"Recurrent helium shortages and high prices have led some academic researchers to install liquefiers to recycle helium that boils off from their instruments."
Yeah, it can't have been a real shortage if they were just letting it boil away.
Yeah, it can't have been a real shortage if they were just letting it boil away.
Also market prices rising with demand don't themselves increase supply, again not instantly anyway. It doesn't matter how high the prices goes, if there is insufficient supply to meet the demand some people will be priced out. That's not even got anything to do with markets and certainly not a market failure, it doesn't matter how allocation is determined, not everyone will get what they need, at least for a while.
Nobody cared when it cost $0.50/l. They do when it’s $5/l.
Do you perhaps mean twenty years ago?
That depends on both time period and location.
In the late 80's I worked in a physics lab in the US that had an old helium recuperation system installed (as gas, I don't think they had a liquifier) but it wasn't in use, we just boiled off 100's to 1000's of liters each week. I assume it must have been used at some point in time though.
In Europe helium has traditionally been much more expensive than in the US (not sure about the situation currently) and I think many labs recovered it. At CERN all the helium was reliquified, except for one time when the liquifier broke down and they boiled off about 20000 liters testing LEP superconducting RF cavities.
Running like that all the time seems unconscionable, but it makes a lot of sense as a backup while the primary is down for repair, as a very cheap-to-install but wasteful-to-run system that would be appropriate for short durations only.
The problem with fresh water isn’t the overall supply of fresh water. It’s getting it to communities that need it, when they need it, and distributing it without contaminating it.
It's not nearly as bad as watering a lawn, where water goes out clean and comes back as contaminated runoff that has to be captured and treated or dumped.
My grandparents had a system that worked basically on that principle. Since they lived in a farming town it used irrigation water which was much cheaper than tap water.
I think they might've been running a Freon loop with the condenser in tap water, to achieve higher thermal delta and just skip the enormous radiators and fans.
They're generally on top of the building, and they kinda look like generic air conditioning units. https://www.munters.com/en/munters/products/coolers--humidif...
Whether or not that's wasteful really depends on where exactly it's happening. If the city water is being pumped out of a fossil aquifer, that's obviously a problem. If the water is coming out of a reservoir with abundant supply, the water being "used" is merely taking a slight detour from what it would otherwise do ("river→reservoir→hvac→river→ocean" rather than "river→ocean".) There could be some energy losses in the pumping and processing of the water, depending on where it's happening, but that's not the water itself being wasted.