I live near a business that has tank farms and piping for pressurized gases. They provide a lot of oxygen for health care use. If they can “manufacture” a gas, why can’t they make more helium?
In: 5
You can’t manufacture helium. At least not on a viable scale.
Oxygen is easy to extract from the atmosphere, there’s loads of it in there. Nitrogen even more so. Carbon dioxide is easy enough too. Chlorine isn’t too hard as you can use electrolysis on salts. Ditto Bromine. Hydrogen can be obtained by electrolysis on water (oxygen also). Things like Argon and Radon are in the atmosphere in low quantities but are there so you can extract them.
Helium pretty much isn’t. It doesn’t react with anything so you can’t extract it from another molecule, and it’s much much less dense than air so when released rises to the top of the atmosphere and then escapes.
All helium on earth is the result of radioactive decay – some elements release “alpha particles” when they decay, these are a fast moving helium nucleus that promptly snatches a couple of electrons and turns into helium. When radioactive elements buried deep underground decay the freshly minted helium can’t go anywhere, so it builds up. When this built up helium makes it into gas reserves and can get extracted along with the rest of the target gas. It isn’t very economical to harvest off the helium so it mostly gets let go.
For a long time the US government made companies harvest it – partly to use in blimps – but they stopped. They were sitting on giant stored reserves of helium, but that costs money to maintain so they sold it off over the years, and now reserves are getting low enough it’s getting expensive to get enough helium for things we use it for.
Mandating helium capture from natural gas extraction would help some, though might be a while before that’s implemented.
And no – there’s no realistic way to generate enough helium via radioactive decay in nuclear reactors and so on. It would cost a fortune to get enough to fill a party balloon.
Latest Answers