why we can’t just take 2 hydrogen atoms and smash them together to make helium.

Question

Idk how I got onto this but I was just googling shit and I was wondering how we are running out of helium. I read that helium is the one non-renuable element on this planet because it comes from the result of radioactive decay. But from my memory and the D- I got in highschool chemistry, helium is number 2 on the periodic table of elements and hydrogen is number 1, so why can’t we just take a fuck ton of hydrogen, do some chemistry shit and turn it into helium? I know it’s not that simple I just don’t understand why it wouldn’t work.

Edit: I get it, it’s nuclear fusion which is physics, not chemistry. My grades were so back in chemistry that I didn’t take physics. Thank you for explaining it to me!

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

Well, it doesn’t really work that way.

First the issue isn’t that we’re going to just “run out” of helium. Rather, as helium reserves get depleted and harder to extract, the price of helium will increase.

Now, we can create helium but not from regular hydrogen. An ordinary hydrogen atom just has 1 proton in its nucleus and no neutrons. This is a problem because if you try to smash two protons together, 9999 times out of 10,000 they’ll just fly apart again. Neutrons are needed to hold the nucleus together.

So to get fusion to work on Earth, we need rarer kinds of hydrogen: hydrogen that has neutrons. We have deuterium (1 proton and 1 neutron) which exists in regular water, but you have to purify it to get any use out it. That takes a lot of money and energy. Then there is tritium (1 proton and 2 neutrons). That one we have to make, which is super expensive. Tritium is about 500 times more expensive than gold.

But to turn tritium and deuterium into helium, we still have to smash them together really hard. Ridiculously hard. That takes a lot of energy and you still only get a little bit of helium out of it.

Now, a hydrogen bomb does actually create helium by fusing these rare types of hydrogen, but they’re still very expensive and the tremendous explosion makes it impossible to collect the helium.