When the price of helium percolates up the supply chain the supply of helium will increase. Helium is obtained by separating it from the output of natural gas wells. At the current price this is only profitable when the fraction of helium in the gas exceeds a certain value. As the price goes up it becomes profitable to get helium from wells with smaller fractions.
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We need that helium for medical scanners and other scientific devices. No helium until we figure out energy producing fusion.
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Many children are…
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…and on helium-filled balloons (if not currently, then recently).
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Helium balloons are a good way to teach your children about loss and the fleeting, ephemeral nature of love. It’s the first step, before one moves on to hamsters.
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Plenty of Helium-3 on the moon for all our fusion power and party balloon needs. Party City should just start a lunar mining operation!
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Some are sounding the alarm.
But the short answer is that the parasitic capitalists from natural gas companies to Party Shitty’s C-suite managed to waste most of it while the general public wasn’t watching them.
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Maybe we need to have doctors ask congress they want to be able to get an MRI in ten years.
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When we’re down to the very last dregs, the richest people on the planet will use even those for their kids’ birthday parties. Or, even more likely, release them into the atmosphere, wasting them, for no other reason than because they can.
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Yep. I’m stockpiling krugerrands, number 10 cans of freeze dried food, toilet paper and helium.
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We have energy producing fusion. The problem is the energy involved is measured in megatons of TNT
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Snooty noble gases, think they’re better than than those on the left.
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Even scientists aren’t recovering it. The cost of liquid helium is still far below the cost to recover.
A superconducting magnet can sometimes suddenly stop being super and all that energy has to go somewhere, so the liquid helium will get boiled off very quickly. If it’s being tested in a small space the low-oxygen sensor alarms go off and you take a quick walk somewhere more hospitable to metabolism.
https://nationalmaglab.org/about/maglab-dictionary/quench
The notes on this MRI decommissioning say:
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No problem. We’ll just buy up enough alpha emitters, and let nature do its thing.
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Yes, but is that point stable? The price has already gone up about 3 times what it was a few years ago, and my supermarket at least hasn’t passed the cost onto the customers. Maybe people would be willing to capture the gas at 10 times the price, but would people be willing to spend $15 on a single balloon? There’s bound to be lots of gluts and shortages on the way to figuring out at what price capturing helium is worth it to people that want temporary floaty things at that price…
Filling these vile things is part of my job. The end of balloons can’t come soon enough.
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http://neuroscience.queensu.ca/MRI-facility/operation-procedures/shutdown
of note
In case of emergency, the electrical power to the MR system can be cut abruptly without turning off or “quenching” the static magnetic field, or the static magnetic field of the MR system can be turned off. Quenching can potentially damage the MR magnet, will result in several days of system down-time, and recovery to operation is expensive. It is therefore to be initiated only in the cases of 1) an uncontrollable fire, or 2) someone is pinned against the magnet by a magnetic object.
capturing all that gas would require a truly massive recovery vessel. The expense would be hundreds of times the value of the liquid helium
Why not just pump the LHe back into a portable container?
I vaguely remember hydrogen-instead-of-helium balloons from when I was a kid. The main problem with them was that hydrogen leaks out through latex rubber faster than helium does, so they’d be deflated by the next day instead of lasting a bit longer. (Yes, they could also explode, but usually that wasn’t a problem if you just had a few balloons at home, just if you had a store with a lot of hydrogen.) If hydrogen balloons were still around when I was a teenager, I wasn’t aware of it; if we wanted them to explode for fun, we had to make our own using zinc and hydrochloric acid.
The helium balloon I really miss is the Zeppelin that flew out of Moffett Field in California for a while. I live near enough that I’d get to see it flying around when I was on the freeway, and even though large parts of society were going down the tubes at the time, at least they were still in good enough shape to keep a Zeppelin flying purely for people to have fun (plus do a bit of Science), and I got to ride in it once, which was amazing.
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Here’s an idea:
Let’s figure out nuclear fusion energy in energy plant form, and then we can have all the balloons we want!
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I was thinking of a fusion is a little more contained… and no fall out. Definitely no fail out.
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