Can we please either stop using floating balloons or replace with hydrogen already, sooo stupid.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Chemistry
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Hydrogen balloons are dangerous. I say this as someone who handles them relatively often. One blast can seriously damage your hearing if you are standing next to it. And they explode easily, too.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. Air it is...
Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade might actually become interesting
Not possible for certain things, plus hydrogen in balloons is dangerous.
It's needed to super cool magnets in NMR (and MRI), and it's heavily used as a carrier gas in GC (where hydrogen is used as the flame gas).
Many GC methods could have helium replaced with nitrogen, but the difference in gas performance means updating every method with tedious work.
For NMR, there is no alternative, just varying degrees of effectiveness in how you use helium.
I was specifically talking about novelty balloons. Personally I think the danger is overblown in most situations, small rising pop (perhaps of flame), but if you have a problem with that, use air... with the goal of saving it for more important uses, like some of your examples. Blimps are another egregious waste, especially if usage scales up they need to be engineered for sustainable hydrogen.
Someone needs to make a "balloon" you fill with normal air and then has a rechargable battery and 4 drone propellers to make it float up.
The balloon lasts much longer than a helium balloon, only downside is you have to charge it and it's noisy.
The Hindenburg was a giant zeppelin 🎶 It's engineers made a minor oversight
Before filling it with explosive gas they should have fixed the "no smoking" light
Helium is a byproduct of nuclear fusion, so in 50 years we should be rolling in it...
Good idea but sadly not feasible
Relevant part (credit to [deleted] and u/chiagod):
Assuming D-T fusion, a single fusion event releases a 14.1MeV neutron and a 3.5MeV helium nucleus. Assuming you can absorb all this energy and you've got an efficient heat engine setup at around 50%, you'll get about 1.5x10^-12 J per fusion, so for a 1GW output you'll need 6.67x10^20 fusions per second. Say you have 1TWe (electric output) worth of fusion reactors worldwide (about half of current electricity generation), then you're producing 1000 times as much helium, or 6.67x10^23 atoms per second. About a mole each second, or 4 grams. This works out to 126 tons of helium a year, or about 1000m^3 per year of liquid helium. The US strategic helium reserve had a peak volume of about a billion m^3 . World consumption of helium is measured in tens of millions of m^3 per year so you'd be short by several orders of magnitude in the best case.
/s? I feel like that tech has been "20 years away" for like 50 years now...
This graph shows projections for how long it was predicted to take to develop fusion power depending on the funding.
Checks out.
So if a billionaire actually decided to fund it, we might have it? It appears that the actual amount of funding is below the "fusion never" line.
They'd have to throw in like 10 billion a year for over a decade, so we probably need a couple of the worlds richest billionaires
Helium is found adjacent to natural gas deposits which have formed in rock with a high uranium content. Over time, the uranium decays, and helium atoms are part of the result of that decay. Almost all of the world's helium comes from an area around San Antonio, Texas.
Yeah got it, but what if we use it to fill garbage to make it float for a day?
Nah. Let's inhale it to sound funny.
We can make helium from anything that undergoes beta decay
You can make it in unlimited abundance in fusion reactors. The difficulty in fusion wasn't producing elements, it was doing so profitably, and now even that's starting to crack. You can even make a novelty fusion reactor on your desk if you wanted to, it isn't exactly hard.