Helium is a gas that does much more than make your voice sound amusing. From solar telescopes to rockets and MRI cryogenics to deep-sea diving, helium is a vital, non-renewable resource that numerous take for of course. As long as it is cheap to fill birthday balloons, most individuals pay little mind to the gas element. The Independent reports that helium won’t be around for much longer, however. Helium, gentle readers, is on the way out.
Helium’s departure will cause huge holes
The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 was a boneheaded move by the United States of America Congress that opened the floodgates to waste this natural resource. Helium became cheap as a result. That’s why supplies have dwindled. The United States of America National Helium Reserve near Amarillo, Texas, can be required to sell off any remaining helium by 2015, even if they have to do it for pennies on the dollar. Helium reserves worldwide are facing similar shortages due to short-sighted management of the resource.
Helium, why did you leave so fast?
Hospitals use liquid helium to cool their MRI scanners. Homeland security also uses helium in their infrared devices aimed at detection and deterrence of terror suspects. Nuclear reactors and wind tunnels also utilize helium, the former in helium-3 isotope form. NASA uses it to clean potentially explosive rocket fuel from fuel tanks. It could all be gone in 25 to 30 years, according to experts in the know about helium.
According to Nobel laureate and Cornell University physics professor Robert Richardson, “Once helium is released into the atmosphere within the form of party balloons or boiling helium, it is lost to the Earth forever”.
Where do we get helium?
The Sun’s nuclear fusion creates helium as a by-product. Not only that, but the radioactive decay of various rocks produces helium on Earth. We get helium from the rocks. It could be created by no other means, according to scientists. Waiting around for natural processes to produce more helium will take billions of years, so that option is off the table.
The $ 100 birthday balloon
To slow the depletion of the world’s helium supply, Professor Richardson suggests the price for helium be raised considerably. If a standard 15 cubic foot dispenser of helium went for $40 in 2009, today it should be as much as 50 times more costly. Thus, in Richardson’s estimation, a helium-filled party balloon should at the moment cost about $100.
Find more information on this subject
Helium Privatization Act
helium.com/items/874929-understanding-the-helium-privitization-act-of-1996
The Independent
independent.co.uk/news/science/why-the-world-is-running-out-of-helium-2059357.html
University of Denver study on helium
mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/helium.htm
