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"Recurrent helium shortages and high prices have led some academic researchers to install liquefiers to recycle helium that boils off from their instruments."

"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.

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.