Imagine not playing the classic party game of "throw burning toothpicks at the hydrogen balloons".
Have politicians done anything to reduce usage of helium outside of industry and medicine?
We've been bit by the helium shortage a couple times at my uni.
We've got like 14 or 15 magnets that need it, but thankfully they're all under one roof and connected to a recovery system. Our supplier called twice last year to tell us that they couldn't ship the He we were scheduled to receive and would have been absolutely boned if we hadn't recovered enough to limp by.
If helium stocks really are low, I assume it makes sense to stop putting it in balloons so we can adequately serve the more important industries that need it, right?
How do we recover from this shortage? Where can you source large quantities of helium?
You buy balloons from Party City
Balloons are pretty minor contributors if I remember right.
People that use a lot of He need to stop letting their spent gas escape and make an effort to recover it.
It's also often left uncaptured by those working in the extraction of fossil fuels.
The only reliable sources for He on earth are trapped in pockets underground.
He is too light and just escapes atmo.
I’d heard about this being a threat before, but I didn’t imagine it would ACTUALLY happen this quickly.
Tragedy if the commons is going to fuck up everyone.
even if it does only come for your birthday party first
I got confused by this for a second when glossing over the thread
Like, who's too light? Who or what is this "atmo"? Why did he escape? We'll never know
And then i remembered that "He" is the name of the element on the periodic table
Galaxy brain moment
C'mon, I've lost a lot of weight and am a manlet but it's not that bad!
Would fusion reactors produce a significant amount of helium?
I knew the resource wars were going to happen in my lifetime, but I didn't expect the catalyst to be birthday orb gas
I'm an engineer for a place that builds MRI magnets, and I dunno about you, but whenever I see people wasting helium I get twitchy because of how much it costs, how little there is of it in the world and the fact nearly every other year some trade embargo in the middle-east causes us to run dangerously low on supply...
Yeah, but I think the facilities using significant quantities of He should probably do their best to recover them instead of trying to shift blame onto balloons.
it's easy to blame people using He for balloons for the crisis, but it doesn't really make much sense. Whenever we do a fill on our 850MHz NMR we get ~100L of recoverable blowoff. That's a shitload of balloons just in one day for one magnet and doesn't account for the boil between fills. Pricing He at $100 per balloon or whatever won't get us to where we need to be if major users keep dragging their feet and refuse to recycle what they can.
Also if you by chance work for Bruker I have some complaints, but who doesn't at this point :V
Squeeze hydrogen atoms together real hard?
The helium shortage/market instability is largely due to the winding down of the US BLM helium programme. Estimated helium reserves are sizeable enough that we're not going to run out for the next few decades, it's just that private sector production hasn't really stepped up yet. Currently helium is produced almost entirely as a byproduct of hydrocarbon extraction, but it seems that with rising prices non-hydrocarbon sources are becoming economically viable. See this article for more details.
Is Party City's biggest portion of their revenue really balloons?
Does losing balloons actually cut so much into their profit that they have to close stores?
I didn't think they made so much off of 'em, simply for the fact that every time I've been there outside of the Halloween season, I've never seen anyone at the counter getting balloons. Maybe once or twice, in my whole life.
Huh. Guess people in my region just don't like balloons.
As someone who works at party City, yes, balloons are huge. Matter of fact, aside from Halloween season which makes up near a quarter of our yearly sales, balloons are the most important thing for this store.
God I hope they close my store.
I thought we only had a shortage of a certain isotope, which was different from the ones we use to fill balloons.
You can thank Newt Gingrich and the drive for privatization for this by the way.
Wasn't there an article about how Newt Gingrich was almost single handedly responsible for ruining the entire US government or something?
They don't call you dynamic for nothing! <3
We do attempt to recover all of our helium.. however we're in the business of manufacturing so we still need a supply of helium to put in the magnet before it's delivered to customers . (No I don't work there)
I'm not blaming the everyday consumer I'm just saying the crisis makes it depressing to see helium wasted
I know many universities and hospitals just let He boil off and don't bother with recovery at all. Part of it is how difficult it is to retrofit facilities, especially when things aren't all in the same building. The magnets at my undergrad were spread out between five buildings, some of which were miles apart. That's not exactly the most efficient way to do things, but He was artificially cheap back when they built a lot of them the uni didn't care to make sure they would be set up well in the future.
I figured you didn't work for Bruker since they're not that big on the MRI end of things, but I can't turn down the opportunity to shit talk them. The last VTU board we ordered from them came with housing so bent that it couldn't fit in our rack. They suggested that we beat it with a hammer to bend it back. That was a $6k part. We just got a 1H preamp slice from them for a low field magnet that came covered in brown residue (coffee? soda? shit?). We just sent off our BBO probe from our 500 and I am dreading seeing what they do to it. The last time we got a probe worked on it came back with globs of solder everywhere that shorted out some of the shim coils. We got a new pulse EPR last year and they fucking didn't ship the He pump for months because they "forgot" and pretended that we never ordered it, despite having paid substantial sums for everything and having all of the paperwork to show for it.
Bruker is a bag of dicks. Their stuff used to be good but now that Varian is dead they don't even have to try.
Helium is the Houdini of gases.
politicians (specifically republicans) made this problem in the first place. The US used to require all helium be sold to the government as its an incredibly rare element and the government regulated how much it sold off each year, and that worked for almost 100 years, except then the republicans in the 90s decided that was communism and ordered the entire stockpile, the world's only reserves at the time, sold off within 10 years, and they did, and now we wish we had that back
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