He , He, He.....HELIUM:THE PARTY'S OVER !

                    " THE PARTY'S OVER ! "
THEY are feature of many a children's party, but helium balloons are using up valuable reserves of the gas which could be used in life-saving equipment, an academic has claimed.
  The gas which is lighter than air used to fill foil balloons is             "hugely frustrating" and "absolutely the wrong use of helium gas. Tom Welton said when appearing on BBC radio 4's- Today Show, who is a professor of sustainable chemistry at Imperial College.

 Helium gas possesses a unique combination of properties which gives it a range of applications, but it is particularly useful as a coolant.
 MRI scanners, which allow doctors to visualise the inner workings of the body with life saving potential, are reliant upon the element to function.

 Each MRI scanner needs up to 10,000 litres of liquid helium to work.
 However , there is currently a global shortage of helium, which is in finite supply, cannot be synthesised, and must be extracted from the Earth's crust.
 Wholesale prices have soared by 20 per cent in recent months, this is due to extraction levels being at 70 per cent of the volume of helium distributed in 2010.
 Professor Welton said in his interview "On the whole we're using more and more and we're supplying less and less." He added "The major use is for cooling things, particularly large magnets. The impact that this has on us is MRI scans. The reason we can do MRI is we have very large cold magnets and the reason we can have those is there is helium cooling them down."
 He concluded " We're not going to run out of helium tomorrow, but on the 30 to 50-year timescale we will have serious problems of having to shut things down if we don't manage to do something in the meantime."
 Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe but most of the gas in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space.This is the reason that supplies trapped beneath the Earth's crust have to be extracted.
 It is usually removed as a by-product in natural gas extraction,and as a result the gas fields of Texas and Kansas have become the world's helium capital.

 The US produces 75 per cent of the world's helium and the largest store is held in an underground reservoir called the Bush Dome run by the American government near Amarillo,Texas.
 The gas itself is only refined in a handful of industrial plants throughout the world, several of which are suffering shortages.
 Did you know that NASA uses helium in space shuttles and space stations- usually to pressurise Thrust engines.

                      "What goes up , must come down ! "