NH3, H2O, and Ne. H2 and CH4 are flammable. NH3 is corrosive. H2O will condense. Neon is way to expensive. The only gas left is Helium.
"Simple" Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"Simple" Solution (Score:5, Informative)
I'm touched, but I was joking. We'd never get a significant amount of helium before we boiled all our oceans in waste heat.
Re: (Score:3)
Problem with that is that those fancy aneutronic fusion reactors they really want to build are going to need large quantities of helium-3 themselves.
Or cheap and plentiful boron.
'balloon gas' (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:'balloon gas' (Score:5, Informative)
It's entirely possible that the price of purified He is currently so low that re-purifying it isn't cost effective.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not only possible; it's a simple fact. Helium is so cheap in the USA that nobody bothers to recycle it. In Europe and elsewhere, helium is more expensive, and recycling is SOP.
Re: (Score:3)
The price has been artificially deflated, since the US stockpiled helium in the National Helium Reserve [wikipedia.org]. The whole thing has been declared too expensive and Congress ordered it sold off in 2007 at any price so of course the price of helium has plummeted and usage shot up like it'll last forever. Of course it won't, and one day we'll be back to collecting it from gas fields and it'll be worth 50x to 100x what it currently is.
Re: (Score:3)
Which tells me that it all WILL be fixed... but not until the current stockpiles are depleted and the price returns to it's "natural" level. Once again, free market works, but the government stepped in and screwed it all up for all of civilization.
Where does it come from? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Where does it come from? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Where does it come from? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where does it come from? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Where does it come from? (Score:5, Funny)
Life is supposed to get Better, not worse! (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Life is supposed to get Better, not worse! (Score:5, Insightful)
Waaah!!!! First world problems suck!!!! Fuck starving people; where's my helium balloons?
Hilarious.
Re: (Score:3)
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
You can go 120 mph or so in a car rated at 50 mpg or so (though not getting that at 120 mph). I drive a 1.3l that goes 60 mph with ease, so long as it isn't loaded up with 5 adults and going uphill. Though for hills and passing it does make lots of noise and doesn't accelerate briskly at those speeds. In fact, the tricks that improve mileage mostly improve efficiency, and thus aren't tradeoffs for acceleration at 60 mph, but improve it (aerodynamics, engine efficiency).
Because of health concerns, I shouldn't salt my food to taste, or eat sugary treats,
In general, if you aren't pre-dispo
The actual solution... (Score:5, Interesting)
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").
Re:The actual solution... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, not quite.
The reason helium is cheap is becaue the US had a HUUUUUGE strategic stockpile during the cold war (many times the total yearly helium production, IIRC), that is being sold off, massivly pushing down the price.
And it is not that easy with the reseves. Helium shortages are a reality! I have colleques that could not fill their helium cryostats because Air Liquide told them that currently they cannot deliver, as hospitals got first priority and the supply was to thin for weeks. They ended up renting a truck to carry dewars from the other end of the country!
Re:The actual solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
which has nothing at all to do with the balloon gas grade crap being sold for children's balloons. the only shortage we have is because most helium is vented at wells. The amount used in balloons is miniscule and doesn't matter either way. This stupid professor is advocating symbolism over substance.
Re: (Score:3)
why bother, 75% of the helium from wells is vented into the atmosphere. the waste product sold as "balloon gas" doesn't matter.
Yes, let the price rise (Score:5, Interesting)
Turn the issue around! (Score:4, Insightful)
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!!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
kids will have fun whenever the adults give them the attention they deserve. including when they will be forced to play with balloons filled with regular air.
please think before you teach your kids to be wasteful.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We should redesign medical equipment and phase out existing medical equipment because we don't want to explain the lack of helium balloons to children? I think your priorities are a little out of whack.
How about we use the helium for the MRIs, and teach children not to expect floating balloons. Balloon animals are a good alternative, if balloons need to be involved at all. I've got four young kids, and they're pretty easy to please.
Summary: (Score:5, Insightful)
Pricing (Score:3)
This is all about pricing. If it is really a shortage then the price goes up and people waste less. The free market really does work - as long as government's are messing with it by subsidizing things. Eliminate the low cost availability of helium from the US government, and probably others, and then the price will float up to it's natural higher level. Demand will drop as will consumption.
We will also have a shortage of gasoline (Score:4, Insightful)
Helium vs "Ballon-gas" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like a million voices all cried out... (Score:5, Funny)
a drop in the ocean (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Every bit adds up. (Score:3)
It is easier to charge the public more or ban something wasteful like children's balloons than it is to get the military or industry to do anything. Remember, the military and industry have a history of KILLING PEOPLE rather than change their ways - and you want them to change over a small resource supply problem? The military complex can't even stop wasting money when we run out of money.
Many replacement options (Score:5, Interesting)
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%
*Sigh* The real reason helium is in short supply: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
We need welding, we don't need balloons. (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Wait wait wait! (Score:4, Funny)
Childrens party ballons are filled with MEDICAL WASTE?
Re:Laudable view, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Laudable view, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
...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.
Re: (Score:3)
Let me put it this way, if the market decided to blow up the planet, nobody could prevent it, it would just happen.
Strangest argument for market forces I've ever heard.
Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it (Score:4, Funny)
My argument (second account, /. limits my comments on the first account)
Please take the hint.
Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it (Score:5, Funny)
...market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature...
Gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic... nope no market in there... citation required.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(/. 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
Re:So they can buy all the helium if they want it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, but it could be recycled for additional medical use instead of vented into the atmosphere where it ends up floating into space...
The natural sources of helium are somewhere around 2% pure. Party balloons are something like 90%, and medical use is over 99%. If you can make 99% helium from 2% helium, you can certainly make it from 90% helium.
Re: (Score:3)
Am I wrong in saying H + H => He?
Yes, 1 + 1 != 4 (or 3).
It's actually closer to 2H=D (twice) then D+H=He3 (also twice) and finally 2He3 = He4+2H. There are some photons, neutrinos and positrons flying around there too, but that's the general idea.
See here. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
What I find funny is a so called scientist saying the price should be raised, to keep people from wasting it.
Oh, sort of like raising the price of gasoline to keep people from wasting it? LOL.
Works pretty good actually. With helium it would work even better since making it a bit more expensive would make recycling and extracting (instead of just releasing) it economically sound.
Anyway, helium is a finite resource, once released into the atmosphere is just goes away into space and since it is an element, there's no way to synthesize it. This should be more than enough reason to put some thought into using it because the market just totally doesn't care for what happens in a few decades.