The world is running out of helium - thanks to party balloons, warns research scientist who uses the gas for pioneering experiments



Helium is also used in medical scanners and particle colliders

Supplies could run out in 30 years, says NRC



Stocks are floating away: Helium is being wasted on party balloons, warn scientists

Helium serves a vital purpose for research scientists - but some are now warning that their experiments are at risk from a shortage of the gas, because stocks are being wasted on party balloons.

Last week researcher Oleg Kirichek had to postpone an experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot when helium stocks ran out.

He was hoping to study the structure of matter, but had to wait three days to run tests – at a huge cost – while helium was found.

The gas is crucial for scientists because it’s used to cools atoms to -270C to stop them vibrating, which makes investigating their nature far more straightforward.

It’s also widely used in medical scanners and exotic machines such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Now, its scarcity is causing alarm bells in the scientific community.

Kirichek told The Guardian: ‘It costs £30,000 a day to operate our neutron beams, but for three days we had no helium to run our experiments on those beams.

‘In other words we wasted £90,000 because we couldn't get any helium. Yet we put the stuff into party balloons and let them float off into the upper atmosphere, or we use it to make our voices go squeaky for a laugh. It is very, very stupid. It makes me really angry.’

Although helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe, Earth only has a limited supply - and the U.S National Research Council believes that we will run out of the gas in less than 30 years.

Vital: The Large Hadron Collider is one of many scientific devices that rely on helium

In fact, it’s now becoming so rare that Nobel prize-winning physicist Professor Robert Richardson of New York’s Cornell University believes that helium-filled party balloons should be on sale for £75.

Helium is extracted during gas and oil drilling and the U.S built up a huge stockpile of it over several decades.