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A global helium shortage has doctors worried about one of the natural gas’s most essential, and perhaps unexpected, uses: MRIs.. Strange as it sounds, the lighter-than-air element that gives ...
[6] [4] For researchers, helium is irreplaceable because it is essential for producing very low temperatures. [4] In recent years, concerns about high prices and the occurrence of a shortage in 2006-7 have also contributed to calls for helium conservation and measures to lower the price of helium for researchers from these organisations. [4]
Helium also has a very low boiling point (-268.9°C or -452°F), allowing it to remain a gas even in super-cold environments, an important feature because many rocket fuels are stored in that ...
Map showing helium-rich gas fields and helium processing plants in the United States, 2012. From USGS. Helium production in the United States totaled 73 million cubic meters in 2014. The US was the world's largest helium producer, providing 40 percent of world supply. In addition, the US federal government sold 30 million cubic meters from storage.
Helium 3 is rare on Earth, primarily produced by the radioactive decay of tritium, but it does reside in abundance in the lunar regolith, deposited by billions of years of solar wind.
A major advantage is that this gas is noncombustible. But the use of helium has some disadvantages, too: The diffusion issue shared with hydrogen (though, as helium's molecular radius (138 pm) is smaller, it diffuses through more materials than hydrogen [4]). Helium is expensive. Although abundant in the universe, helium is very scarce on Earth.
Helium is a natural atmospheric gas, but as a land-resource, it is limited. As of 2012 the United States National Helium Reserve accounted for 30 percent of the world's helium, and was expected to run out of helium in 2018. [23] Some geophysicists fear the world's helium could be gone in a generation. [24]
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