This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Hopefully we stop wasting this limited resource on fucking balloons.
Edit: well this kicked off a fun and respectful conversation. The information I can find from actual scientists says wasting helium on balloons is bad. The balloon lobby says it is just a waste byproduct. The balloon lobby brings nothing of value to the world in terms of plastic or helium use, so I'm going to go with the science opinion on this one.
The helium used for balloons is of low purity.
The shortages you hear about are of pure or near pure helium. The stuff going into the balloons at Tommy's birthday party isn't the same thing used to cool superconductors.
EDIT: And I used to think Reddit was full of ignorant jackasses ...
Balloon helium is 3% helium. So every 33 balloons is one Balloon worth of pure helium. No helium starts off pure. It all gets concentrated/separated to get that way. "Balloon grade" helium can be concentrated just fine and considering that thousands of those balloons are filled every day, it is a lot of wasted helium.
*I had my percentage swapped, it seems. Balloon helium is 97% helium.
balloon helium has some air in it, it's still 90%+ helium, probably
Last time I bought what I thought was a pure balloon of He, I’m pretty sure it had gotten cut with fentanyl.
What the fuck are you on about? Helium is an element. Doesn’t matter if it’s low purity it’s wasted and then gone. When the high purity stuff is gone we can’t be like “thank god we can purify the low wall quality stuff” when that’s gone too
Look, there's one right there!
Using it for balloons is still a waste because that impure helium could be purified for better uses.
No, no it could not.
The stuff used in balloons isn't pure enough to be used for cryogenic purposes, which is what people really want it for.
And before you ask purifying it is really difficult.
Incorrect. It is not found naturally pure, it must be distilled. Balloon helium vs cryogenic helium is like comparing ice distillation vs vapor distillation of liquor. One is cheaper but both are using up a limited resource.
wdym by "low purity" helium, helium that has been purified cryogenically is easily 99.999% if not better, and this is the main process used worldwide iirc
The highest grade helium is grade 6, grade 4.7 gets used for cryogenic purposes. Balloon helium is grade 4.
Tommy's dad didn't steal grade 6 helium from a research lab for kid's birthday party.
Here's a link to a gas supplier's website with a chart: https://www.westairgases.com/blog/exploring-the-most-essential-and-underappreciated-uses-for-helium
I don't know much about Helium, so I'm a bit confused... What's to stop us from purifying grade 4 further into 4.7 and beyond besides cost? If the only thing stopping us is cost, then it's not inaccurate to say that, regardless of grade, the non-renewable element of Helium is being used in frivolous ways because it makes more money to find profitable ways to use the lower-grade helium than to actually further purify and conserve it for more important usage.
So the cost aspect is absolutely massive. You can theoretically filter elemental gold out of sea water, but it's not reasonable to do that to supply gold for use in electronics. Similarly you can purify helium as much as you want but at a certain point the cost makes whatever you were doing with it prohibitively expensive.
Right now we're still pulling helium out of the ground alongside natural gas deposits. We're also not doing everything we can to recover, recycle, or substitute the industrial and scientific grade stuff either.
As less helium gets extracted the cost will go up. This will put market pressure on all users to use it more efficiently or find substitutes wherever possible. If the price goes high enough it might also drive producers to purify helium that might have been sold at a lower grade in the past.
This find in Minnesota pushes that future scenario down the road a bit, which can either extend the status quo or buy time for technological improvements to be made that will make use and extraction more efficient.
Hopefully we stop wasting this limited resource on fucking balloons.
I don't recommend fucking balloons. The squeaks are annoying and the pops hurt.
You need more lube.
I think for balloons we should switch back to hydrogen. What could possibly go wrong?
It would make birthday parties more fun
helium just boils off in MRI/NMR machines, this is the major use of helium i think. if you could recycle that in machines that already are out there, that would solve lots of problems. there are newer systems that do not require cryogens or just require liquid nitrogen which is much cheaper and less energy intensive. these things use closed loop refrigeration, but in turn you need to supply them with power
Thomas Abraham-James, CEO of Pulsar Helium
Oh my god, fuck this. Have we learned nothing? Nationalize that supply right now.
What should we have learned? I'm out of the loop.
That letting capitalists gatekeep access to essential resources is a terrible idea.
Ah ok. I thought there was something specific about this man or company being evil, like that Massey energy guy is to coal mining.
Don't waste your limited resources on party balloons
Somewhere in that mine we're gonna have a bunch of iron miners getting squeaky voices and start sounding like the seven dwarfs.
If there's so much helium inside the earth, then why doesn't the earth float away?
This is actually incredibly good news
Not really, because we're still pissing away invaluable helium because of capitalism...
If we keep doing that, it doesn't really matter how much we find.
We need to stop wasting it first, then finding huge supplies is a good thing. As long as we're not dumb enough to start wasting it again.
Ah yes, we're wasting helium, so finding more isn't a good thing. Of course. 🙄
How are we wasting it? Keep in mind that the helium used for stuff like balloons is not the same as the helium used in medical equipment. Also keep in mind that even if it were, the amount of helium used in balloons would be less than 1% of total usage.
So I ask again, how are we wasting it?
How do you find helium? Did everyone suddenly start talking like chipmonks?
[off topic]
"The Guns Above" by Robyn Bennis. What if Napoleonic armies had an unlimited supply of helium? The author does a great job of describing 1800's airships and their tactics.
Fun book.
