If there’s a helium shortage, why can’t we make more by shooting electrons at hydrogen?
In: Chemistry
**There is no helium shortage.**
What happened is there was the end of a huge helium glut that reduced the price of helium. The US government stockpiled helium from natural gas in 1960, thinking it might be useful in airships. By 1995 a billion cubic meters of helium had been gathered and the reserve was $1.4 billion in debt, so they started selling it off (as helium airships turned out not to be an important wartime need).
This mass selling of the gas pushed the price down and meant it was hardly worth separating from natural gas, as it was more effort than the price you could get. But eventually the US started to run out of gas they wanted to sell and the price could be expected to rise again. That isn’t a “shortage”, we can still get helium from natural gas deposits. It just means the price is now high enough to bother doing it again.
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