I think your comparison to OPEC is interesting, b/c it sounds like you think the price of oil was artificially high, but in retrospect, I think many would say that it has been far too cheap to burn oil, and this has driven our multi-generational climate crisis. I.e. I think the market failure in stewarding precious resources was _not_ that OPEC tried to keep prices high, but that failing to price in the cost of damage to the climate and environment kept prices artificially low.
In the helium case in the US, my understanding is that from 1996 to 2013, though the US was the dominant global supplier and _could_ have chosen to act as a cartel, the 1996 legislation fixed prices to be artificially low (with the aim of merely paying off costs, rather than maximizing revenue), which is claimed to have disincentivized private parties from developing new production capacity.
I'm not some free-market zealot who thinks the invisible hand can do no evil. But in this case, if the problem is that (a) there's currently a bottleneck upstream of important healthcare cases and (b) we want to discourage waste then we should want helium to leave the national reserve (i.e. there's more supply available to hospitals and other parties), and we should want that to be at a reasonable price so it isn't used frivolously (e.g. we wouldn't want party planners to be induced to use more balloons just b/c they're cheap). So auctioning off some of what is held in reserve seems like a reasonable action.
Wrt pricing that is presumably _lower_ for installations with recycling capabilities -- I would think that recycling might if anything make institutions willing to pay a higher volumetric price, since they get more total benefit from it. If the recycling technology is efficient and practically applicable in many contexts, more and more facilities ought to be pressured by high costs to introduce recycling ... or leave the market.
My OPEC comparison was more centered on a small group controlling a critical resource who can control the price regardless of the needs of the consumers of said resource (not the historic price action). I agree with most of your points, but want to stress that the desired outcome should be responsible use and stewardship of what is both a highly useful and nonrenewable resource. Pricing is a component, but maximizing profit should not be the goal. I'd even go so far to say that you either wouldn't sell to consumers of helium who could capture and recycle it but currently choose not to, or you would subsidize the installation of that equipment for them out of the proceeds of more frivolous uses.
My personal opinion is the goal should be to maximize the utility of the resource, with any profits being second order effects. Instead, we too often end up like ancestors who raze the forest only to freeze to death in the winter [1].
I think if you _don't_ sell helium to non-recycling facilities in the near term, MRIs would stop altogether. The two articles about recycling that you shared are both research universities who considered it a PR-worthy accomplishment to put recycling in place to cover _some_ of their machines, which for the moment sound like they're almost entirely about NMR; the UCSF article even says that after paying $500k, they're still hoping to "inspire" other uses than NMR within the same university to begin recycling, i.e. the top-flight research university bragging about recycling still isn't able to do it for clinical MRI machines.
Do you know (or perhaps someone else can chime in) -- is it even feasible currently for a medical facility with 1-2 MRI machines to put a recycling system into place? Or is the recycling system of a size and complexity that only if you have a helium footprint above a given size is it realistic? Certainly, most places would not have the expertise on staff to design and implement such a system today.
Worse, if recycling were a requirement to purchase helium, how do we estimate which medical facilities would _not_ buy an MRI machine because of the higher initial cost of the recycling system, or maintenance of its collection, compression, or purification components? How would that change patient outcomes (especially given that the initial complain about MRIs in this thread was long waits due to limited capacity)?
In reply to your other post (I could not comment on it directly)
> ... then is there really still any meaningful relationship between helium supply and the patient wait time for MRIs as westcort complained? Or is it just that there are too few MRI machines in the healthcare system?
The US is second highest in number of MRI machines per capita after Japan. Its probably staffing issues or maybe MRI scans are used much more widely in the US.
I would have expected that since (in my experience) these machines are generally run by a technician, and the MRI itself is relatively quick (a few minutes), and hospitals can bill insurance thousands for an MRI, that once a medical facility has acquired and set up the machine the machine, that running patients through should more than pay for the time of staff immediately involved.
Thanks for pointing at that!
But if the description is correct,
> ZBO magnets allow practically unlimited
system operation without helium refill.
... then is there really still any meaningful relationship between helium supply and the patient wait time for MRIs as westcort complained? Or is it just that there are too few MRI machines in the healthcare system?
And, I suppose if anyone here knows -- why is it that NMR magnets at UCLA and UCSF required recycling systems which sound meaningfully less efficient (the UCLA article linked above reclaimed only 90%) rather than using the ZBO tech which is apparently standard in modern MRIs?
In the helium case in the US, my understanding is that from 1996 to 2013, though the US was the dominant global supplier and _could_ have chosen to act as a cartel, the 1996 legislation fixed prices to be artificially low (with the aim of merely paying off costs, rather than maximizing revenue), which is claimed to have disincentivized private parties from developing new production capacity.
I'm not some free-market zealot who thinks the invisible hand can do no evil. But in this case, if the problem is that (a) there's currently a bottleneck upstream of important healthcare cases and (b) we want to discourage waste then we should want helium to leave the national reserve (i.e. there's more supply available to hospitals and other parties), and we should want that to be at a reasonable price so it isn't used frivolously (e.g. we wouldn't want party planners to be induced to use more balloons just b/c they're cheap). So auctioning off some of what is held in reserve seems like a reasonable action.
Wrt pricing that is presumably _lower_ for installations with recycling capabilities -- I would think that recycling might if anything make institutions willing to pay a higher volumetric price, since they get more total benefit from it. If the recycling technology is efficient and practically applicable in many contexts, more and more facilities ought to be pressured by high costs to introduce recycling ... or leave the market.