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"A dream. It's perfect": Helium discovery in northern Minnesota may be biggest ever in North America (www.cbsnews.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"A dream. It's perfect": Helium discovery in northern Minnesota may be biggest ever in North America::For a century, the U.S. Government-owned the largest helium reserve in the country, but the biggest exporters now are in Russia, Qatar and Tanzania. With this new discovery, Minnesota could be joining that list.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

What the fuck are you on about? Helium is an element. Doesn’t matter if it’s low purity it’s wasted and then gone. When the high purity stuff is gone we can’t be like “thank god we can purify the low wall quality stuff” when that’s gone too

[+] [email protected] -20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

It isn't exactly wasted. Like you said, it's an element. Short of any nuclear reactions, it won't be destroyed (plus I'm not entirely clear if any useful reactions actually consume helium).

Helium in balloons is returning to the atmosphere. We can re harvest it if we want. While that sounds wasteful, it might actually be more efficient than trying to purify lower grade helium.

I'll put it this way. If the helium in balloons could be easily purified to what they need for industrial uses, we wouldn't be using helium in balloons. Purification industry would drive the price of it sky high.

EDIT: Ignore most of this, I didn't do my due research.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago

Helium in balloons is returning to the atmosphere. We can re harvest it if we want

No. It wafts away into space. All the helium we find is a product of radioactive decay- alpha particles- which gets trapped underground. Once it's released into the atmosphere, it is effectively gone.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

I won't speak to the purification aspect (though I suspect purification is quite trivial), but helium released into the atmosphere is wasted. Saying it's not destroyed is by the by, we aren't going to recover it from space as it rapidly escapes the atmosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; therefore it's fine if I leave all my lights on 24/7 and use inefficient power hungry bulbs. It's not a waste if it isn't destroyed!

-This guy, apparently