Bit of a shocker
 

Have just been advised of a global shortage of helium!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...ons-squandered

Chap on there reckons we should be paying £75 for 1 helium filled balloon, as this is what true value is against it now.

Seems to have been kept fairly quiet, although I'd never have thought it was for use in scientific tests...

Helium was designed for us to laugh at each other surely???:lol1:

Wow, here's hoping my acre of moon is rich in helium!

I heard this about 3 months ago on bbc2. America sold their stock piles off and it's made the price of helium plumbit. Sadly helium is a natural gas and can not be reproduced... Shame to think ow it's wasted.

NASA waste millions of tonnes cleaning their rockets with it... Hospitals use it in mra scans...

That sounds pretty serious. Curious to know if they can do without it...

Sounds like they should float it on the stock exchange.:D

Just hope it doesn't cause inflation.

Just like you to burst my balloon.

Time to use hydrogen in the balloons. Now that would be interesting!!!

Steve

the sun has approx 2 x 10^30 kilograms of gas. 28% or that weight is helium. problem solved. we just need to invest about $15TN to make a big helium scoop

You obviously don't work in analytical chemistry, where this has been known for ten years or more. BOC stopped taking on new customers for helium years ago, for instance. The problem is that there is a roughly constant amount of it produced (these days, almost entirely extracted from the air) but a rising demand. More and more devices like GCs, which use it as a carrier gas, are being produced, and more and more machines like medical scanners,which use it as a coolant. It can't be produced artificially (unless we ever get a fusion reactor working), only extracted from one place or another. For certain industries it's a problem which is going to get a lot worse.

I reckon that you have no choice but to try to flog your dirigible.

Les