this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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The helium used for balloons is of low purity.
The shortages you hear about are of pure or near pure helium. The stuff going into the balloons at Tommy's birthday party isn't the same thing used to cool superconductors.
EDIT: And I used to think Reddit was full of ignorant jackasses ...
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
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.
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