2/18/2024 0 Comments Is iridium a metalWhat might also help is facilities that are being developed to capture helium during the production of natural gas. However, at present, the low price of helium means that this isn’t cost-effective, and so there’s little incentive – what’s required for this to be worthwhile is for the price of helium to rise further. For instance, in some uses, helium can be recycled. There are some measures that we could take to extend this figure. Some estimates have claimed that we could have as little as 25 years of helium remaining, based on current rates of use. The US controls the world’s largest stock of helium, the US National Helium reserve, but despite the future likely scarcity of helium, the reserves have been being sold off at comparatively low prices. The issue is that it’s so light, it’s able to escape the Earth’s atmosphere with ease, meaning the amount of helium on Earth is constantly being depleted. The light gas has a range of uses on Earth, from helium-filled party balloons, to supercooling magnets to very low temperatures in MRI machines. Helium, being the second most abundant element in the universe, might seem an odd element to be kicking off this list of endangered elements with. As we’ll see, there are plenty of applications where this could be problematic. We aren’t saying that that element will disappear from Earth completely, but that there will come a point when supply will be dwarfed by demand, or we will reach the point where it no longer becomes economically viable to extract or use a particular element, and alternatives will have to be sought. Here, we’ll take a look at some of these at-risk elements: their uses, why their supply is under threat, and what can be done to tackle this problem.īefore looking at particular elements, it’s also worth noting what we mean when we’re saying an element is ‘endangered’. For some, the risk is more serious than for others – but there are 9 elements shown in this table for which there is concern that there is a serious threat to their supply within the next 100 years, and a further 7 for which there is a rising threat due to increased use. In total, the graphic shows 44 elements whose supply is at risk. Today’s graphic, in a collaboration with the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute, looks at some of the endangered elements in the periodic table, and why we might miss them when they’re gone. Some elements that many haven’t heard of find uses in technologies or applications we take for granted – but the supplies of these elements on Earth are not infinite. We’re all familiar with the periodic table, but the majority of non-chemists probably aren’t familiar with the everyday uses of some of the many elements it contains.
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