Do the fields of medicine, manufacturing, etc. get adversely affected?
In: Chemistry
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We can make it, but it’s expensive to.
So yes, every field that needs it will be impacted. Prices will rise and keep rising.
You think the cost of an MRI or building that piece of tech is expensive now? 10-15 years from now it could be 100-300% more expensive.
Kids had floaty birthday balloons at least.
Using liquid helium is the easiest way to cool stuff to very low temperatures approx. -270° °C, which is for example required for the magnets in MRI machines and many scientific applications.
Helium is so light that it can leave the earths atmosphere, that means that if helium gets into air, then it is basically gone forever.
Currently we harvest helium which is trapped inside earth and which gets released when we drill for oil or natural gas. When these reservoirs are drained, we basically have none helium occurances left.
In principle you can produce helium out of other elements using nuclear reactions. However that would be very very expensive and we don’t have experience with transmutation processes at such large scales.
Maybe things get cheaper, when we have large scale fusion power plants around, as (depending on their type) they woul produce helium as basically a waste product.
We will have helium so long as we have natural gas. The shortage is because from the 1925, the US started storing helium in a reserve, thinking airships were going to be a big thing. That didn’t pan out, but then rockets became a thing, and they use helium to back fill fuel tanks, so the reserve grew in anticipation of rockets being a big thing. Finally, by 1995, everyone realised that helium wasn’t actually that vital, and the reserve was very expensive, so they started selling it off very cheaply. This undercut everyone else, and nobody really bothered with helium extraction anymore.
Now that reserve is running low, so prices are rising again. That’s the shortage. It’s more of a return from artificially low prices.
As helium prices rise, it’s becoming economical to separate it from natural gas again.
What is helium used for? Well it’s very light, inert, and basically doesn’t freeze. It doesn’t even become a liquid until single digit kelvin temperatures. So cryogenics that want to operate in those temperatures, rockets, airships… We’ll never run out completely, and there are alternatives. With cryogenics, better magnets are superconducting at higher temperatures which don’t need liquid helium, so MRI machines etc will stop needing it. Total loss systems are being replaced by systems that recycle their helium.
Helium party balloons should never have been a thing though. That was just a total waste.
As supply drops, price increases.
Increased prices will be transferred to consumers in some places, but that same increase in price will incentivise governments and companies towards conservation and alternative production methods, which may be easier as [energy becomes cheaper](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy?time=earliest..2022), or if nuclear fusion becomes available
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