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?
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Oxygen, Nitrogen, and CO2 are easy to *manufacture* because they are abundant in the atmosphere. All you need to do is compress air and you’ll have a bunch of the 3 gases.
Helium on the other hand is only found in the atmosphere in trace amounts. The problem is that it is so light that it eventually escapes into space. So virtually all of the Helium that was around when the Earth was formed has already disappeared into space
Hydrogen similarly is light and escapes into space, but unlike Helium which is chemically inert, Hydrogen reacts with other atoms to form heavier molecules which stick around… like water.
Helium is only found in large quantities on Earth underground, the result of millions of years of radioactive materials like Uranium decaying into Helium atoms.
The problem is that we are using it up at an extraordinary rate… mostly because we use it to fill balloons and other complete wastes of the gas.
This is now quickly becoming a problem because the US’s reserves of Helium are being drained and liquid Helium is a critical part of high tech equipment like MRI scanners.
We can mine more, but price controls and various technical limitations make it impractical at the moment.
The Long term the solution to the Helium crisis will likely be Nuclear Fusion. If we can figure out how to make Nuclear Fusion reactors commercially viable, Helium will be made as a bi-product.
In the meanwhile we have to stop wasting it in things like balloons so that we can stretch out our available supply.
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