Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock • Hacker News Board

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#621

Post by xphos » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

rationalist wrote: post #406

randerson wrote: post #150

I've developed a new fear of my 2025 desktop PC being damaged by a power surge or something, because it would cost at least $2K more to replace than I paid for it, assuming I can even find parts now. Compared to the rest of my adult life when I used to secretly pray for something to fail so I would have a reason to upgrade.

It sounds like it won't affect prices that much? > South Korean memory giant SK hynix has since said it had diversified supplies for helium and secured sufficient inventory. Meanwhile, TSMC said that it doesn’t currently anticipate a notable impact following Ras Laffan going offline, but that it’s monitoring the situation.

I mean you are talking about 30% of the world supply I don't think you can spin up the amount of equipment need to replace that in a few weeks.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#622

Post by lucb1e » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #561

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in an area with a bad electrical grid or something? In 40+ years I've never had a single device get fried from a surge/storm. My "surge protector" power strips are from the 90s and probably don't even work.

I lost an audio mixer to a bad surge last year. I don't know whether it was additional load or just really bad fluctuations that damaged the device. Nothing else bit the dust, but the, digital board in this mixer got bricked.

How did you know it was a power surge? Not doubting your comment, just interested in knowing if this ever happened to me

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#623

Post by lucb1e » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 8:14 PM UTC

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #430

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in an area with a bad electrical grid or something? In 40+ years I've never had a single device get fried from a surge/storm. My "surge protector" power strips are from the 90s and probably don't even work.

If your close neighbours have surge protectors then you benefit little from installing your own.

Why? If the voltage spikes on the grid (that's what I understand a power surge to mean), wouldn't even more of it end up in your house (that is: the grid voltage spike even higher) if the neighbors have equipment that doesn't let their devices consume some of that energy?

Edit: wait, maybe I figured it out: those devices must be consuming the excess rather than blocking it. Is that it?

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#624

Post by TehCorwiz » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

happyopossum wrote: post #426

TehCorwiz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Republicans believe that the federal government shouldn't be involved in it at all. So a reauth bill would effectively be DOA. But yeah, that would make more sense.

> Republicans believe So frustrating when every conversation leads to R vs D. Doubly so in this situation since both bills that got us to where we are today had overwhelming BIPARTISAN support and were signed into law by presidents Clinton and Obama…

If individual party members voted against the party line more often there would be less of this kind of discourse. But the reality is that we have a deeply entrenched deeply divided two-party system. There are very few politicians who don't toe one line or the other and endure. But in this case it's a core tenet of the republican party platform to eliminate the administrative state, including strategic investment and reserves.

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

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#625

Post by naasking » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

DoctorOetker wrote: post #619

naasking wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume purity matters. It probably picks up a lot of contaminants during use, and chip manufacturing is pretty sensitive to contaminants.

you can put He in a closed loop system and still use it for cooling, by using it as the thermodynamic working fluid, and then selecting any other fluid as the heat carrier?

That's not clear actually. It's been awhile since I watched the video on the ASML EUV system for etching wafers, but from my recollection, the UV light ablates away layers of wafers and so particles of silicon presumably contaminate the noble gas that's flowing over it. I don't think a closed loop is possible in the existing setups.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#626

Post by dotancohen » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

Retr0id wrote: post #620

dotancohen wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how can that ambient air be stuffed into bags to control buoyancy?

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

An air pump will not compress the air such that it becomes dense enough to overcome the buoyancy of the helium. The idea is ridiculous.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#627

Post by Retr0id » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #626

Retr0id wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An air pump will not compress the air such that it becomes dense enough to overcome the buoyancy of the helium. The idea is ridiculous.

Tell that to the airships I guess

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#628

Post by nerdsniper » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #476

joemi wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does that matter for party balloons, though? It's still buoyant.

A spherical balloon 20cm in radius is displacing 41g of air. Even ignoring compression (which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of, except that it will make the numbers more unfavourable), nitrogen’s 3.3%-lighter gives you a budget of only 1.35g for the balloon. I believe balloons hare heavier than this, so the balloon will still sink (a little more slowly than an air-filled one, but I’m not sure how notice…

> which I don’t know enough to quantify the effects of

You probably do, actually! People constantly underestimate the grand utility of their basic education.

At near-atmospheric pressure and typical ambient temperatures, the ideal gas equation (PV=nRT) from introductory physics works very well and indicates that a 3% overpressure would make gases 3% more dense (linear direct proportionality). At some threshold of high pressures/ low temperatures, you'd want to switch your equation of state (EOS) from ideal gas law to something else. Peng-Robinson would be a good choice for a non-polar gas like Nitrogen, if its >10-50 atm pressure and/or At 20 degC, 1.00atm to 3kPa gauge pressure, ideal gas law predicts nitrogen would increase in density by 2.9608%. Whereas Peng-Robinson predicts it would increase in density by ever-so-slightly more, 2.9623%. This is truly negligible, so better to use the simples EOS for explainability (which would be the ideal gas law).

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#629

Post by globemaster99 » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

Thanks for the American clowns and their terrorism, now the working class people of the rest of the world have to deal with one more head ache.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#630

Post by throwup238 » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

ngcazz wrote: post #502

throwup238 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aluminum smelters use the Hall-Heroult process, where alumina is dissolved in molten cryolite and reduced in massive “pots” which are large electrolytic cells. Each pot contains a carbon cathode lining that must be kept at around 950C during operation. If the pot cools down, the frozen electrolyte and solidified aluminum contract at different rates than the carbon and steel shell, cracking the lining. Once it’s crack…

Fascinating, and what about the discarded hardware? Is it recyclable in any way?

Anything made of steel or aluminum is recyclable because they can just melt it down and easily separate the metals, but the carbon lining and anything nonmetal is basically slag afterwards. Aluminum, electrolyte, and random atoms seep in everywhere and destroy it.

The smelting process I described above is actually the more expensive process to used to produce aluminum from raw bauxite. Recycling aluminum is cheaper and a significant fraction of the world’s aluminum produced every year is from recycled feedstock (over two thirds in the US, last I checked). Same goes for steel and most other metals.