Monument to the Helium Atom
In America, helium is running out of gas. The element that lifts things like balloons, spirits and voice ranges is being depleted so rapidly in the world’s largest reserve, outside of Amarillo, Texas, that supplies are expected to be depleted there within the next eight years.
This deflates more than the Goodyear blimp and party favors. Its larger impact is on science and technology…”Helium’s use in science is extremely broad, but its most important use is as a coolant,” said Lee Sobotka, a specialist in nuclear chemistry and physics who collaborates with researchers at several national laboratories…
“Helium is non-renewable and irreplaceable. Its properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels, there are no biosynthetic ways to make an alternative to helium. All should make better efforts to recycle it…”
Helium plays second fiddle to marketing oil and natural gas, and much of it is lost in a process that removes noncombustible nitrogen and helium from the product of prime interest.
The Oil Patch Boys consider dollars to be their prime commodity, anyway. Worrying about science and nature is not a near-term priority.
quick fix:
Use electricity to split the hydrogen off of water molecules & then use nuclear fusion to turn the hydrogen into helium. problem solved.
#1
I was thinking… Just build a small nuclear reactor with liquid hydrogen as the coolant, and that would yield both deuterium and hydrogen isotopes. You could burn up all sorts of strange isotopes in it, because you certainly wouldn’t be concerned with heat at that point.
But I am not a nuclear physicist…
The picture looks more like a methane molecule than a Helium atom….
The Helium Monument also ain’t a bad place to sit with your take-out lunch. As long as the breeze ain’t blowin’ back towards Amarillo from the feed lots.
Not any great photos of the monument available, Bill. But, it is anatomically correct.
It is called Capitalism!!! When the price starts to rise all sorts of new ways to produce and recycle it will be found.Once again the big C leads the way.
most of the helium in Amarillo is a by product of the oil and gas industries( helium sits on top most gas reserves) and is pulled off and re injected into a geological formation near Amarillo it had very few uses for many years except welding aluminum so there was an abundance now with it used in many modern reactions and manufacturing it should not be to terribly difficult to capture it ( being the 2nd lightest atom) and recycle
Also those who claim it can be made easily in a reactor are sadly mistaken, fusion is still a pipe dream and fission reactors produce only tiny amounts by stripping electrons off other atoms
If a few of the 1,057 experts commenting would click through to the article – they wouldn’t be taking up space with their “common sense”:
#’s 1,2,6,7 puhlease.
hopefully the dumbass ron paul blimp will be deflated too.
#7,
I just googled around. The reactor I described would make a metric butt-load of tritium which decays into H3, which is apparently even better stuff than H4… And is already the main source of synthetic H3
“The U.S. government ran the helium industry for 70 years, but since the mid-90s it has been in the domain of the oil and natural gas industries.”
the Federal Helium Program used to be pretty much a D.C. joke – the classic example of a government program that had outlived its usefulness, but just would not die. And, when it got hammered by Newt’s congress in the 1990s, some science-wonk types said that was a bad idea, but nobody listened.
Good hack thread.
I find this funny.
why NOT stop blowing balloons with Helium, start useing Hydrogen.
That alone would probably save 2/3 of the USE.
Time to invest in helium futures?
I thought people were abusing Nitrous Oxide not Helium!
ECA, you might want to talk to Captain Max Pruss about that approach.
I used to fill 30-40 balloons with natural gas, tie a roll of toilet paper to ’em, let ’em go and light the end of the roll. Talk about a UFO.
Of course, today that would be a terrorist act.
#14 – ECA – why NOT stop blowing balloons with Helium, start useing Hydrogen.
Yeah, I wonder why…
#17 – BubbaRay
You sure was a terrorist… 😉
Well, when I was a kid, I was pouring gunpowder in the entrances of anthills and let them dig it down… repeating it 4-5 times, just to put fire to it right after… *woosh*
And then there was the times when we played fireball hockey… bunch of kids with hockey sticks, a tennis ball, gasoline… *woosh* and the game started.
Jager,
Hydrogen isnt Bad unless you add AIR to it..and disperse it so that it can expand more.
And its a mute point that the Hindenburg DID NOT EXPLODE. If it had, there would NOT have bee survivors, or ANY one on the ground ALIVE.
#20 – ECA
So, no problem when little Bobby puts his hydrogen balloon to an open flame. There’s a reason why hydrogen isn’t used… *woosh*
Jager..
yes, but it goes STRAIGHT UP…it wont explode.
And not as bad as Hairspray or Butane does when you light a Match to it.
AND its ABUNDANT…VERY abundant. WHICH means the COAL and gas corps wont have a Monopoly…
Hydrogen is abundant? Really? Exactly where are these reserves of H2?
For those that deal in reality, much of the hydrogen in use today is stripped from methane (natural gas) – hence is in the hands of big oil.
That’s really going to hurt Alvin and the Chipmunks’ career.
#21, Jag,
Ya, didn’t ya know? When H burns, it mixes two H atoms with an O atom. That creates Dihydrogen Oxide. Very dangerous stuff. People have died from it. A while back we had a thread here where a woman ingested too much Dihydrogen Oxide and died. Others have died from inhaling it. Reportedly, it is in our groundwater as well as spread throughout the oceans. It is a major constituent of acid rain. Probably the most injurious aspect is the use of Dihydrogen Oxide as a sports enhancement !!!
Please join us to ban Dihydrogen Oxide .
Since my link in #25 didn’t work, let’s try this link.
Dihydrogen Oxide .
Pshaw…
When I took welding alllll those years ago, this one time I put an equal mixture of Acetylene gas and o2 in an old tire sitting on its side (not sealed… tire was just sitting there) and I lit it… and my ears are STILL ringing from that.
And if anyone wishes to check the veracity of my claim, all you need to do is get the newspapers from the period, as the boom was loud enough to cause worry that something bad had happened…
This is easy! All we have to do is separate the helium out of H2O water molecules. Just remove the heliums from the oxygens.
I was being SARCASTIC
I was being SARCASTIC!
#30, at best, you were being facetious.