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There has never been a helium shortage. It’s just more costly than scientists would prefer. If they were willing to pay even more, massive more amounts would be

There has never been a helium shortage. It’s just more costly than scientists would prefer. If they were willing to pay even more, massive more amounts would be available.

casefields 6y ago
Just like the truck driving and software engineer shortages we always hear about. There's a shortage of ones willing to work at abysmal wages.
eesmith 6y ago
"shortage" here is meant something like how you used it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203174 with "you disincentive people with lots of bottled water who were about to drive it across the country to address your shortage."
perilunar 6y ago
"Recurrent helium shortages and high prices have led some academic researchers to install liquefiers to recycle helium that boils off from their instruments." Yeah, it can't have been a real shortage if they were just letting it boil away.
- Others 6y ago
  From the article it seems like recapturing the helium is impractical without a significant investment in a reliquifier
  - nimish 6y ago
    Seems to pay for itself pretty quickly for large users. The one guy who saved 90% of his helium costs probably paid for his in a year or two given the price listed
    - willis936 6y ago
      Yep. Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of. Today not recycling helium in cryogenics is unheard of. You send it back to be purified and condensed and some of the savings is passed back to the customer. Nobody cared when it cost $0.50/l. They do when it’s $5/l.
      - amluto 6y ago
        Ten years ago I worked in a building with a helium liquified for recycling. I also knew someone who bought a fancy cryogenic system that didn’t consume helium because it was worth the premium to avoid needing to pay for helium. Do you perhaps mean twenty years ago?
      - tgflynn 6y ago
        > Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of. That depends on both time period and location. In the late 80's I worked in a physics lab in the US that had an old helium recuperation system installed (as gas, I don't think they had a liquifier) but it wasn't in use, we just boiled off 100's to 1000's of liters each week. I assume it must have been used at some point in time though. In Europe helium has traditionally been much more expensive than in the US (not sure about the situation currently) and I think many labs recovered it. At CERN all the helium was reliquified, except for one time when the liquifier broke down and they boiled off about 20000 liters testing LEP superconducting RF cavities.
- simonh 6y ago
  Of course it can. When a material with a highly inelastic but until now sufficient supply experiences a demand spike or supply drop, and mitigating investments in equipment and new sources are capital intensive and take a significant amount of time to implement, you can have severe shortages. I can't see how that's a contentious concept. Markets can often correct for supply/demand imbalances, but not instantly and perfectly. Also market prices rising with demand don't themselves increase supply, again not instantly anyway. It doesn't matter how high the prices goes, if there is insufficient supply to meet the demand some people will be priced out. That's not even got anything to do with markets and certainly not a market failure, it doesn't matter how allocation is determined, not everyone will get what they need, at least for a while.
- myself248 6y ago
  Similarly, I've heard of HVAC systems that just use city water for cooling. It comes in cold, dump heat into it and let it run down the drain. Running like that all the time seems unconscionable, but it makes a lot of sense as a backup while the primary is down for repair, as a very cheap-to-install but wasteful-to-run system that would be appropriate for short durations only.
  - anewdirection 6y ago
    Airconditioning is still a luxury to the world. Not sure running clean, treated drinking water down the drain for comfort is ever worth it.
    - amluto 6y ago
      There are plenty of hot places with enough fresh water supplies that trying to conserve water is of dubious value. The problem with fresh water isn’t the overall supply of fresh water. It’s getting it to communities that need it, when they need it, and distributing it without contaminating it.
    - bcoates 6y ago
      I think the biggest costs of sewage treatment is removing solids and hazardous contaminants. Diluting wastewater with moderate volumes of potable water may not mean much to the whole-cycle. It's not nearly as bad as watering a lawn, where water goes out clean and comes back as contaminated runoff that has to be captured and treated or dumped.
  - CrazyStat 6y ago
    > Similarly, I've heard of HVAC systems that just use city water for cooling. It comes in cold, dump heat into it and let it run down the drain. My grandparents had a system that worked basically on that principle. Since they lived in a farming town it used irrigation water which was much cheaper than tap water.
  - gruez 6y ago
    Are you sure you're not confusing what you're describing with evaporative cooling? I don't think that the thermal delta between tap water and a warm room is enough to justify the cost of filtered municipal tap water. For comparison, if the HVAC system simply fed the water into the radiators and dumped it, the max amount of heat you can capture is around 63J per gram of water (opportunistic assumptions of the water coming in at 5C and leaving at 20C). By comparison, if you evaporate the water, the latent heat of evaporation of water alone is 2257J per gram.
microcolonel 6y ago
The misapplication of "shortage" to describe situations where prices are functioning as expected and supply is available is one of my pet peeves.
blululu 6y ago
In general shortages are less common than cheapskates. Helium is strange though. It is generally produced as a byproduct of natural gas. This means that its availability is largely driven by an unrelated market that is much larger and more lucrative. There is a big discontinuity in the price of helium as a byproduct and the price of helium as a primary good. Thus the supply of helium is relatively inelastic. Doubling the price does almost nothing to change the quantity supplied. I personally recall a period around 2013 when suppliers simply did not have helium to sell.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  How far are we from helium being the primary good? The price of natural gas is going lower and lower (and with strict environmental laws, might go even lower as companies move to other energy sources... How close are we to the value of helium being greater than the value of the methane?
  - nordsieck 6y ago
    > How close are we to the value of helium being greater than the value of the methane? Probably pretty far away. I'm guessing that the amount of helium that's recovered from natural gas wells is pretty small compared to the natural gas recovered. Even if no one uses it for power, there's still home heating, vehicle fuel and plastic feedstock.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Also fertilizer. Methane is a primary input for nitrogen fertilizers. (arguably the input, as the nitrogen comes from air, which (obviously) is readily and abundantly available.)
  - gorkish 6y ago
    Before the helium price dive I had calculated the break over was wells with approximately 6% He concentration; the problem is the places that have this don’t have gas gathering systems and anything you try to do with the gas makes it uneconomical.
BurningFrog 6y ago
In a market economy, there are no "shortages", only higher prices. Not sure which way the Helium market works though.
wrycoder 6y ago
My major professor used to say that LN costs the same as milk, while LH costs the same as scotch. That was many decades ago - things haven’t changed, I guess.

There has never been a helium shortage. It’s just more costly than scientists would prefer. If they were willing to pay even more, massive more amounts would be available.

casefields 6y ago

Just like the truck driving and software engineer shortages we always hear about. There's a shortage of ones willing to work at abysmal wages.

eesmith 6y ago

"shortage" here is meant something like how you used it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203174 with "you disincentive people with lots of bottled water who were about to drive it across the country to address your shortage."

perilunar 6y ago

"Recurrent helium shortages and high prices have led some academic researchers to install liquefiers to recycle helium that boils off from their instruments." Yeah, it can't have been a real shortage if they were just letting it boil away.

Others 6y ago
From the article it seems like recapturing the helium is impractical without a significant investment in a reliquifier
- nimish 6y ago
  Seems to pay for itself pretty quickly for large users. The one guy who saved 90% of his helium costs probably paid for his in a year or two given the price listed
  - willis936 6y ago
    Yep. Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of. Today not recycling helium in cryogenics is unheard of. You send it back to be purified and condensed and some of the savings is passed back to the customer. Nobody cared when it cost $0.50/l. They do when it’s $5/l.
    - amluto 6y ago
      Ten years ago I worked in a building with a helium liquified for recycling. I also knew someone who bought a fancy cryogenic system that didn’t consume helium because it was worth the premium to avoid needing to pay for helium. Do you perhaps mean twenty years ago?
    - tgflynn 6y ago
      > Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of. That depends on both time period and location. In the late 80's I worked in a physics lab in the US that had an old helium recuperation system installed (as gas, I don't think they had a liquifier) but it wasn't in use, we just boiled off 100's to 1000's of liters each week. I assume it must have been used at some point in time though. In Europe helium has traditionally been much more expensive than in the US (not sure about the situation currently) and I think many labs recovered it. At CERN all the helium was reliquified, except for one time when the liquifier broke down and they boiled off about 20000 liters testing LEP superconducting RF cavities.
simonh 6y ago
Of course it can. When a material with a highly inelastic but until now sufficient supply experiences a demand spike or supply drop, and mitigating investments in equipment and new sources are capital intensive and take a significant amount of time to implement, you can have severe shortages. I can't see how that's a contentious concept. Markets can often correct for supply/demand imbalances, but not instantly and perfectly. Also market prices rising with demand don't themselves increase supply, again not instantly anyway. It doesn't matter how high the prices goes, if there is insufficient supply to meet the demand some people will be priced out. That's not even got anything to do with markets and certainly not a market failure, it doesn't matter how allocation is determined, not everyone will get what they need, at least for a while.
myself248 6y ago
Similarly, I've heard of HVAC systems that just use city water for cooling. It comes in cold, dump heat into it and let it run down the drain. Running like that all the time seems unconscionable, but it makes a lot of sense as a backup while the primary is down for repair, as a very cheap-to-install but wasteful-to-run system that would be appropriate for short durations only.
- anewdirection 6y ago
  Airconditioning is still a luxury to the world. Not sure running clean, treated drinking water down the drain for comfort is ever worth it.
  - amluto 6y ago
    There are plenty of hot places with enough fresh water supplies that trying to conserve water is of dubious value. The problem with fresh water isn’t the overall supply of fresh water. It’s getting it to communities that need it, when they need it, and distributing it without contaminating it.
  - bcoates 6y ago
    I think the biggest costs of sewage treatment is removing solids and hazardous contaminants. Diluting wastewater with moderate volumes of potable water may not mean much to the whole-cycle. It's not nearly as bad as watering a lawn, where water goes out clean and comes back as contaminated runoff that has to be captured and treated or dumped.
- CrazyStat 6y ago
  > Similarly, I've heard of HVAC systems that just use city water for cooling. It comes in cold, dump heat into it and let it run down the drain. My grandparents had a system that worked basically on that principle. Since they lived in a farming town it used irrigation water which was much cheaper than tap water.
- gruez 6y ago
  Are you sure you're not confusing what you're describing with evaporative cooling? I don't think that the thermal delta between tap water and a warm room is enough to justify the cost of filtered municipal tap water. For comparison, if the HVAC system simply fed the water into the radiators and dumped it, the max amount of heat you can capture is around 63J per gram of water (opportunistic assumptions of the water coming in at 5C and leaving at 20C). By comparison, if you evaporate the water, the latent heat of evaporation of water alone is 2257J per gram.

microcolonel 6y ago

The misapplication of "shortage" to describe situations where prices are functioning as expected and supply is available is one of my pet peeves.

blululu 6y ago

In general shortages are less common than cheapskates. Helium is strange though. It is generally produced as a byproduct of natural gas. This means that its availability is largely driven by an unrelated market that is much larger and more lucrative. There is a big discontinuity in the price of helium as a byproduct and the price of helium as a primary good. Thus the supply of helium is relatively inelastic. Doubling the price does almost nothing to change the quantity supplied. I personally recall a period around 2013 when suppliers simply did not have helium to sell.

londons_explore 6y ago
How far are we from helium being the primary good? The price of natural gas is going lower and lower (and with strict environmental laws, might go even lower as companies move to other energy sources... How close are we to the value of helium being greater than the value of the methane?
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > How close are we to the value of helium being greater than the value of the methane? Probably pretty far away. I'm guessing that the amount of helium that's recovered from natural gas wells is pretty small compared to the natural gas recovered. Even if no one uses it for power, there's still home heating, vehicle fuel and plastic feedstock.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Also fertilizer. Methane is a primary input for nitrogen fertilizers. (arguably the input, as the nitrogen comes from air, which (obviously) is readily and abundantly available.)
- gorkish 6y ago
  Before the helium price dive I had calculated the break over was wells with approximately 6% He concentration; the problem is the places that have this don’t have gas gathering systems and anything you try to do with the gas makes it uneconomical.

BurningFrog 6y ago

In a market economy, there are no "shortages", only higher prices. Not sure which way the Helium market works though.

wrycoder 6y ago

My major professor used to say that LN costs the same as milk, while LH costs the same as scotch. That was many decades ago - things haven’t changed, I guess.