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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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One relevant part that I couldn't really find in the article is that helium is so light that it escapes Earth's atmosphere when released into the air.
So any helium that is released to the air is permanently gone.
There is also no known way to synthesize helium, and it also doesn't renew itself at all on Earth.
It's also the only substance we have to cool stuff really far down. That's why e.g. MRIs depend on it.
And we put this precious, finite and often life saving substance into kids' balloons to make them bobble nicely through the air.
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".