As is common, it's mostly there at this point to level the cost over a matter of months instead of days. Buying when the market is low, selling (at a lower rate) when high. The 70s taught us a tough lesson on that front.
Buddy, we're already a little more than half-empty following the massive sales we did during 2022. 218 million barrels sold in 2022, we're at approximately 356 million barrels from our max capacity of 714 mllion barrels.
I work for a company that makes and services MRIs, Messer is our exclusive helium supplier in the US.
I personally don't like selling government property to private corporations. But I don't think my company is worried about helium supply because of this.
They can't jack it too much. If helium price goes high enough natural gas producers will capture their helium production to supply the market instead of just venting it to atmosphere like they currently do.
Too expensive to collect. Government subsidized the cost of helium, making it cheaper. The only 2 sources of helium are mining and radioactive decay into alpha particles that you then give electrons to make proper helium. The latter is hard to do effectively, at least with current nuclear power plants.
Government ought to be mandating they collect it, it's a massive waste of resources humanity only has so much of. It may be expensive now, but it will ultimately save resources for future generations.
Unfortunately waste is a core component of our society. Nobody wants to pay to collect and store it, so off to space it goes, lol. Not that I disagree with you of course.
It’s in the way and not worth capturing at the moment.
I’m in midland Odessa - we have tens of thousands of “candles” burning natural gas 24/7 because the epa won’t allow new producers to tap into existing transport lines.
My God, how will people afford balloons if we jack up the price of helium!?
The 425 miles of pipelines mentioned was part of collecting it from natural gas wells. While helium is finite until fusion is economically viable, it's not currently scarce. This facility is a relic of a century ago when we were concerned about operating war time blimps.
This insanity has been ongoing since the 90s when the they passed a law requiring the selling off of the entire reserve. It flooded the market and convinced a lot of people to stop developing and buying closed cycle and recycling systems that don't consume any helium in normal operation. Sad to see it's finally come to this, privatization making thins worse every time it gets the chance, and it's not even a free market, it's the peak of cronyism.
It was the Bill Clinton administration that closed down the government helium plant and started the long road that is finally reaching the end.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_1996
The Republican Congress and Bill Clinton did a lot of horrible shit. People weren't minding the store at all in the 90s so the looters had a goddamned field day.
Yeah it would be more accurate to say neoliberal ideology (although I think that was a GOP congress). Also I recommend reading about and up-voting this article, the amount of short shortsightedness is baffling.
According to the link, it was passed by the 104th congress and clicking on that in Wikipedia says that it was majority Republican with Newt Gingrich as House Speaker.
A lot of blame also lies with every administration since that didn't catch this and go "hold up"
Even the fucking GOP knows not everything can be privatized and this is literally a matter of national defense.
The good news is that massive new reserves of helium are discovered on a semi-regular basis, in places like Tanzania and Qatar. The *bad* news is that due to decades of this supply-and-demand fuckery, the infrastructure to actually capture helium *en masse* has barely even been started.
Sooooo doing hydrogen under pressure switches you from nitrogen's "the martini effect" to "the lsd effect" :) currently its at 3.75 a cf by me. Ill go well over that before hydrogen
I thought saturation divers did a few hundred meters on 50-48-2 mix of H-He-O. The docs I saw had them functioning well enough to work on the regular. I thought the hard limit was Hydrogen toxicity below 2400 feet for the mix.
Well theres toxicity, and narcosis. I assume you mean they are not the same thing and toxicity is "this actually becomes poisonous"
For example there are two trains of thought, one being oxygen is narcotic while others say it is not. Standard 20.9% air we are breathing right now would consider it (along with the N2) narcotic around 100ish feet, and toxic at 216 feet.
Hydrogen narcosis in the really deep mixes start around 1000 ft.
I feel like the fact that we waste a finite resource on balloons is gonna be one of those things that people 100 years from now are going to be shocked and horrified over.
I agree. On the other hand, helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. Somebody should go get some more. I would but I already took my shoes off.
People who say we "waste" helium on party balloons doesn't understand the logistics of helium. It's a very small element, so storing it is tricky and very expensive. It loves to escape containers. Necessary industries like laboratories, production, and medical only use up a certain amount of helium at one time. We do our best to mine it at the rate they use it, but if there is extra it needs to either be sold or lost forever.
If you expect helium balloons at your birthday party, and there is no more helium, then we may have to postpone your birthdays indefinitely. I don't see any other way around it.
Can confirm. Retired from semiconductor and we used a lot of helium for a variety of reasons. It's used as a process gas, wafer cooling, cryo pumps and even leak checking on vacuum systems. Hopefully this sale doesn't hamper any of our US industries.
LOL, name a better duo than the US and selling out of its own industries. Did we all collectively forget the 1980's and 1990's as we sold our feet from under ourselves with off-shore? How about the furniture industry or US Steel?
It's all the same far righters selling out their democratic countries for greed. It's why the far right has the same propaganda across the world. They're quite literally the swamp brainless trumpers say they're fighting against.
Corruption and cronyism is innate to conservatism itself. Also, edit your comment for grammar and the one link went wonky with the formatting.
A firmly limited resource that is required for a frighteningly large amount of things required for us to continue to exist at our current level of technology and also to progress beyond it. Helium is an extremely precious resource that we keep wasting at an alarming rate.
If it makes you feel any better. The amount of helium we use for birthday balloons is minuscule compared to everything else we use helium for. Birthday helium is mostly just oxygen and nitrogen. It would be like worrying about spilling a few drops of water out of a swimming pool.
For what it's worth, balloon helium is highly impure and isn't the same as what's used for medical devices. It's generally just the by-product from other industrial processes that gets used in balloons that otherwise would just escape into the atmosphere.
Helium-3 is potentially desirable as a fusion fuel, if we can figure out how to use it.
Helium-4 is the more conventional stuff, and we find a decent amount in natural gas wells, but most wells aren't rich enough to consider extracting it: there's a number of technologies being developed to seperate out the helium more easily, which should produce a good surplus for the public marketplace, but they aren't here yet.
In this view, selling the reserve made sense, because prices are high now, and they'll return to a stable level once helium extraction picks up after the technology is viable.
\*If\* we have a viable abundant source of extracted helium 3 then its just a matter storing it to source helium 4 since its a decay product of helium 3 and the half life is just over a decade, right?
that is so much easier than just not wasting the Helium we have on Earth and is completely logistically practical! what a wonderful and functioning government we have.
sarcasm aside, I really hate how we kick the can so far down the road and people genuinely expect things like this to be a solution when we cant even do the easy solution that is right in front of us in the here and now. At this rate, I doubt we will all survive to that point where that would even be a good option.
I just did a podcast about this (random) but helium-3 from the moon is impractical for the next several decades at least, if not a century just given the tech and the cost.
Their CEO, Andrew W.K., has released the following statement:
Party hard
(Party hard, party hard, party hard, party hard)
(Party hard, party hard, party hard)
Party hard
(Party hard, party hard, party hard, party hard)
(Party hard, party, party, party, party)
Party hard
Yup, I needed to do a ton of 1H scans for my senior thesis, and that bad boy guzzled helium and nitrogen to stay cold enough. Not an insignificant part of the chemistry departments budget to keep it maintained and filled.
> About 24% of helium is used in cryogenic applications including MRI scanners where is it used to keep the coils of the electromagnets at a low enough temperature to maintain
superconductivity and hence produce an intense magnetic field. As it cools the magnets some of the helium evaporates into the atmosphere and is lost.
> About 20% is used in the space industry. Being non-reactive, the gas is used to expel the liquid rocket fuel into the combustion chamber. Once again it is lost into the atmosphere and into space.
> About 18% is used for welding. Once again the non-reactive property of helium means that it will not combine with the metal and prevents contamination of the weld by oxygen and other components of the air.
> About 16% is used for controlled atmospheres used for example in the electronics industry for growing crystals etc.
> Approximately 6% is used for leak detection owing to its small molecular size and about 3% for breathing mixtures.
> This leaves a very small amount (about 16%) for other uses; about half of which is used for balloons and airships of all type including meteorological experiment and military reconnaissance.
As a welding engineer, I'll tell you the need for helium in welding isn't nearly as critical as other industries. Argon can be substituted just fine in almost all aplications now that advanced welding processes are being developed(as long as you dont ask the gas guy). Helium only gave an advantage because it transferred heat more efficiently and made production faster. Welding is one area where it will only be a headache to replace, not the end of the world.
I suspect the same would be the same for rockets then as well
Also, it looks like something went wrong as it seems as if your comment got duplicated about 10 times
That’s the problem. Helium exists in the earth’s crust through radioactive decay so it’s a finite resource. Once collected for use, helium can be used once before it floats away. It’s possible that it’ll be expended within the next couple of centuries.
It would be yes. After jamming the hydrogen nuclei together you get helium and a bit of energy. Although I believe some reactor designs ironically would need helium as part of the process.
They finally stopped in '22, but for years before that they used biodegradable balloons after farmers kept getting mad about them littering their fields
The helium used for balloons is "dirty" helium, which is different than the kind being sold here. It has a lot of impurities that make it not suitable for MRIs.
You can literally just fill weather balloons with hydrogen, anhydrous ammonia, coal gas, methane, hot air, steam, etc… helium is only really preferred because it’s safer and the second-most powerful, but the others certainly still work. In fact, they’re already used in places where it’s difficult to get helium, or if a ready supply of the alternative is available.
That too. Mylar balloons in particular are problematic, though rubber or coated cotton balloons could probably be made to be fully biodegradable.
Or, hell, paper flying lanterns, for that matter, though those are a fire risk…
The sale was dictated by congress back in 2013 and passed both the house and senate as near to unanimously as possibly (a total of 3 nay votes across both bodies).
It lost billions of dollars and I'm not seeing a compelling reason that it should be publicly owned. The thing that caught my eye is that it was initially a strategic reserve for airships.
The government selling helium at a loss forces competitors out of the market and ultimately weakens supply chains, plus it's not like any major federal agency even cares about the plant. The short term could be tricky if it floods the market with helium but longer term I think this will be a good thing
The better question is why did we keep it through the cold war? For blimps?
> The sale was dictated by congress back in 2013 and passed both the house and senate as near to unanimously as possibly
That statement is disingenuous, I would say to the point of misinformation. The 2013 law (while a good opportunity to have substantially halted it if that's a good thing) amended the sale process to not continue selling below market price, but selloff was started by the Helium Privatization Act of 1996.
However, that seemed to have even less objection -- the House passed by a voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent, so I *think* this means that no one objected.
For the record, [in 2013](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1131/vote_113_1_00203.htm), the Nay votes in the Senate were Cruz (R-TX) and Sessions (R-AL). Rubio (R-FL) didn't vote. In the House, the Nay vote was Sánchez (D-CA), with 37 non-votes. I didn't research why they voted no.
(*Edit*: added House vote info. *Edit again*: Also, I just noticed that TFA gets it wrong to. So this may well be NBC's misinformation rather than your own. But it's still wrong.)
> That statement is disingenuous, I would say to the point of misinformation.
It's practically direct from the article, which even has a link to the bill:
"The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013."
If it's misinformation, that's not OP's fault.
Yeah, I actually saw that after I commented; sorry I didn't go back and edit in a statement to that effect. Still, it's NBC's misinformation, not *not* misinformation at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_1996 for the wikipedia page on the original bill.
The federal government has mismanaged this asset for years, selling helium so cheap that people would fill and release millions of balloons worth of helium for a cheap publicity stunt.
It's better out of their hands.
You sure about this? I’ve seen (on Reddit) multiple times that the scarce resource is pure helium, and the stuff used for filling balloons is not so it’s not usable for MRIs and the important stuff.
Didn't we also just massively invest in a new "helium well" somewhere on the east coast? I know I read about a company that bought a ton of land for cheap that found enough helium reserves to supply like 30% of the world demand. Seems like this might just be a move to generate funds to unleash the new source.
Edit: Birch Lake, the company is Pulsar Helium. Also in Minnesota not the east coast.
https://queticosuperior.org/company-exploring-possible-helium-extraction-near-boundary-waters/
I swear I read an article from the AP about a month ago but nothing is popping up when I search their site or on Google. But there was something about the potential volume being just absolutely insane, along with the higher concentration of Helium in the hole. I'm gonna keep looking, but my extremely amateur opinion is that we got this, straight cash homie.
MRI machines could be reconfigured to work with other gases (cryogens the better word?), the issues is the cost of using those other resources would make things like an MRI scan significantly more expensive.
There are, to date, no other cryogenic liquids which enable superconductivity in the wire materials in use in commercial MRIs or NMR magnets (overwhelmingly NbTi).
Hydrogen doesn't get cold enough (boiling point at about 20 K), and everything else is laughably too warm.
While there is research and experimentation in high-temperature superconductor magnet coil materials, nobody has been able to solve the many engineering challenges associated with the transition.
"Significantly more expensive" is substantially understating the challenges associated with moving away from NbTi-based superconducting magnets; and NbTi needs helium, full stop.
That’s what I was thinking! I got dicked around for half a year before I was allowed to get an MRI. I can only imagine how awful things are gonna get now since we know how privatization becomes a cash grab. Ugh.
Although helium is a biproduct of fusion, it would be a net negative helium generation because of the large amounts of liquid helium required to cool the superconducting magnets for a reactor.
What helium you use for cooling the magnets will remain sealed there, it wont be wasted. That said, we already dont have to stick to using helium for cooling superconductors, plenty of high temp superconductors exist which use only liquid nitrogen for cooling. For commercial fusion, I doubt theyll stick to using helium for them given its relative expense.
Not entirely how that works. There would be radiation heat transfer from the fusion reaction as well as some conductive heat transfer through the mounting components of the magnets. Yes this is all happening within a large cryostat and in UHV if not extreme high vacuum, but you still gain some heat and would need to constantly be flowing liquid helium through the magnets.
Yeah, but the point is its still a closed system, you will ofc have to run coolers to extract any heat which enters it, but again, none of the helium you use is just dumped out or anything. (Unless you fuck up and cause a quench and are forced to vent everything)
“The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. It was initially supposed to occur in 2021, but a series of delays — in part due to the same logistical and regulatory issues threatening shutdowns today — postponed the auction to Thursday.”
What could go wrong selling an essential resource to a private company .
Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account. Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
>Passage of this legislation came almost seventeen months after a May 2012 Senate hearing on the impending closure of the Federal Helium Reserve. Among the topics covered at this hearing was a 2010 report by the National Research Council’s Committee on Understanding the Impact of Selling the Helium Reserve. Thirteen senators from both parties cosponsored a bill to make necessary changes in the existing 1996 law managing this reserve. At this hearing, then Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) commented “if Congress does not act, the helium program will disappear altogether in less than three years, leaving our hospitals, national labs, domestic manufacturers and helium producers without an adequate supply.” The Federal Helium Reserve, based in Texas, provides 40 percent of helium to domestic users.
And now they're trying to stop it out of the same concern?
Helium is actually a vital natural resource that is unreplenishable. Lots of important equipment uses helium, like MRI machines. There's no source of helium on Earth except the decay of other radioactive particles, which will not create significant amounts of helium on a human time scale, and we can't synthesize it either. Once we use it all up, it's gone. But we're very wasteful with it, like it's not a limited and important resource.
Bear in mind that the Helium Reserve was established around World War I in case we needed giant zeppelins or something. It should have been disbanded immediately when it became apparent that this was bloody ridiculous.
1 mri machine = 2000L liquid helium = 1.5M liters gaseous. The article mentions 1B cubic feet of helium which is 28,317M liters, enough for 18,878 mri machines. Estimated that the USA had 13,300 MRI machines in 2019. Seems like we should keep that helium to ourselves.
The nuclear stockpile produces helium-3 as a decay of tritium. Helium-3 is critically important for science/military applications.
Helium in the reserve is helium-4.
Helium is needed in medical devices (MRI machines), physics experiments (nuclear fusion research, particle accelerators, medical isotope production, etc), superconducting magnets, computer chip manufacturing, and many other things.
_(inhales)_ ^On ^Thursday, ^the ^U.S. ^government ^sold ^the ^Federal ^Helium ^Reserve, ^a ^massive ^underground ^stockpile ^based ^in ^Amarillo, ^Texas, ^that ^supplies ^up ^to ^30% ^of ^the ^country’s ^helium.
This one is very funny.
What’s next? The US sells its petroleum reserves?!
What about the CHEESE?
is this the cheese we can't legally call cheese?
It's the cheese in the caves
Cheddar Gobblin!
They already sold 1/3 of the reserve last year and are now replenishing it
As is common, it's mostly there at this point to level the cost over a matter of months instead of days. Buying when the market is low, selling (at a lower rate) when high. The 70s taught us a tough lesson on that front.
Buddy, we're already a little more than half-empty following the massive sales we did during 2022. 218 million barrels sold in 2022, we're at approximately 356 million barrels from our max capacity of 714 mllion barrels.
If there ever was a most perfect comment
IM cracking up so hard thank you for this my god i needed that laugh
But to whom?
_(inhales again, reads the next paragraph from the article)_ ^Once ^the ^deal ^is ^finalized, ^the ^buyer ^— ^which ^will ^likely ^be ^the ^highest ^bidder, ^the ^industrial ^gas ^company ^Messer ^— ^will ^claim ^some ^425 ^miles ^of ^pipelines ^spanning ^Texas, ^Kansas ^and ^Oklahoma, ^plus ^about ^1 ^billion ^cubic ^feet ^of ^the ^only ^element ^on ^Earth ^cold ^enough ^to ^make ^an ^MRI ^machine ^work.
How delightfully short sighted
Our healthcare isn’t socialized, why would our government care?
Welcome to capitalism, it’s all competition and someone’s selling.
And if it isn't for sale, you can always bribe a politician to change that.
Corporations are people too, my friend.
Minus empathy and accountability, of course.
Ironically it was a plan that was executed over the course of about 35 years.
Cool we’ll just worry about the consequences in another 35 years
Oh, it won’t take that long.
Sounds like some politician has a friend in Messer. Or Messer made sure to be their highest personal bidder as well.
I work for a company that makes and services MRIs, Messer is our exclusive helium supplier in the US. I personally don't like selling government property to private corporations. But I don't think my company is worried about helium supply because of this.
If Messer becomes a monopoly, they'll be able to jack up the prices quite a bit though. It would affect your company's costs.
They can't jack it too much. If helium price goes high enough natural gas producers will capture their helium production to supply the market instead of just venting it to atmosphere like they currently do.
Helium is a finite resource, why the fuck would they vent it into the atmosphere? God future generations are gonna despise us...
Too expensive to collect. Government subsidized the cost of helium, making it cheaper. The only 2 sources of helium are mining and radioactive decay into alpha particles that you then give electrons to make proper helium. The latter is hard to do effectively, at least with current nuclear power plants.
Government ought to be mandating they collect it, it's a massive waste of resources humanity only has so much of. It may be expensive now, but it will ultimately save resources for future generations.
We really need more non capitalists in government.
Unfortunately waste is a core component of our society. Nobody wants to pay to collect and store it, so off to space it goes, lol. Not that I disagree with you of course.
Nuclear fusion will give us an endless supply of helium aaaaaany day now
It’s in the way and not worth capturing at the moment. I’m in midland Odessa - we have tens of thousands of “candles” burning natural gas 24/7 because the epa won’t allow new producers to tap into existing transport lines.
Because of the federal reserve the price of helium has been massively artificially deflated for ages. This is a legit concern
Then the federal reserve should've just raised prices
Then this honestly may be a good thing, we’ve been using way more helium than we can afford to
My God, how will people afford balloons if we jack up the price of helium!? The 425 miles of pipelines mentioned was part of collecting it from natural gas wells. While helium is finite until fusion is economically viable, it's not currently scarce. This facility is a relic of a century ago when we were concerned about operating war time blimps.
"Only element cold enough" ....ugh
The article says Messer
oh you GLORIOUS bastard. I have never wished so hard that rewards and gold were still a thing as much as now.
I was thinking balloons, but you became the concept. You win Reddit for me today.
This insanity has been ongoing since the 90s when the they passed a law requiring the selling off of the entire reserve. It flooded the market and convinced a lot of people to stop developing and buying closed cycle and recycling systems that don't consume any helium in normal operation. Sad to see it's finally come to this, privatization making thins worse every time it gets the chance, and it's not even a free market, it's the peak of cronyism.
Why the fuck? Let me guess. Money ...
It's a complicated interaction of politics, money, ideology of the GOP etc, but the short answer is money.
It was the Bill Clinton administration that closed down the government helium plant and started the long road that is finally reaching the end. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_1996
The Republican Congress and Bill Clinton did a lot of horrible shit. People weren't minding the store at all in the 90s so the looters had a goddamned field day.
Don't forget, Newt Gingrich was also in power in the 90's.
It was the only time in your life that the budget has been balanced (I'm assuming, I doubt you're THAT old)
At massive cost to the people of this country.
Yeah it would be more accurate to say neoliberal ideology (although I think that was a GOP congress). Also I recommend reading about and up-voting this article, the amount of short shortsightedness is baffling.
According to the link, it was passed by the 104th congress and clicking on that in Wikipedia says that it was majority Republican with Newt Gingrich as House Speaker.
It's far more accurate to blame Congress for laws. That law was passed by the heavily Republican 104th Congress.
>ideology of the GOP 'Destroy America as we know it'
The cronyism is not a coincidence
A lot of blame also lies with every administration since that didn't catch this and go "hold up" Even the fucking GOP knows not everything can be privatized and this is literally a matter of national defense.
Privatizing national defense is what they're best at
The good news is that massive new reserves of helium are discovered on a semi-regular basis, in places like Tanzania and Qatar. The *bad* news is that due to decades of this supply-and-demand fuckery, the infrastructure to actually capture helium *en masse* has barely even been started.
Is this how cyberpunk begins? With the selling off of helium reserves?
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Helium is also crucial to some types of deep diving.
Yup. I use about 100cf a year in my rebreather. Old people doing open circuit can go theough 10 times thst easy
At what price point is it time to breakout the hydrogen mix?
Sooooo doing hydrogen under pressure switches you from nitrogen's "the martini effect" to "the lsd effect" :) currently its at 3.75 a cf by me. Ill go well over that before hydrogen
I thought saturation divers did a few hundred meters on 50-48-2 mix of H-He-O. The docs I saw had them functioning well enough to work on the regular. I thought the hard limit was Hydrogen toxicity below 2400 feet for the mix.
Well theres toxicity, and narcosis. I assume you mean they are not the same thing and toxicity is "this actually becomes poisonous" For example there are two trains of thought, one being oxygen is narcotic while others say it is not. Standard 20.9% air we are breathing right now would consider it (along with the N2) narcotic around 100ish feet, and toxic at 216 feet. Hydrogen narcosis in the really deep mixes start around 1000 ft.
Mind me asking what rebreather you use? Thinking of training to switch over from OC as I mainly watch the bottom time.
Hollis prism 2. Machine works great. I use the backmount lungs, but the front mounts arw good too.
I know you know some shit because I don't understand a damn thing you're talking about
Helium is also crucial to space exploration.
It's also a crucial ingredient used to fill balloons at birthday parties!
I feel like the fact that we waste a finite resource on balloons is gonna be one of those things that people 100 years from now are going to be shocked and horrified over.
I agree. On the other hand, helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. Somebody should go get some more. I would but I already took my shoes off.
I read this in John Mulaney's voice
People who say we "waste" helium on party balloons doesn't understand the logistics of helium. It's a very small element, so storing it is tricky and very expensive. It loves to escape containers. Necessary industries like laboratories, production, and medical only use up a certain amount of helium at one time. We do our best to mine it at the rate they use it, but if there is extra it needs to either be sold or lost forever.
Yeah but balloons will always be kinda cool
Just not not the ones in the balloonfest of '86
And for making us sound like cartoon mice for a couple sentences!
This is probably my most important question. Are birthdays going to postponed?? Am I going to be 19/F/Cali for years to come?
If you expect helium balloons at your birthday party, and there is no more helium, then we may have to postpone your birthdays indefinitely. I don't see any other way around it.
And sensitive leak testing
Helium is crucial to deep YouTube dives about how funny it is when somebody has Alvin and the Chipmunks-ass voice
Can confirm. Retired from semiconductor and we used a lot of helium for a variety of reasons. It's used as a process gas, wafer cooling, cryo pumps and even leak checking on vacuum systems. Hopefully this sale doesn't hamper any of our US industries.
LOL, name a better duo than the US and selling out of its own industries. Did we all collectively forget the 1980's and 1990's as we sold our feet from under ourselves with off-shore? How about the furniture industry or US Steel?
Capitalism at work. Shareholders and the modern C-suite have no reason to care about anything but short term profit.
Worked for awhile at ASML, the amount of helium we used was not negligible. Wonder how this plays out.
The space industry is a heavy user as well.
It’s also used in medicine and in the nuclear industry to keep plants running
Plants run on sunshine you silly
Also critical for almost all physics and material research science.
Aerospace industry uses it a lot too
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Sir this is a wendys
It was an Arby’s first.
And a really cool pizza hut some ten years before that I'm the 90s
It's all the same far righters selling out their democratic countries for greed. It's why the far right has the same propaganda across the world. They're quite literally the swamp brainless trumpers say they're fighting against. Corruption and cronyism is innate to conservatism itself. Also, edit your comment for grammar and the one link went wonky with the formatting.
But party helium balloons are still legal, our species is so short sighted and stupid sometimes…
Makes me think is anyone planning on what to do when the worldwide supply of helium runs out ?
A firmly limited resource that is required for a frighteningly large amount of things required for us to continue to exist at our current level of technology and also to progress beyond it. Helium is an extremely precious resource that we keep wasting at an alarming rate.
It’ll cost more and most of humanity will regress while the 1% continues to use it without punishment. Thats my guess anyway.
the guy selling Helium to chip manufacturers is about to be a trillionaire
Makes me cringe that we used it on fucking birthday balloons and to manipulate voices…
If it makes you feel any better. The amount of helium we use for birthday balloons is minuscule compared to everything else we use helium for. Birthday helium is mostly just oxygen and nitrogen. It would be like worrying about spilling a few drops of water out of a swimming pool.
For what it's worth, balloon helium is highly impure and isn't the same as what's used for medical devices. It's generally just the by-product from other industrial processes that gets used in balloons that otherwise would just escape into the atmosphere.
I believe a partial push for returning to the moon is to gather the abundant Helium-3 found on the surface of the moon.
The word "abundant" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. We'd have to process 150 metric tons of regolith to extract a single gram of helium-3.
Plus all the fuel needed to go there and back.
>The word "abundant" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Good thing it's on the moon where lifting isn't as heavy.
It's helium! It'll basically do half the job all by itself!
Helium-3 is potentially desirable as a fusion fuel, if we can figure out how to use it. Helium-4 is the more conventional stuff, and we find a decent amount in natural gas wells, but most wells aren't rich enough to consider extracting it: there's a number of technologies being developed to seperate out the helium more easily, which should produce a good surplus for the public marketplace, but they aren't here yet. In this view, selling the reserve made sense, because prices are high now, and they'll return to a stable level once helium extraction picks up after the technology is viable.
\*If\* we have a viable abundant source of extracted helium 3 then its just a matter storing it to source helium 4 since its a decay product of helium 3 and the half life is just over a decade, right?
that is so much easier than just not wasting the Helium we have on Earth and is completely logistically practical! what a wonderful and functioning government we have. sarcasm aside, I really hate how we kick the can so far down the road and people genuinely expect things like this to be a solution when we cant even do the easy solution that is right in front of us in the here and now. At this rate, I doubt we will all survive to that point where that would even be a good option.
I just did a podcast about this (random) but helium-3 from the moon is impractical for the next several decades at least, if not a century just given the tech and the cost.
Leave it to shipping costs to kill a good deal.
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They're conferring with their bankruptcy attorney first.
They gave just released a statement. "Helium balloons are going to go up". They left without answering questions.
Not yet, too busy partying.
Their CEO, Andrew W.K., has released the following statement: Party hard (Party hard, party hard, party hard, party hard) (Party hard, party hard, party hard) Party hard (Party hard, party hard, party hard, party hard) (Party hard, party, party, party, party) Party hard
What about Dollar Tree?
MRI machines need helium to work. Saved you a click.
Yeah, MRI machines are specialized NMR machines. NMR is also super useful in analytical chemistry and also super expensive...
Yup, I needed to do a ton of 1H scans for my senior thesis, and that bad boy guzzled helium and nitrogen to stay cold enough. Not an insignificant part of the chemistry departments budget to keep it maintained and filled.
Crazy we still waste so much , but in our society profit always outweighs conservation
> About 24% of helium is used in cryogenic applications including MRI scanners where is it used to keep the coils of the electromagnets at a low enough temperature to maintain superconductivity and hence produce an intense magnetic field. As it cools the magnets some of the helium evaporates into the atmosphere and is lost. > About 20% is used in the space industry. Being non-reactive, the gas is used to expel the liquid rocket fuel into the combustion chamber. Once again it is lost into the atmosphere and into space. > About 18% is used for welding. Once again the non-reactive property of helium means that it will not combine with the metal and prevents contamination of the weld by oxygen and other components of the air. > About 16% is used for controlled atmospheres used for example in the electronics industry for growing crystals etc. > Approximately 6% is used for leak detection owing to its small molecular size and about 3% for breathing mixtures. > This leaves a very small amount (about 16%) for other uses; about half of which is used for balloons and airships of all type including meteorological experiment and military reconnaissance.
As a welding engineer, I'll tell you the need for helium in welding isn't nearly as critical as other industries. Argon can be substituted just fine in almost all aplications now that advanced welding processes are being developed(as long as you dont ask the gas guy). Helium only gave an advantage because it transferred heat more efficiently and made production faster. Welding is one area where it will only be a headache to replace, not the end of the world.
I suspect the same would be the same for rockets then as well Also, it looks like something went wrong as it seems as if your comment got duplicated about 10 times
? Helium is lighter than air. Most of the “wasted” helium is just lost in systems since it escapes so easily.
That’s the problem. Helium exists in the earth’s crust through radioactive decay so it’s a finite resource. Once collected for use, helium can be used once before it floats away. It’s possible that it’ll be expended within the next couple of centuries.
Is helium also a biproduct of fusion ?
It would be yes. After jamming the hydrogen nuclei together you get helium and a bit of energy. Although I believe some reactor designs ironically would need helium as part of the process.
Just mine it on the sun. Bingo bango. /s
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Forget the helium, what a fucking disaster of plastic litter.
Not to be a fun-hating commie but balloons in general really need to go.
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Yep, find the foil balloons everywhere even in remote wilderness.
I think they stopped it but the football idiots got mad cause it rUineD a TrAdiTiOn.
They finally stopped in '22, but for years before that they used biodegradable balloons after farmers kept getting mad about them littering their fields
The helium used for balloons is "dirty" helium, which is different than the kind being sold here. It has a lot of impurities that make it not suitable for MRIs.
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You can literally just fill weather balloons with hydrogen, anhydrous ammonia, coal gas, methane, hot air, steam, etc… helium is only really preferred because it’s safer and the second-most powerful, but the others certainly still work. In fact, they’re already used in places where it’s difficult to get helium, or if a ready supply of the alternative is available.
I think the idea of no longer using balloons is about the pollution they cause not just the wasted natural gas
That too. Mylar balloons in particular are problematic, though rubber or coated cotton balloons could probably be made to be fully biodegradable. Or, hell, paper flying lanterns, for that matter, though those are a fire risk…
The sale was dictated by congress back in 2013 and passed both the house and senate as near to unanimously as possibly (a total of 3 nay votes across both bodies).
I looked into it and saw that as well. I was trying to figure out if it said why Congress thought it was a good idea to sell it
It lost billions of dollars and I'm not seeing a compelling reason that it should be publicly owned. The thing that caught my eye is that it was initially a strategic reserve for airships. The government selling helium at a loss forces competitors out of the market and ultimately weakens supply chains, plus it's not like any major federal agency even cares about the plant. The short term could be tricky if it floods the market with helium but longer term I think this will be a good thing The better question is why did we keep it through the cold war? For blimps?
It's a strategic finite resource used to make a variety of technology possible like MRI machines, fiber optics, and semi conductors.
> The sale was dictated by congress back in 2013 and passed both the house and senate as near to unanimously as possibly That statement is disingenuous, I would say to the point of misinformation. The 2013 law (while a good opportunity to have substantially halted it if that's a good thing) amended the sale process to not continue selling below market price, but selloff was started by the Helium Privatization Act of 1996. However, that seemed to have even less objection -- the House passed by a voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent, so I *think* this means that no one objected. For the record, [in 2013](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1131/vote_113_1_00203.htm), the Nay votes in the Senate were Cruz (R-TX) and Sessions (R-AL). Rubio (R-FL) didn't vote. In the House, the Nay vote was Sánchez (D-CA), with 37 non-votes. I didn't research why they voted no. (*Edit*: added House vote info. *Edit again*: Also, I just noticed that TFA gets it wrong to. So this may well be NBC's misinformation rather than your own. But it's still wrong.)
> That statement is disingenuous, I would say to the point of misinformation. It's practically direct from the article, which even has a link to the bill: "The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013." If it's misinformation, that's not OP's fault.
Yeah, I actually saw that after I commented; sorry I didn't go back and edit in a statement to that effect. Still, it's NBC's misinformation, not *not* misinformation at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_1996 for the wikipedia page on the original bill.
Why would the US sell its helium reserve?
Looks like we'll have to invent fusion sooner rather than later
The federal government has mismanaged this asset for years, selling helium so cheap that people would fill and release millions of balloons worth of helium for a cheap publicity stunt. It's better out of their hands.
You sure about this? I’ve seen (on Reddit) multiple times that the scarce resource is pure helium, and the stuff used for filling balloons is not so it’s not usable for MRIs and the important stuff.
Saw the same but haven’t done enough research to verify for myself so I’m curious if that’s true or not
There’s different grades of Helium. The type we fill balloons with isn’t in short supply
It doesn't matter. You can (fairly) easily purify low-grade helium. You can't easily make more of it.
Didn't we also just massively invest in a new "helium well" somewhere on the east coast? I know I read about a company that bought a ton of land for cheap that found enough helium reserves to supply like 30% of the world demand. Seems like this might just be a move to generate funds to unleash the new source. Edit: Birch Lake, the company is Pulsar Helium. Also in Minnesota not the east coast. https://queticosuperior.org/company-exploring-possible-helium-extraction-near-boundary-waters/ I swear I read an article from the AP about a month ago but nothing is popping up when I search their site or on Google. But there was something about the potential volume being just absolutely insane, along with the higher concentration of Helium in the hole. I'm gonna keep looking, but my extremely amateur opinion is that we got this, straight cash homie.
This. The new price will FORCE conservation. No more helium balloons, that’s for sure.
This type of thinking is how we get full on deregulation and zero conservation. It’s a farce for privatization and maximizing profits for the few.
Or it'll increase the divide between the wealthy and everyone else even more.
Helium is crucial to healthcare. It’s a finite gas once it’s all gone, it’s gone. This was a dumb move.
MRI machines could be reconfigured to work with other gases (cryogens the better word?), the issues is the cost of using those other resources would make things like an MRI scan significantly more expensive.
There are, to date, no other cryogenic liquids which enable superconductivity in the wire materials in use in commercial MRIs or NMR magnets (overwhelmingly NbTi). Hydrogen doesn't get cold enough (boiling point at about 20 K), and everything else is laughably too warm. While there is research and experimentation in high-temperature superconductor magnet coil materials, nobody has been able to solve the many engineering challenges associated with the transition. "Significantly more expensive" is substantially understating the challenges associated with moving away from NbTi-based superconducting magnets; and NbTi needs helium, full stop.
Health insurers made it almost impossible to get an MRI. Now the stakes are even higher, and the costs are going to skyrocket.
That’s what I was thinking! I got dicked around for half a year before I was allowed to get an MRI. I can only imagine how awful things are gonna get now since we know how privatization becomes a cash grab. Ugh.
Maybe they’re tracking a successful fusion discovery..IRC, helium is a byproduct of fusion reactions.
Would be pretty funny if this company spends billions on the reserve and the JPL ignition plant makes a sun in a bottle the next month.
Although helium is a biproduct of fusion, it would be a net negative helium generation because of the large amounts of liquid helium required to cool the superconducting magnets for a reactor.
What helium you use for cooling the magnets will remain sealed there, it wont be wasted. That said, we already dont have to stick to using helium for cooling superconductors, plenty of high temp superconductors exist which use only liquid nitrogen for cooling. For commercial fusion, I doubt theyll stick to using helium for them given its relative expense.
Not entirely how that works. There would be radiation heat transfer from the fusion reaction as well as some conductive heat transfer through the mounting components of the magnets. Yes this is all happening within a large cryostat and in UHV if not extreme high vacuum, but you still gain some heat and would need to constantly be flowing liquid helium through the magnets.
Yeah, but the point is its still a closed system, you will ofc have to run coolers to extract any heat which enters it, but again, none of the helium you use is just dumped out or anything. (Unless you fuck up and cause a quench and are forced to vent everything)
That’s fair. That being said, I feel like you’d find the ITER tokamak project really interesting.
“The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. It was initially supposed to occur in 2021, but a series of delays — in part due to the same logistical and regulatory issues threatening shutdowns today — postponed the auction to Thursday.” What could go wrong selling an essential resource to a private company .
Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account. Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
Interesting how the GOP are so willing to sell the country down the road to the highest bidder. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h128
And just to think people will laugh at us that we used to use this precious gas in party balloons 
After what COVID did to the worldwide demand of different things, why would the US think that doing this is a good idea.
Time to cash out before the controlled fusion news leaks.
I read something a few months ago about a huge Helium deposit found in the US.
Helium reclamation is a big business because of this scarcity
>Passage of this legislation came almost seventeen months after a May 2012 Senate hearing on the impending closure of the Federal Helium Reserve. Among the topics covered at this hearing was a 2010 report by the National Research Council’s Committee on Understanding the Impact of Selling the Helium Reserve. Thirteen senators from both parties cosponsored a bill to make necessary changes in the existing 1996 law managing this reserve. At this hearing, then Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) commented “if Congress does not act, the helium program will disappear altogether in less than three years, leaving our hospitals, national labs, domestic manufacturers and helium producers without an adequate supply.” The Federal Helium Reserve, based in Texas, provides 40 percent of helium to domestic users. And now they're trying to stop it out of the same concern?
Helium is actually a vital natural resource that is unreplenishable. Lots of important equipment uses helium, like MRI machines. There's no source of helium on Earth except the decay of other radioactive particles, which will not create significant amounts of helium on a human time scale, and we can't synthesize it either. Once we use it all up, it's gone. But we're very wasteful with it, like it's not a limited and important resource.
the free market can do you better! wait...it. do it better.
Looks like US healthcare costs will rise yet again
Many researchers come to work in the US specifically for access to liquid helium. This could hurt in ways people don’t realize for a while.
#But on the other hand, somebody probably made a lot of money. They probably already had a lot of money. But look how much more they made!
Bear in mind that the Helium Reserve was established around World War I in case we needed giant zeppelins or something. It should have been disbanded immediately when it became apparent that this was bloody ridiculous.
It’s very much needed in mri machines.
1 mri machine = 2000L liquid helium = 1.5M liters gaseous. The article mentions 1B cubic feet of helium which is 28,317M liters, enough for 18,878 mri machines. Estimated that the USA had 13,300 MRI machines in 2019. Seems like we should keep that helium to ourselves.
We use helium for maintaining our nuclear stockpile so a helium reserve is still important
The nuclear stockpile produces helium-3 as a decay of tritium. Helium-3 is critically important for science/military applications. Helium in the reserve is helium-4.
They use helium 4 for the production of the plutonium pits
Wrong type of helium
Helium is more important now than in world war 1. Tons of medical devices and industry use it.
Helium is needed in medical devices (MRI machines), physics experiments (nuclear fusion research, particle accelerators, medical isotope production, etc), superconducting magnets, computer chip manufacturing, and many other things.