Helium is a scarce and irreplaceable gas essential for medical and other technologies. Future generations will condemn us for wasting it on this kind of trivial nonsense.
Hydrogen is way too combustible. It could ignite merely by your body’s static charge. In retrospect, you drop a burning matchstick inside a chamber of helium and nothing happens.
The mixture of hydrogen and oxygen is combustible. Pure hydrogen is not. Either way the amount of energy in the hydrogen to fill a balloon like this is too low to cause any amount of damage.
Pure hydrogen cannot combust, u just need to make sure that Oxygen stays away. Need an insulating and strong yet light material to keep the hydrogen isolated. The question is how long will it take to invent such wonder material
I also imagine if you put it in a flame retardent bag with no pressure instead of a baloon, there might not be an explosion. There are videos show a relatively weak explosion with hydrogen baloons indoors, but that is because they pop and mix with oxygen. A loose bag should be even slower.
The type of helium used in balloons is a completely different grade than the helium that is used in technology or medical fields. It’s essentially a byproduct of the helium refining process and it isn’t high enough quality to be used for any other application. We aren’t wasting our ‘good’ helium on balloons, we’re making use of a leftover product that isn’t really good for anything else.
What is the difference between helium gas and balloon
gas?
Helium gas that Supagas provides is greater than 99% helium
purity versus balloon gas that can contain up to 5% nitrogen or
oxygen diluting the product from 99% to 95% purity.
Still confused about why they can't just separate it out somehow but that's another issue.
I used to work in a lab and they had water for molecular testing and other really sensitive tests. It was like $800-1000 for like a handful of 0.5ml bottles of that grade of water. Whereas our batch tests that used less pure water like general chemistry we were using like 500k water filters from a tank that needed like to replaced the internal filers for like $2k every 3 months.
This "can't be used" is probably because it's too expensive currently. But it could probably be refined and purified but that doesn't maximize profits. Even scientists sort of treat economics as if it's a natural law - but it isn't. That is just unplanned greedy capitalism.
Sure but from what I understand once our helium reserves are gone they are gone for good since you'd need to filter insane quantities of air to mine it. It will probably become INCREDIBLY valuable in 50 or 100 years.
It's somewhat true but also not really, as helium can be created synthetically and there are many ways to extract helium from various other elements.
Also whether or not it becomes valuable depends on how much we depend on it in the future and whether alternative materials or processes are being used instead. For example it is a key component in the hydrogen economy, but it is quite likely that the hydrogen economy won't exist anymore in 50 or 100 years (and / or will never materialize to begin with).
It's more a question of our ability to extract it. We need more every day, and extracting it is hard.
Helium comes from radioactive decay, and the earth is big, yo. So extremely unbelievably mega big that you cannot fathom how much material is underground, breaking down as we speak. It will run out eventually, sure, but the sun will also explode one day. That doesn't mean tomorrow.
And hey, if all the radioactive stuff in our underground runs out, it means less cancer too! Radon is a bitch.
I work in the movies and you couldn't guess how much helium that uses. They make big balloon lights that are heavy and filled with alot of helium and they're held up by ropes. If there's a big movie shoot requiring them, it's happened before that all of the civilian supplies in my country, Czechia get taken and then they need to supply it from hospitals which have more than they need and then they have to start shipping it from other countries.
Helium is actually really hard to store since it is so permeable and since lighter than air will literally just float out into space.
Even stored in a tank like you see at a store, it will slowly leak out over time and escape.
The only way they have found to store helium efficiently is to pump it back where they found it, because the Earth seems to have a way to keep it trapped, or else we would already have no helium on Earth.
You're thinking of Hydrogen. Helium doesn't measurably leak through metal containers.
The reason why it is stored underground in big caverns is because that's the cheapest storage method available in some parts of the world. In others, it is stored in metal or concrete tanks.
Thanks, I had heard this on podcast about helium, but googling about it you are right that it not so permeable to escape metals.
The story they told was that the US has a huge helium reserve underground, in a secret location, and early on they were trying to figure out how to store it. So they put it into containers but over time noticed it was escaping. Not knowing what to do, they ended up pumping it all back into the ground as that was the only proven way to keep it indefinitely.
We've had fusors(first invented by Philo T. Farnsworth, who also invented the first all-electric television) for a long time, so if we really really needed more helium we could make it. It wouldn't be cheap though.
The problems we have with fusion are about keeping it going and extracting net energy from it.
This comment has managed the impressive feat of being the stupidest thing I have read on reddit all week. Helium is a noble gas — a class of elements named for the fact that it does not form compounds with other elements. Helium is not bound up with anything.
Natural deposits and alpha decay (which is where those deposits come from) are the only way we get helium. Full stop. There is no smelting or other chemically extractive process for refining because helium does not form compounds.
Not anymore, the issue wasn't that we can't make it. It's that just mining it was much easier so not much artificial helium production infrastructure was built. That has changed in recent years
I admire your optimism dude, but the main issue with fusion is that the amount of energy required to contain the reaction is greater than the energy produced. The only reason it works on the scale of stars is because the amount of gravity is high enough to naturally contain the reaction taking place.
I dunno if physics works that way though, you are basically describing a closed system that produces more energy than it takes in and currently we only observe this happening in extreme environments like the core of a star.
They just found a massive new deposit in like minnesota or nebraska or something. Look it up. I would have previously agreed with you but the new source seems basically limitless
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u/Turbo_Tom Jul 18 '24
Helium is a scarce and irreplaceable gas essential for medical and other technologies. Future generations will condemn us for wasting it on this kind of trivial nonsense.