8 ms·
Aren’t there huge stockpiles of helium in the US? I can buy party sized tanks at Target or big tanks at the usual places like welding supply places.
by trollbridge 8mo ago
Aren’t there huge stockpiles of helium in the US? I can buy party sized tanks at Target or big tanks at the usual places like welding supply places.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- vasco 8mo agoMesser Completes Acquisition of Federal Helium System from BLM https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-acquisition-of-federal-helium-system-from-blm https://www.messer-us.com/press-releases/messer-completes-ac...
- owebmaster 8mo agoFoi de vasco (died).
- bix6 8mo agoWhy did we sell it instead of lease? This seems like something that should be in public hands.
- cagenut 8mo agosorry thats too far left wing an opinion in america today
- infogulch 8mo agoThe sale was completed in 2024.
- actionfromafar 8mo agoI feel that as soon as the existential threat easened with the splintering of the Soviet Union, the US started doing some self-harming libertarian flavored shit to itself. In the 1980s, I assume getting rid of the "strategic reserve" of anything would have met more pushback, because of primal fear overriding greed.
- noah_buddy 8mo agoYes, Reagan was noted for his desire to avoid privatization of anything. /s Kidding aside, the US has had libertarian pipe dreams for the better part of its history. The aberration was the New Deal period up until the mid 60s.
- scythe 8mo ago> We are going to do a terrible thing to you — we are going to deprive you of an enemy. – Georgi Arbatov, Soviet political scientist, 1988
- trollbridge 8mo agoWasn’t the original purpose of the strategic helium reserve to build fleets of zeppelins?
- phr4ts 8mo agoFor those who don't understand, Biden sold the Helium not Trump - he took office on Jan 20, 2025.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- baldeagle 8mo ago"Current law (cira 2013) requires BLM to sell off the crude helium remaining in the Federal Helium Reserve in order to repay the U.S. Treasury the $1.3 billion debt incurred creating it. This debt will be repaid this fiscal year and that, as a consequence, the helium program will terminate at the end of the current fiscal year (October 1, 2013), absent Congressional action. Currently, the Federal Helium Reserve supplies roughly 40% of domestic and 30% of global helium demand. Loss of access to the Federal Helium Reserve would result in significant disruptions to a large number of critical U.S. industries." https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/494b2f9e-c8f5-4a44-962d-de4e83397d6b https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/494b2f9e-c8f5-4... Sounds like Obama kept the gas taps flowing, instead of locking it up because authorization to sell it had expired. Here is the whole record: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/all-actions https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...
- 4ggr0 8mo ago> too far left wing > biden uhm...
- edgyquant 8mo agoHis admin was by far the most left wing in history, only the actual far left think otherwise
- ImPostingOnHN 8mo agoPlease don't call everyone names for not agreeing with you. There are billions of people in the world, and you are one, and you have your one set of opinions out of billions. Nobody endowed you or your opinions with any sort of infallibility or superiority over others.
- piva00 8mo agoIdeological idiocy, the dismantling of anything public turning into private hands is ideologically pure for libertarian-inclined folks, no matter how strategically stupid it might be.
- hn_acc1 8mo agoThis. 1000x this.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoSeems more directly capitalist than libertarian to me.
- piva00 8mo agoNeoliberal capitalism is founded on absorbing parts of libertarian thinking. The "capitalism" moniker of today used by ideologues is coupled to the meaning of it given by neoliberals. It's been coopted, not necessarily capitalism means "everything should be private", the current flavour of capitalist ideology wants that but other versions of capitalism don't put that as a foundational Ideological tenet.
- forgetfreeman 8mo agocrypto-libertarian "government bad" ideology is one hell of a drug.
- dnautics 8mo agowell it was signed into law by obama, so there's that.
- stvltvs 8mo agoI like the guy, but he was GOP-lite as a president, served corporate interests.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoThe GOP isn't "crypto-libertarian" by any stretch of the imagination. That's probably even more absurd than the people who suggest the GOP is "financially conservative".
- forgetfreeman 8mo agoThe thing there is the GOP was financially conservative a few decades ago and it's like nobody bothered to update the wiki.
- mrguyorama 8mo agoThey'll ride it forever. My dad still insists "Protecting the environment is conservative, look at the EPA made by Nixon" as if there hasn't been clear and deliberate anti-environmental policy since then. After 30 years of empirical reality demonstrating that if you want a government that is responsible with money, you must vote democrat, Donald Trump was still voted in because "He's good for the economy" He is not.
- forgetfreeman 8mo ago
- tzs 8mo agoThe Helium Privatization Act of 1996 (HPA) required it. It passed to House on a voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent and was signed by President Clinton. After sales paid off the debt that has been incurred from the expansion of scope of the helium program in the 1960 Helium Act, which was one of the main points of the HPA, it was update by the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 (which passed the House 394-1, and the Senate 97-2, and was signed by President Obama).
- fluidcruft 8mo agoA lot of the balloon use has switched to nitrogen (helium became much, much more expensive after the strategic helium reserve was sold off)
- bilsbie 8mo agoIs lifting gas? That’s pretty cool.
- cpncrunch 8mo agoNo.
- nerdsniper 8mo agoTechnically yes, but practically no. Air is 78% nitrogen. Nitrogen is 3.3% lighter than air. Helium is 86.2% lighter than air. Hydrogen is 93% lighter than air.
- joemi 8mo agoHow much does that matter for party balloons, though? It's still buoyant.
- nerdsniper 8mo agoI feel like people really need to learn basic physics. The gas inside a standard party balloon is generally compressed 3% to inflate the balloon. This wipes out even the theoretical buoyancy of nitrogen. And trust me, there was never any practical buoyancy to begin with. You’d need a ridiculously large balloon in a room with impossibly still air and impossibly null thermal gradients to even measure the buoyancy of nitrogen vs air. The buoyancy of nitrogen vs air would never be perceptible to human senses in any real-world setting. It would be the same as just filling the balloon with air.
- joemi 8mo ago> I feel like people really need to learn basic physics. I'm 20+ years out of college and I asked a question specifically because I was unsure. Give me a break. I'm sorry if "party balloon buoyancy physics" wasn't the part of my college classes that stuck with me.
- emsign 8mo agoBalloon gas is ~20% oxygen, so your kids don't go unconscious while doing the funny voices.
- shmeeed 8mo ago[flagged]
- qwertox 8mo agoThis is very likely not true.
- estimator7292 8mo agoWould you like to offer a rebuttal more well reasoned and thought out than "nuh-uh"? You have the entire collected knowledge of mankind at your fingertips. You could do 30 seconds of research and find an answer better than "I don't think that sounds right".
- loloquwowndueo 8mo ago> You could do 30 seconds of research So could you, right?
- gjm11 8mo agoWhat is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. (The form in which Christopher Hitchens actually stated "Hitchens' Razor" is more symmetrical but unfortunately wrong: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". Anything can be asserted without evidence! It's only when something actually has been, in a given context, that dismissing it is -- in the same context -- a reasonable course of action.)
- fc417fc802 8mo agoWhile a reasonable principle I don't think it applies in context. People aren't expected to exhaustively source comments on HN. There's subjective etiquette to it. In this case it would be reasonable to inquire about the basis of the original remark, or to reject based on personal knowledge, or to reject based on a concrete citation. But an arbitrary non-technical vibes based rejection doesn't fit with how things generally work here.
- dylan604 8mo agoDepending on who you go to, some places will not sell you tanks of Helium. We did a balloon launch expecting to use Hydrogen because Helium was going to be problematic. The sales rep at the supply place took a look at the group of us knuckleheads with absolutely no Hydrogen experience and ended up selling us the Helium while also exchanging all of our connectors. Hydrogen tanks use specific connectors different from all other tanks to make using a hydrogen take by mistake very difficult. I was nervous about using hydrogen and had no issue with the higher price for the helium knowing I wasn't going to catch on fire.
- hrmtst93837 8mo ago[flagged]
- jason_s 8mo agoafter what kind of shutdown?
- ceejayoz 8mo agoIf the helium gets warm, you have to vent it outside before it goes kaboom from the pressure. https://radiology.ucsf.edu/patient-care/patient-safety/mri-safety-guidelines/magnet-quench https://radiology.ucsf.edu/patient-care/patient-safety/mri-s...
- amatecha 8mo agoDamn, that's intense: > If the scan room door is closed when a quench occurs and helium escapes into the scan room, the depletion of oxygen causes a critical increase in pressure in the room compared with the control area. This produces high pressure in the scan room, which may prevent opening of the door. If this should happen, the glass partition between the scan and control rooms should be broken to release the pressure. The scan room door can then be opened as usual and the patient evacuated. In such a case the patient should be immediately evacuated and evaluated for asphyxia, hypothermia and ruptured eardrums.
- NooneAtAll3 8mo agonote for hospitals: doors into MRI rooms should open outside
- realityking 8mo agoMost MRIs vent their helium in an emergency shutdown. https://medprotech.de/en/what-is-an-mri-quench/ https://medprotech.de/en/what-is-an-mri-quench/
- jiggawatts 8mo ago
- dnautics 8mo agonot just. huge deposits opened (actively being exploited) up in colorado, utah in the past few years and Minnesota this year
- stevenwoo 8mo agoAll natural gas deposits contain helium at various concentrations, it's only commercially worth harvesting above a certain percentage but speculate the problem is the US can't just fill the Qatar loss in supply immediately since we have plentiful natural gas.
- trollbridge 8mo agoMakes sense. We have so much gas where I live that there are places it’s just flared off and burned, because it’s less greenhouse emissions than it escaping unburned.
- GeorgeWBasic 8mo agoIf it's being burned, it isn't helium.
- HPsquared 8mo agoParent is referring to natural gas
- XorNot 8mo agoHelium deposits don't exist is the thing, the same structures in the Earth which trap methane gas also trap helium gas and some of them trap enough to make recovery economically viable.
- HPsquared 8mo agoAnd that helium comes from Alpha decay of Uranium and Thorium.
- hedora 8mo agoToday, I learned Helium does burn, and when it burns, it forms Carbon. https://www.britannica.com/science/chemical-element/Processes-producing-heavier-elements https://www.britannica.com/science/chemical-element/Processe... Granted, the flare gas probably doesn't reach the prerequisite 100M-200M kelvin. I suspect high pressure is also required so the Helium stays close to the heat source.
- mc32 8mo agoGood old JIT stock management for essential materials, right? One’d think that they’d keep more than a couple of weeks’s supply of critical materials —too bad many copied Cook’s and others’s JIT inventory management for everything.
- krunck 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve