5 ms·

It's up to those of us living today to decide to make the common rising baloon extinct. It's going to happen one day regardless. If we do it sooner, we get to u

It's up to those of us living today to decide to make the common rising baloon extinct. It's going to happen one day regardless. If we do it sooner, we get to use helium for medicine longer. I'm in favor, though sad, of a government ban. It should probably happen slowly so that no one's job is to empty canisters into the open air. Opinions?

colechristensen 3y ago
Almost all natural gas wells just vent the helium they produce to the atmosphere. Helium balloons won’t ever be the culprit in a shortage. This is a plastic straw ban kind of issue, visible to people but pointless because the actual problem is elsewhere.
- metaphor 3y ago
  > This is a plastic straw ban kind of issue, visible to people but pointless because the actual problem is elsewhere. Curious, would you mind expanding on where you think the actual problem is?
  - chii 3y ago
    if people are venting it away, it's because the people who would like to purchase it are not willing to pay the price. So the problem is that the uses of helium might not be commensurate with the cost of producing (or rather extracting) it. So therefore, the fix is to have the uses of helium pay more for it. Unfortunately, the payer of the uses of helium, such as for medical treatment recipients, do not want to pay more. As for balloons, the grade of purity is not sufficient for use in medicine, and thus is not realistically a problem (or the cost of refining it to higher purity is also costly).
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    With a long term view we would be stockpiling way more, requiring more efforts to recover used helium, and capturing more instead of venting in natural gas wells rich in helium. All of those things cost more though and aren’t being done because helium is cheap.
  - spcebar 3y ago
    To my recollection, plastic straws aren't anywhere near as prevalent or damaging in oceans as discarded fishing nets. That's the usual comparison here IIRC. But it seems to me it's a case of "we can do both", and in this case conservation of helium might not be a bad idea in addition to changing mining practices to capture it.
    - petesergeant 3y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics Suggests otherwise and is a fascinating read
      - bagels 3y ago
        The word "straw" do not appear in this article. The consumer plastic that is in the ocean is largely put there by large cities in Asia as the article points out. My plastic straws are going in to a landfill, not in to the ocean.
        PlunderBunny 3y ago
        I know you’re talking about oceans, but I see straws in the grass by the side of the road, in the garden beds in the park etc. up until recently (in NZ) they were plastic straws. Now they’re paper, and they will biodegrade if no-one picks them up. That’s a win. I also haven’t seen a plastic shopping bag stuck in a tree for a few years (because they were also banned here). Another win.
    - colechristensen 3y ago
      Ocean plastics primarily come from cities in less developed countries that don’t have any government waste management (and by that i mean garbage pickup) that just dump their trash in the local river. Your plastic straw doesn’t end up in the ocean unless you litter on a beach trip. Guilt tripped Americans eating fast food make up an unimaginably tiny amount of ocean plastic waste. It isn’t a “we can do both” situation for either matter. It’s a popular deception that makes people feel like they’re helping which almost entirely distracts from the actual issues. The “thoughts and prayers” response that is worse than useless.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    The overwhelming majority of terrestrial plastic that makes it into the oceans originates from 10 rivers, all of them located in Asia and Africa. Plastic straws in the US generally get safely disposed of in landfills and never reach the ocean or other waterways.
    - rascul 3y ago
      Where does the plastic in the rivers come from?
      - bagels 3y ago
        The people that live near the rivers. Instead of landfills, dumps, or incineration, they just discard it directly in to the rivers or on to the street where it is washed in to rivers.
  - otherme123 3y ago
    The problem is helium cannot be contained, and it goes up until it leaves the Earth. It never binds to any element that could "anchor" it to our planet. Compare with liquid nitrogen: you can liquify air, use the nitrogen that sooner or later will go back to the atmosphere, but it rarely leaves the planet. So you have a cycle.
- justahuman74 3y ago
  What's a ballpark-estimate volume/weight that might get vented?
  - neilkk 3y ago
    Don't have exact figures but it's a lot less than zero.
- ImAnAmateur 3y ago
  So where is the problem? The rate of the mining? The efficiency? I would assume that helium baloons wouldn't be the culprit in a shortage because they'll be the first to go in a shortage. I assumed it was because the money made from helium baloons is responsible for higher rates of helium mining. I'm genuinely not going to know what you think the actual problem is if you don't tell me. I promise I tried looking it up before responding. Edit: I hadn't thought about purity requirements. Helium baloons do require significantly lower purity than medical uses. So how that lower grade stuff is treated as a whole is the part to consider, rather than helium baloon revenue.
  - crotchfire 3y ago
    The rate of radioactive decay, which is where subterranean Helium comes from.
  - wakawaka28 3y ago
    The problem is probably in processing and storing the helium indefinitely. We might wish we had the vented helium in 100 years or whatever. But unless it can be retained until the time it is needed (a fundamentally unprofitable venture to anyone alive now), it can't be used.
ipsum2 3y ago
Hydrogen balloons are fun to pop.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Combine with candles on a cake
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Hydrogen is a good lifting gas. The balloon only needs enough H to lift it. The rest of the balloon could be filled with nitrogen or CO2. The H concentration may be low enough to not burn.
    - isoprophlex 3y ago
      That is, I'm sorry to be so blunt, not a well thought out idea. The flammability range for hydrogen in air is 4% - 74%, and even though it ignites with difficulty at dilutions higher than 10%, you would still have to dilute it like mad in order to get a provably non-flammable lifting gas. 10% H2 in N2 is not good for lifting... let alone 4%. --- Oh, and, tri-atomic CO2 is very heavy (44 g/mol). So, waving the ideal gas law around, it really doesn't make sense to use that for lifting purposes at all when you have other, smaller things around.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        My chemistry dates back to freshman chemistry long ago. So I am not a chemist. > The flammability range for hydrogen in air is 4% - 74%, and even though it ignites with difficulty at dilutions higher than 10%, you would still have to dilute it like mad in order to get a provably non-flammable lifting gas But it could not combust inside the balloon because H doesn't combine with N (at least I don't think it does!). It would have to be released, and then mixed with air to burn. If the balloon popped would it disperse faster than it could burn? I don't know, and simple chemistry would not provide an answer. One would have to do experiments.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Are you literally blaming this on helium balloons? For kids parties? We’ve already had half a dozen threads about the industrial uses of helium. Not relevant?
WalterBright 3y ago
Just use hydrogen.
neilkk 3y ago
Surely this (unlike many other environmental and social issues) is effectively solved by price? If helium balloons cost $100 each vastly fewer of them would be sold. If they cost $100 but you could get $90 back by bringing them back to the store for the helium to be recycled, much less helium would be consumed. If there is a limited supply of helium for essential medical use, the price should rise until either demand is affected or less of it gets discarded by hydrocarbon extractors. If this doesn't happen we are probably ok.
- orev 3y ago
  Price is driven by the market, and the market has a very short timeframe where anything is relevant (it generally only cares about the timeframe when the transaction is taking place). However the management of helium as a resource needs to be thought of as “the entire time that humans will exist on Earth”, since it’s an almost completely non renewable resource where after using it once it’s often lost forever.

colechristensen 3y ago

Almost all natural gas wells just vent the helium they produce to the atmosphere. Helium balloons won’t ever be the culprit in a shortage. This is a plastic straw ban kind of issue, visible to people but pointless because the actual problem is elsewhere.

metaphor 3y ago
> This is a plastic straw ban kind of issue, visible to people but pointless because the actual problem is elsewhere. Curious, would you mind expanding on where you think the actual problem is?
- chii 3y ago
  if people are venting it away, it's because the people who would like to purchase it are not willing to pay the price. So the problem is that the uses of helium might not be commensurate with the cost of producing (or rather extracting) it. So therefore, the fix is to have the uses of helium pay more for it. Unfortunately, the payer of the uses of helium, such as for medical treatment recipients, do not want to pay more. As for balloons, the grade of purity is not sufficient for use in medicine, and thus is not realistically a problem (or the cost of refining it to higher purity is also costly).
- colechristensen 3y ago
  With a long term view we would be stockpiling way more, requiring more efforts to recover used helium, and capturing more instead of venting in natural gas wells rich in helium. All of those things cost more though and aren’t being done because helium is cheap.
- spcebar 3y ago
  To my recollection, plastic straws aren't anywhere near as prevalent or damaging in oceans as discarded fishing nets. That's the usual comparison here IIRC. But it seems to me it's a case of "we can do both", and in this case conservation of helium might not be a bad idea in addition to changing mining practices to capture it.
  - petesergeant 3y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics Suggests otherwise and is a fascinating read
    - bagels 3y ago
      The word "straw" do not appear in this article. The consumer plastic that is in the ocean is largely put there by large cities in Asia as the article points out. My plastic straws are going in to a landfill, not in to the ocean.
      - PlunderBunny 3y ago
        I know you’re talking about oceans, but I see straws in the grass by the side of the road, in the garden beds in the park etc. up until recently (in NZ) they were plastic straws. Now they’re paper, and they will biodegrade if no-one picks them up. That’s a win. I also haven’t seen a plastic shopping bag stuck in a tree for a few years (because they were also banned here). Another win.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    Ocean plastics primarily come from cities in less developed countries that don’t have any government waste management (and by that i mean garbage pickup) that just dump their trash in the local river. Your plastic straw doesn’t end up in the ocean unless you litter on a beach trip. Guilt tripped Americans eating fast food make up an unimaginably tiny amount of ocean plastic waste. It isn’t a “we can do both” situation for either matter. It’s a popular deception that makes people feel like they’re helping which almost entirely distracts from the actual issues. The “thoughts and prayers” response that is worse than useless.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  The overwhelming majority of terrestrial plastic that makes it into the oceans originates from 10 rivers, all of them located in Asia and Africa. Plastic straws in the US generally get safely disposed of in landfills and never reach the ocean or other waterways.
  - rascul 3y ago
    Where does the plastic in the rivers come from?
    - bagels 3y ago
      The people that live near the rivers. Instead of landfills, dumps, or incineration, they just discard it directly in to the rivers or on to the street where it is washed in to rivers.
- otherme123 3y ago
  The problem is helium cannot be contained, and it goes up until it leaves the Earth. It never binds to any element that could "anchor" it to our planet. Compare with liquid nitrogen: you can liquify air, use the nitrogen that sooner or later will go back to the atmosphere, but it rarely leaves the planet. So you have a cycle.
justahuman74 3y ago
What's a ballpark-estimate volume/weight that might get vented?
- neilkk 3y ago
  Don't have exact figures but it's a lot less than zero.
ImAnAmateur 3y ago
So where is the problem? The rate of the mining? The efficiency? I would assume that helium baloons wouldn't be the culprit in a shortage because they'll be the first to go in a shortage. I assumed it was because the money made from helium baloons is responsible for higher rates of helium mining. I'm genuinely not going to know what you think the actual problem is if you don't tell me. I promise I tried looking it up before responding. Edit: I hadn't thought about purity requirements. Helium baloons do require significantly lower purity than medical uses. So how that lower grade stuff is treated as a whole is the part to consider, rather than helium baloon revenue.
- crotchfire 3y ago
  The rate of radioactive decay, which is where subterranean Helium comes from.
- wakawaka28 3y ago
  The problem is probably in processing and storing the helium indefinitely. We might wish we had the vented helium in 100 years or whatever. But unless it can be retained until the time it is needed (a fundamentally unprofitable venture to anyone alive now), it can't be used.

ipsum2 3y ago

Hydrogen balloons are fun to pop.

midasuni 3y ago
Combine with candles on a cake
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Hydrogen is a good lifting gas. The balloon only needs enough H to lift it. The rest of the balloon could be filled with nitrogen or CO2. The H concentration may be low enough to not burn.
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    That is, I'm sorry to be so blunt, not a well thought out idea. The flammability range for hydrogen in air is 4% - 74%, and even though it ignites with difficulty at dilutions higher than 10%, you would still have to dilute it like mad in order to get a provably non-flammable lifting gas. 10% H2 in N2 is not good for lifting... let alone 4%. --- Oh, and, tri-atomic CO2 is very heavy (44 g/mol). So, waving the ideal gas law around, it really doesn't make sense to use that for lifting purposes at all when you have other, smaller things around.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      My chemistry dates back to freshman chemistry long ago. So I am not a chemist. > The flammability range for hydrogen in air is 4% - 74%, and even though it ignites with difficulty at dilutions higher than 10%, you would still have to dilute it like mad in order to get a provably non-flammable lifting gas But it could not combust inside the balloon because H doesn't combine with N (at least I don't think it does!). It would have to be released, and then mixed with air to burn. If the balloon popped would it disperse faster than it could burn? I don't know, and simple chemistry would not provide an answer. One would have to do experiments.

avgcorrection 3y ago

Are you literally blaming this on helium balloons? For kids parties? We’ve already had half a dozen threads about the industrial uses of helium. Not relevant?

WalterBright 3y ago

Just use hydrogen.

neilkk 3y ago

Surely this (unlike many other environmental and social issues) is effectively solved by price? If helium balloons cost $100 each vastly fewer of them would be sold. If they cost $100 but you could get $90 back by bringing them back to the store for the helium to be recycled, much less helium would be consumed. If there is a limited supply of helium for essential medical use, the price should rise until either demand is affected or less of it gets discarded by hydrocarbon extractors. If this doesn't happen we are probably ok.

orev 3y ago
Price is driven by the market, and the market has a very short timeframe where anything is relevant (it generally only cares about the timeframe when the transaction is taking place). However the management of helium as a resource needs to be thought of as “the entire time that humans will exist on Earth”, since it’s an almost completely non renewable resource where after using it once it’s often lost forever.