Given its scarcity, helium should be more expensive, to the point where filling party balloons with it is decadent profligacy.
I mean it is expensive, it's just the amount required for a balloon is insignificant and thus seems cheap.
As a diver who uses helium I can tell you it is, compared to air, so much more expensive they actually charge me for it (rather than just rolled into the cost of a dive) - to the sum of about $300 a dive - depending on depth.
Privatization seems like a really bad idea to me. Helium is non-renewable resource. Privatization is about being 'efficient' at maximising profits. Do you think the people / companies that own the helium reserves are going to be interested in keeping helium available for centuries in the future? I'd say probably not.
For a profit based company, the only motivation to preserve the helium for future use is that maybe it will be worth a lot more money in the future. But there are two big problems with that. Firstly, the timescale is likely to be too long for the profit to be of interest. And secondly, the main reason the price would go up is scarcity; and that scarcity will come sooner if the helium is wasted in the short term. (Unless one company actually has a monopoly on helium, in which case they can create artificial scarcity by just not selling it. But that would obviously be bad for other reasons.)
We should go back to filling them with hydrogen.
What could go wrong?
I mean other than that...
Oh the huge manatee!
wasn't that just the flammable lining?
When I was in school decades ago, my science teacher brought in a big balloon filled with hydrogen and lit the string on fire without telling us that it was filled with hydrogen.
I could feel the explosion in my bones. It was neat.
I’m not sure you could do that in schools today.
Mylar balloons should be outlawed. They get sent free and land on power lines WAY too often. Over a thousand mylar balloon caused power outages are recorded in just Southern California alone in a typical year. The cost of repairing the damage might even exceed the revenue of mylar balloon sales.
I want a balloon full of uranium hexafluoride.
Meh, Argon is fine. Although what you said would be kind of funny.
I really wonder what power plants will do with the helium once they get fusion working. Maybe a balloon business on the side isn't such a bad idea.
I mean too much Helium isn’t a problem. It’s one of the few (only?) elements that will just disappear if you don’t do anything with it.
It’s light enough that it rises to the very tip top of the earth’s atmosphere and is then stripped away by solar radiation. That’s why is a depleting natural resource, not because it’s burned or used or anything, but because it just escapes.
Edit: seems I was wrong about the escape mechanism for helium, it seems the primary mechanism is polar wind escape.
Also, hydrogen can also apparently escape from the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf
In a perfect world stick it in a secondary reactor and make lithium. But that's obviously even further off than hydrogen fusion.
The amount of helium produced is truly miniscule, in the order of a few cubic centimeters. They'll just pump it into the ground somewhere, assuming we ever get fusion working
You don't have to pump it anywhere. Capturing helium is actually the hard part. It's very adept at sneaking through small cracks and flying off into space. Earth's gravity cannot contain it(if it could it would be a gas giant) and pretty much all of it comes from primordial uranium decaying and getting caught in geological features by chance.
Brought to you by big hydrogen.
Good thing I finally finished voice training and no longer need Helium to pass 👍
Don't you mean "outlaw α-decay" instead?
I just work here, sir. I'm not a scientician.
nice keming on that one
We also need to end road work while were at it. Enough is enough!!
not only are these plastic bags shit and the people finding joy in in imbeciles, but helium doesnt grow on plants. it is limited.
Counterargument: everything is limited, and all joyful people are imbeciles to some extent
fair
Well, the half lives of the stuff that produces helium are generally above 500 million years so we'll still be making more of it for a very long time, but the reserves we've found trapped in geologic formations certainly are limited. /s
