Hey, we run out of helium, NASA can just plan a recovery mission to the Sun and suck up all we need!
And then the astronauts can talk with funny voices all the way home…
~VOW
Not the average velocity, just the velocity way out in the high-speed tail of the distribution. Helium isn’t all that different in mass from nitrogen or oxygen, after all, and those have managed to persist for eons.
nm
You’re right that the average speed isn’t up to escape velocity, or else it would all escape immediately. It’s quite a bit lighter than oxygen or nitrogen, though. Oxygen pairs and helium never does, so your average helium atom has 1/16 the mass of an O2 molecule and consequently four times the average velocity. Of course the earth manages to keep water vapor in pretty handily at roughly nine times the mass of a helium atom, but even that is a pretty big difference.
I wasn’t thinking in terms of escaping gases, but in terms of mining helium by fractional distillation, would it be better to mine at high altitudes?
If the world is running out of helium, and it’s necessary for important industrial or scientific things, why are we still using it to fill up sparkly “Look who’s 40” balloons? Shouldn’t we be saving it?
Why do you hate America?
The questions are: who are “we”, and where?
Helium is a by-product of the natural gas industry. The helium in the party balloons is there because someone rescued it before it was simply sent up the flue with all the other contaminants in the natural gas.
The one place helium has been stored in any real quantity is the US reserve - which no-one, either private or public, is now willing to pay for. In principle, it could be sequestered in any depleted gas fields. Trouble is that it is currently uneconomic to do so. Interestingly there are existing uneconomic gas fields that have quite high helium content. In Kansas. The US seems peculiarly well placed because its basement rocks are high in uranium and thorium. So where you have a very good seal above, and good deep fissured geology to trap large enough volumes of gas, you accumulate - over the many millions of years a good reserve.
Elsewhere on the planet the advent of economic natural gas liquefaction means that helium becomes an economic by product. Here in Oz, and in Qatar, the LNG plants produce economic amounts of helium which is sold. The immense quantities of LNG is shipped to overseas customers. Mostly China. Before LNG was a viable way of selling natural gas, the helium just went up the flue. The down side is that the once not so very valuable natural gas reserves have increased in value and are being exploited much faster then before. Because it is now possible to economically transport it in liquid form it can be sold to a much wider market than those customers simply within gas pipeline distance.
Bottom line is that helium is for all intents a limited reserve. Once we run out of natural gas we will run out of helium. It isn’t a matter of frivolous party balloons, the vast majority of helium still simply goes straight up the flue.
Thanks all, for even more help with this question. I talked to a helium balloon retailer in my hometown yesterday. He said his price for a tank of helium has doubled in the past year and tripled in the past five years. He said he can only pass some of this increase on to his customers as the cost for a helium balloon is now so high that sales are down. The retailer feels that the reason for the price increase on a tank of helium is big suppliers buying out smaller ones and not related to polices at the US national helium reserve. Assuming normal economic forces are at work here, will the price for a party balloon in the US be falling anytime soon? And a related question, is global party balloon use of helium really a “drop in the bucket”?
One a related note, there is one group of folks that are gonna really hurt when helium gets expensive. Recreational divers who dive deep (greater than about 150 ft give or take) on mixed gases where a significant fraction of the breathing mix is helium rather than nitrogen. Its not uncommon for these divers to burn a good chunk of change just to pay for the helium they use on one dive. If it actually does get to be something like 10 to a 100 times more it will become a hobby for the rich.
Rebreathers will help to reduce helium costs and are becoming more common as time goes by, but maybe not enough if the helium gets REALLY expensive.
Now, they could breath a hydrogen mix, but its gonna be a tricky and scary until they get the procedure for mixing and using worked out. Its one of those things that is doable but I wouldn’t want to be one of the first pioneers to be working out the potentially deadly kinks.
Breathe a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen? That’s not a good idea.
In rare circumstances, it’s actually a very good idea.
Divers could just take of their masks to breath all the hydrogen/oxygen mix they want. For a few minutes anyway.
That’s why I never shell out good money for nitrous oxide.
We need to let the free market work. High temperature magnets that reduce operating costs and cooling needs are in the process of being developed for MRI scanners. There may also be other scanning technologies on the horizon that could replace MRI scanners altogether and would require little or no cryogenic cooling. We need to let market demand push our technology to develop cheaper and more energy efficient machines that result in lower health care costs. If the government steps in and regulates helium, the law of unintended consequences will come around to bite us in the form of higher costs and slower technological innovation.
What I’d like to know is where I can buy helium futures–or simply helium in long-term storage.
C’est à rire!
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Mixture. Not compound. Or do you season your food with chlorine gas and sodium metal? 
Based on what I’ve learned from this thread “The Guardian” got it wrong this week, especially the headline. This story seems to blame the sale of party balloons for a shortage of helium needed for an experiment. Does anyone know what percentage of annual global helium production goes to party balloons?
On thing about the helium released into the air. Yes, helium in the air eventually escapes into space to never come back. But I suspect this still takes awhile. So, it will be more expensive to retrieve from the air than from natural gas wells but it will be there awhile I suspect. Does anybody know how long on average it takes a helium atom to escape the earth’s atmosphere?
Helium is being constantly replenished by radioactive decay. Most of that simply makes it into the atmosphere. The stuff in the gas wells is very old Helium that didn’t make it out because it got trapped along with the natural gas. So the concentration of Helium in the atmosphere is a very long term steady state, one that is independent of our use of Helium, or natural gas. The trouble with it as a source is the dramatically higher cost of recovery - mostly as a cost of energy needed to perform the process. But it is one that we won’t deplete. There are 3,600,000,000 tons of Helium in the atmosphere. Which isn’t much, but vastly more than we need.