Yeah got it, but what if we use it to fill garbage to make it float for a day?
Nah. Let’s inhale it to sound funny.
Lithium fission is being explored for subcritical reactors. The fission of lithium ions by bombarding them with neutrons results in excess energy, tritium atoms, and helium atoms.
It would be an amazing thing if widespread energy generation via subcritical fission of lithium also helped solve the “finite helium” problem.
Imagine a world where old lithium batteries can be recycled and create H^3 and He^4 and also generate clean energy.
What you’re describing requires a strong neutron source, like a D-T fusion reactor or a conventional fission reactor. That’s essentially the thought as to how to make the blanket for a fusion reactor and how you’d extract energy from the neutrons while replenishing your tritium. You need the rarer isotope of lithium for that, lithium-6. Be just as useful to recycle your lithium batteries back into lithium batteries, since they don’t have a particularly high concentration of lithium-6.
I defer to your expertise as I only read an article about Lithium fission and know my knowledge is limited.
Can we please either stop using floating balloons or replace with hydrogen already, sooo stupid.
Hydrogen balloons are dangerous. I say this as someone who handles them relatively often. One blast can seriously damage your hearing if you are standing next to it. And they explode easily, too.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. Air it is…
Not possible for certain things, plus hydrogen in balloons is dangerous.
It’s needed to super cool magnets in NMR (and MRI), and it’s heavily used as a carrier gas in GC (where hydrogen is used as the flame gas).
Many GC methods could have helium replaced with nitrogen, but the difference in gas performance means updating every method with tedious work.
For NMR, there is no alternative, just varying degrees of effectiveness in how you use helium.
I was specifically talking about novelty balloons. Personally I think the danger is overblown in most situations, small rising pop (perhaps of flame), but if you have a problem with that, use air… with the goal of saving it for more important uses, like some of your examples. Blimps are another egregious waste, especially if usage scales up they need to be engineered for sustainable hydrogen.
Someone needs to make a “balloon” you fill with normal air and then has a rechargable battery and 4 drone propellers to make it float up.
The balloon lasts much longer than a helium balloon, only downside is you have to charge it and it’s noisy.
Helium is a byproduct of nuclear fusion, so in 50 years we should be rolling in it…
Good idea but sadly not feasible
Relevant part (credit to [deleted] and u/chiagod):
Assuming D-T fusion, a single fusion event releases a 14.1MeV neutron and a 3.5MeV helium nucleus. Assuming you can absorb all this energy and you’ve got an efficient heat engine setup at around 50%, you’ll get about 1.5x10^-12 J per fusion, so for a 1GW output you’ll need 6.67x10^20 fusions per second. Say you have 1TWe (electric output) worth of fusion reactors worldwide (about half of current electricity generation), then you’re producing 1000 times as much helium, or 6.67x10^23 atoms per second. About a mole each second, or 4 grams. This works out to 126 tons of helium a year, or about 1000m^3 per year of liquid helium. The US strategic helium reserve had a peak volume of about a billion m^3 . World consumption of helium is measured in tens of millions of m^3 per year so you’d be short by several orders of magnitude in the best case.
I suspect that the frivolousness with which we currently release waste helium will look pretty stupid future generations. Wherever liquid helium is used as a coolant, we should be installing recovery systems to capture and recondense the helium. With the appropriate safety precautions, hydrogen can be used as a lifting gas for blimps and balloons. I can’t think of any applications which require helium to be released into the atmosphere to float away into space forever.
