The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile. Here’s why the medical world is worried.
The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile. Here’s why the medical world is worried.
www.nbcnews.com
The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile. Here’s why the medical world is worried.
One relevant part that I couldn't really find in the article is that helium is so light that it escapes Earth's atmosphere when released into the air.
So any helium that is released to the air is permanently gone.
There is also no known way to synthesize helium, and it also doesn't renew itself at all on Earth.
It's also the only substance we have to cool stuff really far down. That's why e.g. MRIs depend on it.
And we put this precious, finite and often life saving substance into kids' balloons to make them bobble nicely through the air.
We could recover a lot more helium from natural gas production (some fields contain a lot) but right now it's vented because it doesn't have enough value for the operators. Only a few places worldwide bother recovering it during refinement.
But as it gets scarcer the price will go up. Unfortunately the already vented helium is gone forever 😔
We don't know any economical way to synthesise helium. Nuclear fusion exists.
Not in a way that could be scaled up to even cover the childrens birthday parties of a medium sized city.
It does somewhat renew itself due to alpha decay, but that probably isn't fast enough to matter.
from the wiki article on Helium:
I think the main issue here is not that we are loosing helium on a planetary scale but that the easy to reach helium from gas wells is wasted. We will never run out of helium at our current rate of consumption before the sun goes nova, if we consider all sources on earth, but it will get a lot more expensive and the supply will get less steady.
Hydrogen fusion plants would produce helium in the reaction, which would need to be constantly filtered out.
Would be nice if that was the reason.
But not nearly the required amounts. We currently use about 6 million metric tons of helium per year.
If fusion plants ever become a commercially viable thing (and that's a big if), they will never be able to supply anything close to that.