I'm in favor, though sad, of a government ban. It should probably happen slowly so that no one's job is to empty canisters into the open air. Opinions?
Curious, would you mind expanding on where you think the actual problem is?
So the problem is that the uses of helium might not be commensurate with the cost of producing (or rather extracting) it.
So therefore, the fix is to have the uses of helium pay more for it. Unfortunately, the payer of the uses of helium, such as for medical treatment recipients, do not want to pay more. As for balloons, the grade of purity is not sufficient for use in medicine, and thus is not realistically a problem (or the cost of refining it to higher purity is also costly).
But it seems to me it's a case of "we can do both", and in this case conservation of helium might not be a bad idea in addition to changing mining practices to capture it.
Suggests otherwise and is a fascinating read
Your plastic straw doesn’t end up in the ocean unless you litter on a beach trip. Guilt tripped Americans eating fast food make up an unimaginably tiny amount of ocean plastic waste.
It isn’t a “we can do both” situation for either matter. It’s a popular deception that makes people feel like they’re helping which almost entirely distracts from the actual issues. The “thoughts and prayers” response that is worse than useless.
Compare with liquid nitrogen: you can liquify air, use the nitrogen that sooner or later will go back to the atmosphere, but it rarely leaves the planet. So you have a cycle.
I'm genuinely not going to know what you think the actual problem is if you don't tell me. I promise I tried looking it up before responding.
Edit: I hadn't thought about purity requirements. Helium baloons do require significantly lower purity than medical uses. So how that lower grade stuff is treated as a whole is the part to consider, rather than helium baloon revenue.
If helium balloons cost $100 each vastly fewer of them would be sold. If they cost $100 but you could get $90 back by bringing them back to the store for the helium to be recycled, much less helium would be consumed.
If there is a limited supply of helium for essential medical use, the price should rise until either demand is affected or less of it gets discarded by hydrocarbon extractors. If this doesn't happen we are probably ok.
However the management of helium as a resource needs to be thought of as “the entire time that humans will exist on Earth”, since it’s an almost completely non renewable resource where after using it once it’s often lost forever.
We’ve already had half a dozen threads about the industrial uses of helium. Not relevant?
10% H2 in N2 is not good for lifting... let alone 4%.
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Oh, and, tri-atomic CO2 is very heavy (44 g/mol). So, waving the ideal gas law around, it really doesn't make sense to use that for lifting purposes at all when you have other, smaller things around.
> The flammability range for hydrogen in air is 4% - 74%, and even though it ignites with difficulty at dilutions higher than 10%, you would still have to dilute it like mad in order to get a provably non-flammable lifting gas
But it could not combust inside the balloon because H doesn't combine with N (at least I don't think it does!). It would have to be released, and then mixed with air to burn. If the balloon popped would it disperse faster than it could burn? I don't know, and simple chemistry would not provide an answer.
One would have to do experiments.
1. Pure nitrogen is lighter than air. Not enough to lift a balloon, but enough to make the balloon lighter than an air filled one. So it would be a good gas to mix with the hydrogen. Nitrogen gas is cheap, too.
2. Helium could be mixed in with the hydrogen, so the hydrogen would not be concentrated enough to ignite. This would reduce the quantity of helium needed.