Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Best News of the Day: We Can Go back to Wasting Helium

As Humans we have a poor track record of functioning of stewards of anything let alone the Creation we were told to take care of while God was busy. The best example I can think of is the element helium that we first discovered in the gases that are tapped off of oil fields so we can get to the sweet sweet hydrocarbons.

The story of the discovery of helium is a remarkable one in that it was discovered in the spectrum of the sun before it was discovered here on Earth. On Earth, our helium is the product of radioactive decay in the deep rock of the Earths crust and is therefor a non-renewable resource.  Anyway, helium is a noble gas which means it has little chemistry and because of its density it functions poorly as a blanket gas so we decided to pretty much throw it away in the form of floaty party balloons.



Policy changes by the American government meant that the National Helium Reserve was  liquidated and the and the stability of the helium market was subject to violent and expensive fluctuations. It seems like it was only then that we realized that helium is a crucial natural resource and chemistry departments all over the world spent millions and millions of dollars upgrading their instruments to minimize and re-cycle their helium used in their labs.

The panic can now be set aside with the discovery in Tanzania of a huge natural reserve and I have no doubt that we will go back to wasting the resource letting our superconducting magnets quench and blow the helium up to the stratosphere.

For us, that means that we can now go back to mass releases of helium filled party  balloons that will eventually end up in the ocean where they will kill turtles. It is almost like we do not think we will ever be called to accounts for our stewardship.