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.'"
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:"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:So they can buy all the helium if they want it (Score:1, Informative)
It is nonsense that prices are kept artificially low by government, they were kept artificially high by US gov't until 1996, when US gov't decided to stop gov't intervention in He production and storage. Just like most people, who don't understand economics, you and the 'academic' in question are talking about natural gas mining AS IF it is subsidised by gov't, it's not.
In FACT the prices for natural gas fell sharply in USA over the decade. Here is an interactive graph, set the scale to 10 years. [ycharts.com] It's a hard to store and transport commodity, many companies went out of business. There is NO shortage of Helium, that's what the market says. The market in USA also says that there is (right now) no shortage of natural gas.
Here, I'll make it easier for you (I don't know if you can understand the easier version either, but hey, I'll try).
Helium is almost fully extracted from natural gas, which is mined for its other uses (like fuel production), and so if He is not collected from natural gas production, there won't be almost ANY supply of He available at any price.
So by creating an artificial price floor for He all you are going to accomplish is this: the consumption will be much lower and production will mostly cease to exist, which means Helium is going to be RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE and that's it, it's gone. The entire process of He extraction may be scrapped and there will be no way of getting any of it. So your MRI costs will go up, enjoy.
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:'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: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: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: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.
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.
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: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: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, 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:H! (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:2, Informative)
The reason it would not extrapolate linearly is these trace gases are usually separated by cryogenic means. The liquification temp of helium is ~4 K is memory serves. This is much lower than other gases and would require significant expenditure.
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)
Hydrogen embrittles metals. There are some alloys that can mitigate the embrittlement but it's easier to use helium.
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:How to decide the fate of helium (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How to decide the fate of helium (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 see a superconductor that would be superconducting with LN2 still being used with liquid helium for this reason.
Plus, a little buffer room might be a good idea, since if there is a fault that causes the temperature to rise, you don't want to cross the critical temperature by accident. Suddenly all that current would be going through a resistance and further heat up the liquid, causing fast boiling and likely venting of it somewhere.
That said, we could probably design MRIs to work with liquid hydrogen, just expect it to be a lot more expensive due to being less efficient, more material constraints, and extra safety needed.
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.
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.)
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
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, 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.
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, 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.