As Assemblywoman Siren has described, we have allowed for several years a mismanagement of our resource with regards to Helium. As it is crucial to numerous applications from welding to MRI machines, we will need to be more careful in the future about Helium usage. Unlike other chemicals considered "non-renewable", like gasoline, Helium cannot be made by chemical means
at all. Helium is the closest substance to being perfectly inert in existence. The only way we can make Helium is by nuclear fusion, which doesn't seem like it's about to become a feasible technology for Helium production any time soon.
The purpose of clause 3 was not because Helium is dangerous (it isn't; it's inert under virtually any conceivable circumstances), but to persuade balloon customers to use less pure Helium. One of the main difficulties in Helium extraction is its purification from Neon and it is unnecessary to use pure Helium to make balloons float. In fact, you could use pure Helium, pure Neon, or anywhere in between. Balloons will float if they are filled with any gas less dense than air. While Helium is the least dense gas other than Hydrogen (
which we should avoid), a number of other gasses are also less dense. Most of the other gasses are unsafe for children to handle for one reason or another (Hydrogen Cyanide, Hydrogen Fluoride, etc) or rarer than Helium anyway (like Neon) but there is no reason at all that requires the use of pure Helium. The way this is written is actually quite a loose restriction. We could probably go quite a bit lower than 75% without running into issues. (I would say anything lower than about 25% would be problematic because they wouldn't be able to cut the mixture with air and still have it be considerably lighter than air anymore).
Methane (Natural Gas) and Ammonia are occasionally used for weather balloons. Another possibility for how we could address this is limit weather balloon Helium usage as well.
As for nationalizing extraction, doing this would require the federal government to arbitrarily purchase billions of dollars of production equipment to do the same thing the industry is doing now.
