Helium is hard to replace

I know of a few.

They use a lot when installed, but rarely need top-ups.

They are shipped full of helium and chilled, but aren’t ramped up (so aren’t superconducting magnets until after commissioning).

While hydrogen-air mixes explode really readily (outstandingly wide flammability and pretty wide detonation range), and the energy released is considerable for the weight, the actual explosion does not produce a particularly high overpressure wave.

That's because the starting density of the hydrogen air mixes at near atmospheric pressure (such as in a balloon) is pretty low. Also, the balloon does not significantly contain the explosion, which reduces the danger a lot. I would not want to do it in a glass container.

My chemistry teacher told us how once when he ignited helium in a test tube, the tube broke and he ended up with pieces of glass embedded in his skin. The students had face masks and he was looking the other way "just in case" for this "safe" experiment but he could have easily been blinded.

Things can always go wrong. We probably shouldn't strive for 100% safety because they we'd spend our lives in a padded cell. But we also shouldn't assume things are safe because they're common or routine.

Along with the other commenter, I'll add that a classroom is usually a lot bigger than a home dining room or other domestic party locations. That size also helps things dissipate instead of reflect. Not sure by how much but I'm sure it does something.

You can get permanent hearing damage from that demonstration if you stand right next to that balloon.

We did this. One balloon with plain air. One with pure hydrogen. One with 50/50 hydrogen and air. The one with pure hydrogen popped closer in magnitude to the pure air than it was to the 50/50 mix.

ETA: I may be misremembering, the more I think about it, the more I recall that we did not use air, we did use pure oxygen. Not like it was hard to get (and we had lots more interesting stuff than that in the lab, this was the 80s...). But the outcome I do remember. The entire point of the experiment was to examine the difference between the individual pure elements and the mix. We expected the pure hydrogen to be far more interesting than it turned out.

Pure hydrogen in a balloon produces a low, loud, very satisfying bang. Completely different from a sound of an air balloon popping. Here is a video from a very good Royal Society of Chemistry demonstration series on various unusual combustion process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwbyl7ywfhk&list=PLLnAFJxOjz...

Hydrogen mixed with air or with oxygen produces an ear piercing supersonic detonation, exceedingly loud and unpleasant. Not recommended for demonstrations.

As a kid I took a lot of classes at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, which was paradise for fledgling nerds. On the last day they would have a little closing ceremony with some cute little science experiment. One of my favorites was "Going Out With A Bang".

The instructors would bring out a helium balloon and a candle on a meter stick. The balloon goes pop, huzzah.

Then the twist. "Hey, wanna do it again?" All the kids would be like "meh, I guess?" They would then bring out a balloon full of hydrogen (maybe some oxygen too?). It would look identical to the first one, floating there tethered to the lab bench.

When the candle hit the second one, it made a white flash and a really sharp BANG. It was an order of magnitude louder, and you could hear the transient bouncing off the walls and echoing in the halls. It made an impression.

That still amounts to magical thinking. And the point of the post that you’re replying to is that we didn’t actually make things better. We actually accelerated our exploitation of other resources to make up for the shortage of the others which had serious other negative side effects.

Since we’re dealing in magical hypotheticals, what if this new economical way to split nitrogen generated so much pollution that it poisoned natural water supplies? Also the “economic way” is misleading. If prices shoot up enough, then crazy things become economical like missions to other planets to retrieve it. But that’s an insane cost that has to be borne out by all humanity. Historically that worked because you increased how many people were on earth so it spread the cost out. However, it’s pretty clear the Earth is at carrying capacity for humans with our current technology which is why the population growth has slowed drastically. So increasing costs threaten to become a weight the next generation can’t lift resulting in societal collapse.

> Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows).

This is nonsense, from the physics point of view.

The reason why rubber/fertilizer were replaced by oil/gas products is that oil/gas has the energy needed for the (relatively simple) chemical transformations needed to obtain rubber/fertilizer from the feedstocks.

Splitting nitrogen into helium is a nuclear reaction that requires copious amounts of energy.

At least using fusion or collecting helium from Moon/Jupiter are physically sane, if economically insane.

Is He1+ an ion while 2+ is not because no known chemical reactions produce the latter? (Is that true?)

The Bush Dome Reservoir is a giant underground formation. So yes, it's being stored underground.

I suppose I'm neutral on the topic of strategic helium reserves; but what aspect of this is supposed to be pound foolish? What exactly is the buffer meant to be for?

A strategic petroleum reserve makes a lot of sense, petroleum is part of the food supply chain and it'd be stupid to be in a position where a short disruption could cause people to starve. Not to mention the military implications if an army can't zoom around because the petrol stations run dry for whatever reason.

I don't see anything on the list of uses for helium that looks particularly time- and helium- sensitive in the way that a strategic stockpile would help with.

Specifically, the US federal government. Just like most Americans don’t hate the people of Russia or Iran any more than the folks the next town over, I’ve never met someone from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, or pretty much anywhere else who hates all Americans. I’m sure they exist, but probably as a small minority. There’s plenty of reason to hate our government though, especially if it has threatened to destroy your entire civilization.

US government is invoking religion in its justification, US military command has prayer meetings, they call the attack on Iran “part of gods plan”

God's angels typically don't bomb your little girl's school.

All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.

Are you aware of what the US regime has done to Iran? There's a reason they say that.

Just because someone hates you and calls you the devil (or loves you and calls you an angel) doesn't mean they think you're literally the physical embodiment. Especially when you're not even a living being but a country or a government. I'm pretty darn sure you can assume it's a metaphor and that your coworker doesn't have evidence to the contrary.

I think the issue is about our not believing what religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning

Would like to add Vox is nowhere near the other's popularity, and has received substantial donations from... Hungary. A total of 6.5 million euros during the 2023 elections.

> That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that.

I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old.

I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals.

Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.

> eat the rich, and try to build something more sane

The tragedy is that right wing parties are sponsored by the rich snd serve primarily them. Economic grievances of ordinary people are exploited to make them vote agains their interests.

The pledge is not to some painted cloth or the current government but the community of people you are part of and the decision of who leads them, made thru free and fair elections. I really thought about its meaning as someone that chose to come here and join this community out of my own free will. IDN, Perhaps people that are taught to memorize it as children simply regard as mantra and never think about its meaning. PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge, most often to fatherland/motherland or even a King or Tyrant.

I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.

Strong disagree.

One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.

Classic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when the other dismantles the institutions that let the country work, so both sides are equally bad.

MRI could switch to LH2. Yes, it's explosive and higher boiling temperature so would not support as high field and incompatible with currently used semiconductors. But it's doable. Plenty of other important uses (i. e. semiconductors and lasers) where it is much more irreplaceable.

In a world of extremely cheap solar electricity pushing grid prices negative, a lot of things might be a lot more economical then conventionally thought though - particularly when you factor in the desire to get a full return on industrial manufacturing of panels.

We are already separating out the majority elements from air via ASU plants, so we should compare the abundance of helium in what is left from typical extraction. And that looks quite technically viable, if obviously uneconomic at present.

Is this graph wrong?

http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/atmos...

If by “free” you mean “very very expensive” then i agree with you. It would cost a fortune to even just attempt a pilot project proving feasability. Then we would need to send up regular replacements to the “sending the harvest down” hardware at the minimum. Just imagining the cost of a tank which can be launched into space, autonomously dock with the collector sails, then deorbit and land makes my head spin. And then doing that at scale, paying people to launch it, paying people to operate the system.

It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.

Helium-3, created by solar wind.