Helium Availability

Recently I was reading a book on Solid State Physics (fascinating I know) and it mentioned that they used liquid helium to cool the magnets to get maximum efficiency because liquid helium has a boiling point of about 4 K  (-452° Fahrenheit), or you know, really really cold, and as the magnets get colder, they becomes more magnetic.  Then I remembered hearing somewhere that there is a helium shortage so I decided to look more into it and I found that this is actually true and since we use helium for many different things some of which is very important, this could be a problem. 

The reason why so much helium is being lost is because when we use it in things like party balloons or welding machines, it simply just floats into the air and since Helium is the second lightest element in the universe, it leaves the atmosphere and drifts into space.   Since we don’t have a way to artificially create helium, the only way we can get more is by drilling into the ground the same way we drill for oil. 

You might think, “So what, we lose the ability to have silly floating pieces of plastic at our parties.  What’s the big deal?” Well that would be alright if that was the only thing helium was used for but it is also used for more important things such as MRI machines.  They use liquid helium for the same reason that was explained in the book I was reading because if you didn't know, MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging so without the helium to cool the magnets, the machines wouldn't be able to work.

Liquid helium is also used in many scientific labs where they have to spend thousands of dollars on systems that can recycle the helium from the air of their labs as waste as little of it as possible.

The price of helium is also becoming a problem and as helium becomes scarcer, the price will rise causing some problems for industries that rely on it such as the medical industry.  The graph below shows the price history for helium, and while it was from an article written in 2012 it is still fairly accurate to today’s prices and shows that the price has nearly doubled in the last 15 years.

                Now I’m not saying you should stop buying balloons for your parties, or boycott PartyCity, I just thought that it was interesting that something we see everywhere also has many important uses and that sometime soon could all be gone.