Liftless
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Went to a graduation ceremony Friday evening. All the talk was about grad parties lacking balloons. There’s a helium shortage. Why?
Helium is made at a plant in Texas. It’s regulated by the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management. They shut it down in January. Still not open.
No word on whether they will be air – lifting helium from Germany. Maybe they could use a zeppelin?
Joe Doakes
Apparently, helium is white supremacist.
Or something.
June 13th, 2022 at 7:07 am
Oh crap!
Helium is used for more than balloons. It is critical for the production of fiber optics, semi-conductors and MRI machines.
Expect shortages of these things momentarily.
June 13th, 2022 at 7:19 am
A friend of mine is a retired physicist, who used helium as part of his research. His pet peeve was always that helium, as an inert element that can’t easily be produced in a lab or factory, has a finite global supply, and yet that we continue to squander it on birthday party balloons.
Didn’t America once have the world’s largest strategic reserve of helium? Didn’t Congress, in its wisdom, vote to privatize and sell off said reserve? In August 2019, the NPR show Planet Money described the history of the reserve and government policies that helped create a shortage of the gas.
Oops!
Find The Helium
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-the-helium
June 13th, 2022 at 9:14 am
^ Yep, we’ve always been wasteful of He4, mainly because the US was the largest supplier due to the fact that we like to drill for natural gas. We won’t mention the party who’s decided that such drilling should be limited now. We also won’t go into why the US decided to not sell He to Germany, and that was the cause of the spectacular demise of the Hindenburg.
Back in the day, in prehistoric times when I was a physics grad student, I used liquid He4 to cool He3. He4 was dirt cheap at the time: a gallon was cheaper than milk, which should give you an idea how much the price of milk is distorted. On the other hand, the price of He3 was highly regulated by the government, as well as the supply, and that was distinctly *not* cheap. That was because the principle supply of He3 was from nuclear weapons production, the government was loathe to give any hint as to the production levels involved.
Ah, those were the days. We had a heck of time figuring out why we always achieved our lowest temperatures after 2 in the morning until we figured out that Channel 6 went off the air around 1 am, and that that TV station was hitting the resonance frequency of our superfluid He3 and heating our dewar . How fun. I spent many a weary month building a room sized Faraday cage to fix that problem.
June 13th, 2022 at 9:46 am
Yes — it was a byproduct of a natural gas field in Kansas. And yes, in Reagan’s obsession with minimizing the size of the government it was privatized under Newt Gingrich, another well-known scientist…
Helium is a strategic material that should only be used for non-frivolous purposes. No party balloons. Use it in supercooled magnets in MRI machines, gas chromatographs, other scientific applications.
June 13th, 2022 at 10:14 am
Em, we have a choice: change the policy to increase supply (the side effects of which terrify the Left — heaven forbid we should aim for cheap energy!), or reduce demand. The price will rise to ameliorate demand if we let the market really work.
Reagan was wrong to eliminate the strategic reserve, but at the time we really didn’t need it since gas chromatographs and NMR machines (as they were known at the time) were rarer than hen’s teeth. (I’m old enough to remember when Leftist hysteria made “Nuclear Medicine” departments, and “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance” terrifying enough to force name changes to “Magnetic Resonance Imaging.”) As technology has improved, those machines have become more ubiquitous and it may be wise to add a strategic reserve, but in Reagan’s time there really was no reason to have one.
June 13th, 2022 at 10:38 am
BTW, it really is nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. You use those superconducting magnets to create magnetic fields strong enough to align the atomic nuclei, then turn off the magnets and look for the radio waves given off as the atoms flip as they relax (entropy means they really don’t like to stay aligned unless you force them to stay that way).
It works well in organic compounds as non-invasive imaging, but subjects don’t like it because you really want to keep the volume in which you keep the magnetic fields small to minimize the energy required, and the subjects hear the big “clang” of the stored energy in the magnets being released while being constrained in a small chamber nobody likes that. The fields involved are pretty high (although nowhere near what I was dealing with to try and supercool He3), and the energy released when they turn off the magnets is pretty stressful mechanically. It’s also why you’re checked for metal before getting in one of those machines — metal can literally be deadly if you’ve got it on you.
June 13th, 2022 at 10:43 am
Yet, ‘Em, members of the party of science say that a flu virus is the deadliest thing on earth, that an unproven artificial vaccine can prevent it and then will prevent one from dying, that men can get pregnant, that men can menstruate and that bees can be fish. Pound sand, dumb ass!
June 13th, 2022 at 10:48 am
My larger point was how ill informed Joe Doakes is about his chosen topic.
June 13th, 2022 at 12:07 pm
Now just hold on a minute there, pardner. You blame Reagan for the lack of helium but he left office in 1988 and I distinctly remember helium birthday balloons as recently as 2018, a full 30 years later. Seems to me there’s a bit of a disconnect between ’cause’ and ‘effect’ in your analysis.
Seems to me the proximate cause of this latest shortage comes from the Lesko Brandon administration shutting down the only factory that makes helium, same as they did with the only factory that makes baby food. That’s the reason I asked whether we’ll soon be airlifting helium from German, same as baby food, only in a zeppelin. Maybe the Goodyear Blimp could be drafted to make trips.
As for the short-sightedness of ending the helium reserve, that’s a perfect example of 20-20 hindsight. At the time, the US Government maintained a strategic reserve of helium to inflate airships for the next war, same as it maintained a mohair subsidy to encourage ranchers to raise goats so we could make uniforms from their hair. It was another example of preparing for the last war through government programs which never die. At the time, nobody expected a need for mohair, just as nobody expected a military or scientific need for helium. It made sense to stop those programs.
Well, try to stop those programs. We still subsidize mohair. Just in case. I suppose you’re happy about that, E? Never know, we might need it someday.
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/epasReports?area=home&subject=ecpa&topic=fta-wm
June 13th, 2022 at 12:07 pm
I posted a response, E, but I linked to an official US Government website so the moderation bot jailed me. Probably for ‘disinformation.’
June 13th, 2022 at 12:30 pm
JD, but you always knew trollbots were only interested in a personal attack and not in any intelligent discourse – you have to have intelligence fort that, something trollbots do not possess. Scroogle’s AI is more intelligent* than an inanimate talking-point bot you continue to converse with. But hey, if you like talking to walls, all the power to you.
* – Google engineer put on leave claims AI bot LaMDA became ‘sentient’
June 13th, 2022 at 12:50 pm
“* – Google engineer put on leave claims AI bot LaMDA became ‘sentient’”
It’s going to take a lot more than this to convince me that engineers are meaningfully self-aware.
June 13th, 2022 at 4:12 pm
Emery on June 13, 2022 at 10:48 am said:
My larger point was how ill informed Joe Doakes is about his chosen topic.
Sez the guy who still believes — fervently! — that Trump colluded with Putin to steal the 2016 presidential election. From Hillary! Because Putin was terrified of Hillary becoming prez.
True, but oh so funny.
June 13th, 2022 at 9:17 pm
The research group I worked with used dozens of gas chromatographs, virtually all using high purity He as the carrier gas. I used three in my lab alone- two using two different columns and one for mass spectrometry. Cylinder delivery on site for all the different research groups was a daily occurrence. As an aside, when my business group was sold and the downsizing occurred, rather than donate the excess GC’s to colleges they were scrapped (liability concerns!)
June 15th, 2022 at 11:08 am
On the light side, the Goodyear “blimp” IS now a Zeppelin, technically.