Do the fields of medicine, manufacturing, etc. get adversely affected?
In: Chemistry
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.
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