Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> a Colorado State University chemist who orders a 60-liter dewar every 8–13 weeks to fill his 8-tesla superconducting magnet.

So... absolutely no recapture of this used helium? I wouldn't be throwing stones at party balloons. Seriously, the concept of helium as a disposable gas is the root of the entire price problem. Hopefully the price will rise to the point that capture and recycling become more cost effective.

>>A new, $110 000 liquefier at the University of Idaho is expected to recycle most of the helium needed for three NMR magnets, an electron paramagnetic resonance magnet, and a Mössbauer spectrometer, says Blumenfeld. As an added benefit, the new machine will enable the university to purchase its helium in gaseous form instead of liquid, for a substantial cost savings, he says.

110K? That is dirt cheap for nearly any industrial process. Industrial baking ovens can cost more. Why are such things not standard with every device needing substantial amounts of helium.

$100K is a lot of money for some experimental low temperature labs. The other issue is that vibrations from compressor units can interfere with sensitive experiments like scanning tunneling microscopy. Helium is expensive enough as it is that I think most labs would like to recycle it, but there are drawbacks.

If helium is a precious resource (it is), we should use federal dollars to incentive better management and recycling of it by academic and research users. Very similar to how we incentivize energy efficiency with grants and tax policy.

The price of helium should be the incentive.

It should be, but the market is distorted :/

It is a matter of economics. Even at $20 per liter, that research group only pays $8k per year. It would be hard for them to justify dropping $100k on a liquifier to their funding agencies. Doing that would bump up the amount of money they ask for on a grant by an order of magnitude. Most groups use liquid helium even more sparingly than them.

I'm in a huge research university and I am only familiar with one group that has a liquifier and it's because they move through Helium on the kiloliter scale.

My institution takes the long game: Physics as a department has a (£1m, ~2000l / overnight run) liquefier that is used nearly continuously and pays for itself in the long run.

This is the tragedy of the commons for climate change all over again: individually, we profit by polluting as not doing so involves a cost; societally we win overall by changing our behaviour collectively. A helium liquefier and recovery system is exactly the sort of thing a competent departmental head should support.

You said it yourself, it's not common because the price is low. Let's not devote the valuable hours of human labor towards recapturing a gas at higher efficiencies than necessary when there's food, family time, and other technologies that could also use that same attention.

>> when there's food, family time, and other technologies that could also use that same attention.

Because unlike food and family, helium is a finite resource. Once it is released into the air, it is gone. It will float up and literally into space. By protecting and conserving it now we won't have to panic once it becomes truly rare.

(Not kidding about into space. The helium in those party balloons really does leave the planet.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape

Family isn't an infinite resource, we will all die someday. Further, there are other finite resources, each one with its own priority.

>Because unlike food and family, helium is a finite resource. [...] By protecting and conserving it now we won't have to panic once it becomes truly rare.

Is there a need to preemptively conserve? As it becomes rarer, prices will increase which will naturally encourage conservation. At the same time, new supply will come online as they become economical due to the higher prices.

You can pay in to recapture now and have it cheap enough for everything later as our needs expand, or you can fritter it away now and have it become a burden on our future expanding needs and have to pay in to recapture it then anyway. Not recapturing now sounds like a tax on future generations.

Nothing against you because I held the same views in the past but I think this is a very dangerous line of thinking. Not everything can be solved with "when it's scare we will come up with alternatives" or "even if the alternatives aren't efficient enough now we will improve them if we run into a scarcity issue".

I hear this around energy most often. Oil is becoming more and more expensive ($$ and energy-wise) to extract (I find the best way to look at how many barrels of oil are extracted for the energy cost of 1 barrel). This number has been falling ever since the first well was tapped. We have used up all the "easy oil" and moving on to things like fracking which, environmental damage aside, does not have good returns and some of the major drill sites have adjusted their predicted yield down sharply (also fracking sites have a steep fall off where normal wells have more of a bell curve). The problem is: we have no viable substitute for oil (/gas). The world runs on oil.

Solar is great but you can't put it in a tank or ship across the ocean or fly and battery tech isn't really close to closing that gap. You also can't make plastic from solar energy. Not to mention converting all our cars, trucks, etc to battery-powered is not a fast or cheap process. I highly recommend watching these videos on Energy Economics [0], Peak Cheap Oil [1], and Shale Oil [2] (aka fracking).

All of this to say, I think it's dangerous to assume that we will have the time (or money) to reverse or halt the loss of non-renewable materials. Especially since if any of these start to get really expensive due to lower supply/higher demand it will kick off a number of other issues. If the price of oil spikes that affects a ton of our economy from gas, to plastics, and more.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqEi7XRKY8&list=PLRgTUN1zz_...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uKihKkx0eY&list=PLRgTUN1zz_...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uKihKkx0eY&list=PLRgTUN1zz_...

Plastics and liquid fuels can be manufactured starting from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Hydrogen of course can be produced via the electrolysis of water with solar electricty.

Carbon Recycling International already operates a commercial methanol plant for making methanol using renewable electrolytic hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

This article "Process Advantages of Direct CO2 to Methanol Synthesis" has a lot of details:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2018.0044...

Methanol is a portable liquid that can be used directly as a fuel. It is also convertible to the olefins (alkenes) propylene and ethylene, the two most common plastic feedstocks. China has built millions of tons of capacity for methanol-to-olefins in the past decade, though unfortunately their input methanol is mostly produced from coal.

See e.g. this recent plant that came on stream: "World’s largest single-train methanol-to-olefins plant now operating"

https://www.chemengonline.com/worlds-largest-single-train-me...

Helium is one of the very few mineral resources that is simultaneously industrially important, scarce, difficult to substitute, and exhibits poor prospects for higher sustainable terrestrial production.

The other few elements in this small club are (IMO) the platinum group metals and rhenium.

The planet Jupiter is a quarter helium by mass, so I propose we deliberately waste all our helium on earth then use that as an excuse to start mining operations in space.

(I'm semi-joking.)

> Solar is great but you can't put it in a tank or ship across the ocean or fly

Not directly. But what about using it for hydrogen production?

It works but is super super inefficient, and actually using hydrogen directly as a fuel also has huge drawbacks, primarily due to the fact that it is prone to detonate vs simply combust. Unfortunately I don’t believe hydrogen is going to ever be viable at global scale unless it’s simply used to synthesize artificially produced petrochemicals, an even more inefficient process.

Compared to the inefficiencies of fossil fuels hydrogen is a paragon of efficiency.

Pricing is based on current extraction cost but the potential future need is not something that can be predicted accurately. For something that could be very important, and that is used so frivolously, yes, we should probably preemptively conserve helium gas.

This may make me sound like a jerk, and perhaps I am, but:

Helium is only a finite resource at this price point. We could extract harder to get to reserves, or even make our own by fusioning hydrogen, if the price was high enough.

Unless there is a clear political or financial reason, assume that any entity will do the bare minimum required to get whatever output they want.

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