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Short-sighted waste of helium reserve


               
2013 Sep 2, 11:17am   1,637 views  6 comments

by Dan8267   follow (4)  

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/mar/18/helium-party-balloons-squandered

"It costs £30,000 a day to operate our neutron beams, but for three days we had no helium to run our experiments on those beams," said Kirichek. "In other words we wasted £90,000 because we couldn't get any helium. Yet we put the stuff into party balloons and let them float off into the upper atmosphere, or we use it to make our voices go squeaky for a laugh. It is very, very stupid. It makes me really angry."

Earth only has a limited supply of helium, which is released as a by-product of the petrochemical industry. Essentially, pockets of the gas are disturbed during gas and oil drilling and rise to the surface. In the 1920s the US decided helium would be a strategic resource. It realised that air power would be crucial in future wars, and assumed that these would be fought by airships that would use helium to float. "The US created a vast stockpile of billions of litres of helium in the 1920s and kept it until the late 1990s, when it decided to sell it off," said Jonathan Flint, the CEO of Oxford Instruments, whose scanners and other devices use helium for cooling.

For the past decade that vast stockpile has been sold off, causing prices to plummet. "Helium was cheap and we learned to be wasteful with it," said Kirichek. "Now the stockpile is used up, prices are rising and we are realising how stupid we have been."

When given the choice between a cure for cancer and floating party balloons, humans always go for the balloons.

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1   curious2   2013 Sep 2, 12:02pm  

Dan8267 says

For the past decade that vast stockpile has been sold off, causing prices to plummet. "Helium was cheap and we learned to be wasteful with it," said Kirichek. "Now the stockpile is used up, prices are rising and we are realising how stupid we have been."

I remember reading about this short-sighted decision a decade ago. I can't help wondering now, with so much advance notice, why didn't some of the universities with enormous endowments buy up the supply when it was cheap? Whether for investment or to secure the supplies they would need for research, isn't that what a university endowment is for?

2   freak80   2013 Sep 5, 10:20pm  

Dan8267 says

When given the choice between a cure for cancer and floating party balloons, humans always go for the balloons.

Communist!

Are you questioning the free market? The free market always allocates resources in the most efficient and responsible manner!

3   Dan8267   2013 Sep 6, 8:44am  

freak80 says

Dan8267 says

When given the choice between a cure for cancer and floating party balloons, humans always go for the balloons.

Communist!

Are you questioning the free market? The free market always allocates resources in the most efficient and responsible manner!

So true. Economics is the new religion. The free market is unquestionable dogma, even though it has not existed in over a hundred years, possible two.

4   Dan8267   2013 Sep 10, 3:15am  

kill me

5   leo707   2013 Sep 10, 4:30am  

I think that there will come the day when people feel that burning up all our oil in cars and making crappy plastic toys will have been a short-sighted waste of a resource that is very useful for other purposes.

6   freak80   2013 Sep 24, 1:02am  

leo707 says

I think that there will come the day when people feel that burning up all our oil in cars and making crappy plastic toys will have been a short-sighted waste of a resource that is very useful for other purposes.

When future generations are scavenging landfills just to survive, it will be hard to blame them.

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