Comment by jandrese
10 hours ago
It becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas.
I'm not a chemist but are there really no alternatives? Running fusion plants to make helium seems very unlikely to become cost effective, but it would be quite the sci-fi future if we filled party balloons by bombarding hydrogen with free protons.
I guess there aren't any easy molecules to break apart to get helium either since its a noble gas. No hydrolyses type solutions because there aren't any molecules that incorporate helium. I guess radioactive decay, but even that is ultimately limited over long enough timescales.
There are NO alternatives. There's nothing else that stays liquid at 4 K and absolutely nothing else comes close.
> There are NO alternatives.
We use a lot in our MR scanners.
The tech is changing and magnets are using far far less.
Super-conduction at higher temperatures has made progress too.
So while you are right that nothing else stays liquid at those temps, we won’t be needing nearly as much helium in radiology in the next few years.
The new generation use something like 700ml of helium, where the standard was hundreds of litres. https://magneticsmag.com/siemens-healthineers-gets-fda-clear...
The article itself spells out several alternatives to buying continuous amounts of Helium: high temperature semiconductors and zero boil-off systems that don't require a continual supply.
All these "we're going to run out" stories pretend that engineering cannot adapt to changing cost structures, which is just total nonsense.
Sure, there is nothing that can be directly substituted for how we use Helium today, but clearly we're using Helium inefficiently today and the answer is that once markets force us to change, we will find more efficient ways.
> it would be quite the sci-fi future if we filled party balloons by bombarding hydrogen
How dangerous are party balloons filled with hydrogen? Not a whole balloon arch obviously.
There are many cases in the news of accidents with sometimes a large number of party balloons filled with hydrogen or other flammable gases.
One of the larger episodes was in 2012 in Armenia, where thousands of balloons exploded during a meeting, injuring 154 people, of which 4 seriously (the video is of poor quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWEm2sS7Dw8
A smaller, more recent episode in India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH5JwHeKnZo
I had a science teacher that did this in class, then taped a match on the end of a yardstick and held it under the balloon. They made quite a bang. I wouldn't want to be right next to it when it went off.
Was there an experimental control?
How does that bang compare to the bang from an equally-inflated balloon full of ordinary air?
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Yeah I've seen that demonstration in school too. But if the teacher was willing to do it in school, with kids, how dangerous was it really?
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> It becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas.
I actually remember a similar problem from some compound that was mainly formed as a byproduct of some old Canadian nuclear reactor design. As the tech gets phased out, the material is no longer available in significant quantities, with consequences for a projects that need it (like Iter).
Some things can be cheap if they are produced as a byproduct, but very expensive if they have to be obtained directly.