new sources of helium
What's this, now?
Who could have foreseen that turning over a limited natural resource over to the free market would result in us blowing it all in an orgy of party balloons? Not the neoliberals, that's who.
I'm mostly embarrassed that when future generations want an MRI, we're going to have to be like, "Guys, we're really sorry, but you have to understand how incredibly funny our voices sounded while squandering the stuff."
Another Joe P.! The boys from Brooklyn?
There's plenty of helium in stars. The free market will inexorably figure out a way to efficiently mine it. Hopefully the Sun-miners will be unionized, because that's gonna need some safety regulations.
3: We don't have tell them, we can show them on YouTube! You really are getting old, aren't you Stanley?
5: because that's gonna need some safety regulations.
Or not. Were the original 49ers unionized? You need to listen to more Rage Against the Machine.
Someone was recently giving me an excited account of how affordable it would be to mine the moon for iron, but they kind of trailed off in response to my withering glare. I mean, iron?
One of the recurring fantasies of space junkies* is mining the moon for Helium 3 to fuel second-generation fusion devices. Presumably we could tap the He4 produced as a byproduct. After we develop second generation fusion machines and an infrastructure for lunar mining. And ponycorns for all.
*Full disclosure: I am one of these and only differ on the lunacy of helium mining and space elevators and shit. Asteroids are where it's at, baby!
Lots of plants are coming online, so it's believed that the long-term supplies (projected out to 2030) are relatively stable. But in the short run, yeah, oops.
9.1: sucks for the clones, of course.
And when are we going to get airships filled with non-flammable helium?
Anyway, without MRI images and algebra, I wouldn't have a job.
Or at least, I wouldn't have this job.
I'm now wondering how insane it would be to try to manufacture helium by spallation.
I keep thinking that the hazards of hydrogen are overstated. Bring on the mildly-flammable balloons!
18: I think you are correct, but getting FAA approval for an upgraded airship in the Hindenburg class would be hard. I bet you could get a very high degree of safety by putting the hydrogen ballonette inside a larger helium filled one, and using active venting of the interior spaces to keep hydrogen from building up. It would be awesomely cool to do Cape Town to Cairo in a Zeppelin.
Back of the envelope, 17 does seem kind of crazy, I think. Maybe for absolutely vital, small amounts in some kind of awful "in a world without helium..." scenario, but unlikely to beat mining on any sane timescale.
The free market will create cold fusion! Then we'll have all the helium we want.
Perhaps Ryan can talk this up as the free market responding to reduce the cost of medical care.
I think the idea with the plants is that there's more than enough helium being released by natural gas mining, but that you need a plant to actually sort out the helium from the rest of the gasses.
Sorry, those were me. At any rate, sounds like things are bad in the short run, ok in the medium run, and big trouble in the long run (unless we get fusion working, in which case ponies for everyone).
25: Yes, but how do you sort helium from other gases? (One thing that comes to mind is cooling until everything else liquefies. But I wonder if there's a simple way to actually separate the gases.)
Sometimes it occurs to me how much of my (negligible) peace of mind relies on putting my likely lifespan against vaguely imagined time frames for various shit hitting various fans. Happily, I don't know enough about why we need helium to do much with this one. My birthday parties will survive the helium drought unless it takes helium to make gin.
Right, the MRI thing I knew from this thread. But, uh, thanks for googling that for me.
22
... Maybe for absolutely vital, small amounts in some kind of awful "in a world without helium..." scenario, but unlikely to beat mining on any sane timescale.
Helium is 5 parts per million (by volume) of the atmosphere so there is plenty around. Extracting it is just a matter of cost. According to wikipedia:
Helium must be extracted from natural gas because it is present in air at only a fraction of that of neon, yet the demand for it is far higher. It is estimated that if all neon production were retooled to save helium, that 0.1% of the world's helium demands would be satisfied. Similarly, only 1% of the world's helium demands could be satisfied by re-tooling all air distillation plants. ...
which seems to have absolutely vital small amounts covered.
The source of the potential price spike is that for some reason the government has been selling off its reserve at below market prices.
12, 25: It looks like it's fractional distillation of natural gas and then subsequent purification (by low-temp distillation, and then filtration) that gets to high-purity helium. High capital cost, high volume, paper-thin margin, I suspect.
As for supply shortages, here's the relevant bit from a recent Chemical and Engineering News story (http://bit.ly/LSc6Se) (you have to be a ACS member to log in):
Two helium plants in Algeria run by the national oil firm Sonatrach have recently been operating at about half of their normal capacity because of low natural gas demand, says Air Products' Van Sloun. When demand for gas from helium-containing wells goes down, or wells deplete, less helium is available. Production shortfalls from small plants in Russia, Poland, and Australia have also limited global helium supply, Van Sloun points out.Some relief will come starting later this year when nearly 2 billion cu ft of capacity fires up. A 200 million-cu-ft-per-year plant in Big Piney, Wyo., originally planned to open in 2011, should begin operating by the end of 2012. Owned by Air Products and Matheson Tri-Gas, the plant sits idle while the project's crude helium supplier, Cimarex Energy, completes work on its own facility.
Sometime next year, an expansion in Algeria will add 350 million cu ft of capacity, industrial gas suppliers say. But the biggest addition of them all is the 1.3 billion-cu-ft Qatar Helium 2 project, scheduled to open in early 2013 by the Qatari firm RasGas. Together with the 660 million-cu-ft Qatar Helium 1 plant already in operation, RasGas says, the new capacity will make the country the world's second-largest helium producer.
And Russia could also enter the major leagues of producers. In 2014 or sometime thereafter, large new helium reserves are likely to be tapped in Siberia, says Peter J. Madrid, a helium analyst with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages the government's pipeline.
Incidentally, I'm no MRI technologist, but that bit about quenches ruining magnets sounds a bit alarmist. While I don't doubt that quenches can do a good bit of damage (especially uncontrolled ones), I'm not convinced that we're ever going to get to that point w/r/t this particular shortage.
A basket of fruit unusual fluorine compounds for Chemjobber, I think!
37: to tie different apocalyptic threads together, perhaps some cyclic fluorocarbons!
One particularly disastrous magnet quench comes to mind, but that was more the shoddy engineering of some connections than the quench itself that caused so much trouble...
I'm no MRI technologist either, but it's worth remembering that these are extremely delicate machines and the other side wants fucking balloons.
fucking balloons
Fucking magnets, fucking balloons: the MRI niche pr0n just gets more and more sophisticated.
14, 39: Those magnets won't fuck themselves.
42: I believe that in an MRI, you're inside the magnet. So guess who's fucking who?
fucking balloons:condoms::fucking magnets:x
x=singles bars? highballs? some kind of complicated sex aid I can't google up because of too many ICP results/my wife is 3 feet away on the other computer.
Incidentally, I heard that there's an additional shortage of Helium-3 (a rare isotope), which is used in dilution refrigerators. The shortage is because Homeland Security has been buying a lot of it to use in high-end radiation detectors.
44 is hauntingly in the style of Alameida.
Wow, between 2009 and 2010, the price of one liter of He-3 jumped from $100 to over $2000. (Although I don't think there's really a free market for He-3.)
Target sells a disposable helium tank for filling party balloons for $49.99, which leads me to believe that hel-pocalypse hasn't quite arrived. Or maybe it's here.
48: maybe that's the seventh seal?
Funner helium balloon trick* than breathing in the helium is to tie it to the gearstick of your car and watch it as you accelerate, brake and turn. There are several levels of analysis you can use to explain its behavior, but I think the neatest is appealing to the equivalence principle.
*And it doesn't use up the helium so you can donate it to the MRI place when they have to look at your knee after you wreck when the balloon un-intuitively ends up in your face during a left turn**.
**In the Northern Hemisphere ...
fucking balloons
You must have a really big ballon.
Neunundneunzig fickballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizontal
I probably shouldn't try to make jokes in languages I don't understand.
Si, pero a tiempos, no puedo quitar.
The people who just sat next to me are speaking Spanish. Somebody say more German and see what happens.
Google Translate told me "Schwarzgerät" meant "black unit", and I thought that was going somewhere entirely different until I googled and saw it's from Gravity's Rainbow.
Never mind German on my account. I have to leave. Unrelated: The bartender called me an old man for ordering a rusty nail.
I'd always heard it as "device" rather than "unit". You know, because of the dimensions.
63: I've finally looked up a Rusty Nail and it sounds a lot better than I'd have guessed from the name. Is it expensive? I'm assuming not since it's a Moby staple, but maybe I've misjudged you.
66: Drambuie is kind of expensive by volume, and if they're using actual Scotch, I think you'd normally be in the $7-14 range. Here, at least.
It's $5 to $7 where I go, depending.
67: That was my thought, and fuck a six-dollar drink. (I had one tonight but I go out, like, once a month. Plus there was a shrimp in it and that's worth something.) I just asked Lee if she ever had one when she was a bartender and said no because it's an old lady drink. Sorry she thinks you're girly, Mobes, though on the plus side (?) she has a thing for old ladies.
It's possible to get drinks for six dollars? Craziness.
I guess I already threw away my chance to move to an inexpensive city.
I just asked Lee if she ever had one when she was a bartender and said no because it's an old lady drink.
Huh. As a former bartender, I think of a Rusty Nail as an old man drink.
Essear, darling, I'm sure with hometown drinking you could find cheap stuff. My well g&t, good or not, is anywhere from $2-5 and beyond that I feel like I should be getting something fancy that's worth $9-12. I'm not comfortable in the middle.
72: She only ever worked at a gay bar, which may have skewed it. I think your version is closer to canonical.
They have $2.50 well drink night at one bar. One guy counted it as a well drink, but I think he was doing me a favor because I was there a lot.
Anyway, I have no exact idea what it costs. I think some bartenders use better scotch by default for it. Also, I usually order them after a few beers, so I don't remember exact numbers so well.
It's possible to get drinks for six dollars? Craziness.
Let me be the first to recommend Fresh Salt.
I guess I already threw away my chance to move to an inexpensive city.
You could get another in three or six years!
61: 54 to 58?
Ah, yes it is. So 55->me.
66: Depending on your taste in Scotch, it may not be that expensive when made at home.
Alternately, you could sneak a flask of Drambuie into the bar and order a well Scotch (or some kind of well Whiskey) on the rocks, and make your own cocktail.
You could just sneak the whole drink in, but that would be unethical.
You could just disguise yourself as LB's dad and she'd probably mix one for you.
The OP struck me as funny because probably the first political book I ever read outside school was Parliament of Whores, by P.J. O'Rourke, and in the chapter on the budget he specifically discusses the Helium Fund as an example of what not to do. He says that would-be-budget-busters go after programs like the Helium Fund that sound unimportant and funny, but he wanted to avoid that because a lot of such programs really are things that no one but the government could do, and are small change compared to the federal government as a whole.
Five years later, Congress did think it was worth going after the small change after all, and there was absolutely no need the private sector couldn't meet, apparently. Funny how that worked out.
Dammit, we need that helium to build our hypersonic ion-drive space airships. How are we going to keep our two-mile-wide floating hotels up without adequate supplies of helium? The whole project becomes ludicrous!
83: gosh, he really didn't use to be braindead, did he?
85: There are lots and lots of people who seemed more or less sane - right overall IMO but wrong on a few minor issues, or wrong overall but respectable about it - until 9/11, and it's tempting to lump him in with them. But I have to wonder how sane him, or for that matter any of them, were to begin with.
(For years I had read a comment of his in that very chapter as being just so unserious that it made me question the quality of his thinking in general, even for someone who's a humorist first and a political commentator second, but when I looked it up for this thread I realized he meant something completely different than I thought. Oops. I may need to reevaluate him quite a bit.)
86: He was always basically a dick, even if a quite funny one. Over time the dick ate the funny.
Did you know there's a global shortage of BCG vaccine? Because some filthy Canadian monster let mould grow in the factory and birds nest in the air conditioning.
I say, WAR WITH CANADA!
Yet another important scientific use for helium (hope I'm not pwned on this).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19348123
83
Five years later, Congress did think it was worth going after the small change after all, ...
The helium program was a notorious government boondoggle.