The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile. Here’s why the medical world is worried.
The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile. Here’s why the medical world is worried.
Privatizing the US national helium reserve. Gonna laugh when in a few years the government of another nation ends up owning it. Helium is dwindling finite resource that key technological infrastructure relies upon.
Think of those quarterly profits though Jack
The free market has spoken and found party balloons to maximize utility
Gonna laugh when in a few years the government of another nation ends up owning it.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1114964240/new-battery-technology-china-vanadium
A bunch of scrappy engineers made a next generation battery and sold the technology to the US government
The government never bothered to manufacture anything. Instead they sold everything to China and now they’re already releasing public versions of the batteries. Now the US doesn’t have any knowledge on the batteries or even the factories to build them
Helium is technically finite, but it's really a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Most natural gas operations don't bother to even harvest the helium.
That’s crazy to me. It’s obviously useful, how is it not worth it to extract it if it’s already there during the process? That’s like hearing people back in the day burning gasoline since it was a byproduct of extracting crude oil.
Holy shit, why would you do this. Neoliberals are the stupidest people on the planet. "Oh well we have to sell it off because it's not profitable enough!" sure am glad this won't cause the price of helium to surge resulting in a hike in MRI costs.
Get ready for helium in everything for like three years and then it’s all gone. No more floaty balloons ever again.
We can always use hydrogen for the floaty balloons. Double as fireworks!
This has similar vibes to being an addict and selling your playstation or couch to buy drugs, but at least drugs are fun where is this is just being done to accumulate more capital for a dozen crusty old fucks
joe biden with the highest voice you've ever heard
This shit is a crime against the people and in a civilized country, these fuckers would be sent to a gulag for 20 years, then the people would seize the helium back.
What gets me is the fact that sell-offs like this are just accepted, but anytime it goes the other way and something is nationalised, it's a huge overreach because we didn't vote on it or whatever
private property is a very high priority for bourgeois dictatorships
capitalists are the stupidest fucking people on earth
The article says it will probably owned by a German company, Messer Group. Germany and helium... 🤔
During the Nazi era, the Messer-led company benefited considerably from the regime's arms production, employed forced laborers and was a supplier for the V2 production and the Wehrmacht.[1] In the denazification process, Messer, who had been a member of the since 1933, was classified as a follower in 1948
oh, right.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Messer
Also, can't wait for this to make people's medical treatment even more expensive! Exciting times! Thanks Joe Biden!
Hast du etwas Zeit für mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von neunundneunzig Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Denkst du vielleicht grad an mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von neunundneunzig Luftballons
Und, dass so was von so was kommt
Wait till you learn who delivers anti-grafitti spray to the Berlin holocaust memorial
Can't wait to listen to all my analytical chemistry friends complain about how helium is too expensive and how they have to design new procedures.
I've helped people make procedures with nitrogen and hydrogen based on studies that use helium because helium is too expensive. Not being able to do an MRI because you need helium is nightmare inducing.
Looks like we're already out, bought a "helium-filled" HDD and it doesn't even float.
When I looked into this a couple years ago, my understanding was that yes, the supply is finite, but the amount we have in storage is a lot and we slowing mining operations because we have enough on reserve for a while.
Havent they been in the middle of doing this for like 20 years?
They finished the sell-down years ago to a much reduced capacity but now they're outright selling off the entire remaining stockpile and all the infrastructure
Is there like a SpongeBob meme where the magic conch is capital and he’s is pulling it for an answer or something
This is the equivalent of our very logical and rational economic system btw
We really do have an emote for everything.
actors in munchkin roles reeling.
The lollipop guild is in shambles
It’s over for balloons
Serious question: is there a replacement for helium or is it sorta a when it’s gone it’s gone kinda deal
pretty sure it just goes up to the top of the atmosphere and stays there.
i thought it flew off into space
Helium is too light to stay within Earth's gravity. Nearly all helium came from underground. The problem with helium is that it's too good. It's inert, light, and doesn't conduct anything. It's really good for some specific applications, like MRIs use it.
The helium that's on Earth now is the only amount we have. The sun is full of it though, like it spits out helium by the ton every second. There's an amount of helium-3 on the moon too, underneath the top layer, and I've heard some space scientists speculate that we might eventually have to harvest helium from the moon.
It's possible to break down some radioactive elements into helium, but that takes hundreds of millions of years. It's possible to make helium-3 using nuclear fusion with tritium and lithium then capturing the decay products, but this is extremely slow, expensive, and I think less than something like 200kg of helium have ever been made this way. It's hypothetically possible to bombard deuterium atoms together to create helium. Deuterium is a hydrogen isotope that has a neutron in its nucleus. If you've ever heard of "cold fusion" that's a big part of what those people want to accomplish, reliable and efficient ways of creating helium atoms.
The cosmically ironic part about Earth running out of helium is that the universe makes helium in such large quantities that it's the second most common element. There are huge clouds of helium floating around space that are larger than our whole galaxy. Our sun builds enough helium to last us for hundreds of years and it does that in several seconds.
It’s a byproduct of natural gas extraction.
It's not a common element. And because it floats, it's quickly lost to space once released.
We could technically make more with Hydrogen and nuclear fusion, or fissile products, but the price of man-made Helium would probably be about ten million fold more. It has a variety of useful properties that range from expensive to impossible to replace with other gases, namely its thermal properties, its inertness and being lighter-than-air.
Clown world should have been our meme.
xi please fire the pies when ready
We can co-opt it.
prepare for Balloonpocalypse
Just tearing the copper wires out of the walls without a shred of irony at this point.
Nobody left to neocolonize but ourselves I guess.
someone once said that fascism is when the colonial methods of oppression are brought home to the imperial core