MRI machines need thousands of liters of liquid helium to function. Health care workers say they can’t afford any disruptions to the helium supply chain.
an estimated 3000 metric tons of helium are generated per year throughout the lithosphere.
I think the main issue here is not that we are loosing helium on a planetary scale but that the easy to reach helium from gas wells is wasted. We will never run out of helium at our current rate of consumption before the sun goes nova, if we consider all sources on earth, but it will get a lot more expensive and the supply will get less steady.
oh i must have missed a few orders of magnitude there. 6Mt of helium is a ridiculous amount though … what is all that used for? according to WA that is about the water volume of the three gorges dam at STP
Edit: just read the report, wow, more than a quarter of all the helium is used just for “breathing mixes” which i assume means its for scuba diving.
It does somewhat renew itself due to alpha decay, but that probably isn’t fast enough to matter.
from the wiki article on Helium:
I think the main issue here is not that we are loosing helium on a planetary scale but that the easy to reach helium from gas wells is wasted. We will never run out of helium at our current rate of consumption before the sun goes nova, if we consider all sources on earth, but it will get a lot more expensive and the supply will get less steady.
But we are consuming about 6 million tons per year (https://www.chemanalyst.com/industry-report/helium-gas-market-578).
The 3000 tons are just a drop in the water and it’s pretty much impossible to get to all that.
oh i must have missed a few orders of magnitude there. 6Mt of helium is a ridiculous amount though … what is all that used for? according to WA that is about the water volume of the three gorges dam at STP
Edit: just read the report, wow, more than a quarter of all the helium is used just for “breathing mixes” which i assume means its for scuba diving.
There’s quite a large amount of the usage which could be labelled “for fun”.