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In fact, my understanding is that, not counting nuclear fusion, helium is a non-renewable resource critical for some kinds of critical uses like medicine; and t
by gwd 5y ago
In fact, my understanding is that, not counting nuclear fusion, helium is a non-renewable resource critical for some kinds of critical uses like medicine; and that our current habit of putting it in balloons is considered rather reckless by people taking a longer view of things. If we could capture that helium, it would make things a lot better.
- throwaway894345 5y agoCapturing and using gases doesn't typically prevent them from ending up in the atmosphere, unfortunately.
- gambiting 5y agoLike others have said though - helium escapes our atmosphere naturally and quite literally leaves Earth. That's how we're loosing all of our supply - it's just being vented into space constantly.
- rnhmjoj 5y agoExactly, helium is likely bound to exhaustion along with natural gases deposits: the only source of helium, currently. It can't be replaced with another gas, at least not in supercoducting magnets, so it's a problem. In the future, fusion power plants will be optimised to reduce helium losses, recycle helium produced by the reactions and may also have to extract helium from the atmosphere. The latter is a rather expensive process given that the concentration is just a few ppm.