Helium is a major problem in the scientific community as a scarce resource

The reality is that helium is indeed a scarce resource. Products in many industries need helium, but there's no way we can make more cheaper.
people don't realize that helium is a non-renewable resource. It is made on Earth through the nuclear decay of uranium and recovered from mines. Once it is released into the atmosphere, it becomes unethic to recapture it, and eventually the helium in the atmosphere escapes completely because it is too light.question of whether we have run out, the available answer is absolutely correct (yes!). ), but it needs to be added that this is a problem that many people outside the helium industry do not know about, but will eventually affect them.
first related article in the world is a good summary of why this has become a pressing issue in recent years.
to the scarcity of this element, the United States has been storing helium in a national helium reserve known as the Bush Dome outside Amarillo, Texas, since the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, 1.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas were stored there. The current reserves are about 600 million cubic meters, about four times the current world market., Chan noted that the 1996 Helium Privatization Act requires the Interior Department to sell all stored helium by 2015. "So," he said, "the U.S. government sells its equivalent of 40 percent of the world helium market at below-market prices." "" this action hinders the active exploration of helium, " Chan explains.
article Source: Probe Question: Are We Running Out of Helium? A few months after the article was published, Congress passed a bill to maintain reserves.
details of the problem focus on the negative impact of bad policies on scientific users of helium, but I would like to emphasize that helium has many other uses in industry and medicine, and here are some of the uses:
1. Helium is used as a refrigerant to cool superconducting magnets of an MRI machine. This is the maximum use of low-temperature helium. This is an application, and another cryogenic refrigerant can eventually be replaced because there are several new superconductings that produce the magnetic field needed when they are cooled by high-temperature, low-temperature refrigerants such as liquid hydrogen, oxygen, or argon. However, I doubt that hospitals and MRI manufacturers will act soon.。 2. Helium is used as an inert gas for welding. In these applications, I think if helium is used up, they can replace another inert gas.。 3. Helium is used as an inert gas in the semiconductor industry to grow semiconductor crystals, quick cooling elements and control heat transmission.
4. Helium is used for leak detection and for the testing of containers that will withstand cracks under high pressure or low vacuum conditions. This is another gas that cannot be replaced, at least at very high and very low pressures, because helium can flow through the smallest cracks.scientific community may have the most say in this shortage because:
1. Many scientific experiments require liquid helium because it enables scientists to reach the minimum temperature of any cryogen. It is usually necessary to observe quantum forces clearly at low temperatures, which is irreplaceable.
2. Research institutions tend to have a lower priority in the shortfall.
what we can do:
1. Implement a reasonable helium exploration/storage policy that will force mining companies to extract such resources without the impact of unstable costs/supply. In 2013, the U.S. Congress passed a bill to maintain helium reserves and not sell it below market prices. This makes supply more stable, but does not change the fact that such resources are non-renewable.。 2. Limit the use of wasted helium and recycle the helium we use. For cryogenic applications, this means installing a closed recirculation system to recompress helium from the exhaust of the cryogenic system. This has always been an operating procedure for large users such as the Large Hader Collider. However, with recent cost increases and supply disruptions, individual research laboratories have also begun to implement such systems. The start-up costs were huge (more than $100,000), but cost savings emerged in just a few years, and convenience was immediately apparent. In the future, I think (and hope) this system will not be used for liquid helium research and medical users to choose from.'t do:
helium is extracted from Earth, we can't produce more helium. All methods of producing more helium are expensive and not worth discussing: 1) hydrogen fusion, 2) bombarding other atoms (such as lithium or boron) with high-energy protons in particle accelerators, and 3) mining helium on the moon is an absurd proposition in terms of the volume that needs to be shipped back to Earth (however, it may be economically feasible to mine helium-3 on the moon). In this sense, the problem of helium depletion is different from the problem of oil depletion. For the latter, alternatives such as ethanol fuel can and do be synthesized, not to mention numerous energy options that do not emit carbon., however, helium is irreplaceable in many applications that use it.
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