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.

Balloons

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Forgive my ignorance

[plover]

The US has maintained the Strategic Helium Reserve for about ninety years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve [wikipedia.org]

Re:renewable resource

[SJHillman]

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.

Re:Dispensing our reserves?

[necro81]

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.

Re:Balloons

[Anonymous Coward]

Balloon grade helium is still 90-95% pure typically. The only reason it is "waste" is because helium is so cheap to get already refined, there is no need to refine it. It is still a symptom of helium prices being really low, at all grades. It is not like helium comes out of the ground at 99.995% pure, and it is not like all science work needs the high purity stuff. Depending on the exact impurities, the helium can be purified with just activated charcoal sometimes, or other times it needs to be separated cryogenicly when there is a large neon impurity.

Re:renewable resource

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:renewable resource

[swillden]

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.

Re:Helium is not scarce at all

[Trepidity]

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.