“A dream. It’s perfect”: Helium discovery in northern Minnesota may be biggest ever in North America::For a century, the U.S. Government-owned the largest helium reserve in the country, but the biggest exporters now are in Russia, Qatar and Tanzania. With this new discovery, Minnesota could be joining that list.
It isn’t exactly wasted. Like you said, it’s an element. Short of any nuclear reactions, it won’t be destroyed (plus I’m not entirely clear if any useful reactions actually consume helium).
Helium in balloons is returning to the atmosphere. We can re harvest it if we want. While that sounds wasteful, it might actually be more efficient than trying to purify lower grade helium.
I’ll put it this way. If the helium in balloons could be easily purified to what they need for industrial uses, we wouldn’t be using helium in balloons. Purification industry would drive the price of it sky high.
EDIT: Ignore most of this, I didn’t do my due research.
Helium in balloons is returning to the atmosphere. We can re harvest it if we want
No. It wafts away into space. All the helium we find is a product of radioactive decay- alpha particles- which gets trapped underground. Once it’s released into the atmosphere, it is effectively gone.
I won’t speak to the purification aspect (though I suspect purification is quite trivial), but helium released into the atmosphere is wasted. Saying it’s not destroyed is by the by, we aren’t going to recover it from space as it rapidly escapes the atmosphere.
