If there’s a helium shortage, why can’t we make more by shooting electrons at hydrogen?
In: Chemistry
The thing is it wouldn’t be really cost-effective to make it in a lab, unless you want your helium-filled balloons to cost you $50+ per balloon, just to pay off the lab fees that made it for you.
Nevermind that, with most of the processes to produce elements like that, they aren’t really going for “quantity”, they’re doing the process to see/prove that they *can*. Imagine if you had a full factory process to fuse helium in their lab, and only produced 2 or 3 tanks of it per year.
It isn’t that we *can’t* make helium, it’s that it simply isn’t cost effective, and no where near the quantities that people want.
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