Party balloons at 100!

And,once the helium reserves are gone,there will be no way of replacing it,the Professor of physics said.

8220;There is no chemical means to make helium. The supplies we have on Earth come from radioactive alpha decay in rocks. Right now it8217;s not commercially viable to recover helium from the air so we8217;ve to rely on extracting from rocks.

8220;But if we do run out altogether,we will have to recover helium from the air and it will cost 10,000 times what it does today,8221; Prof Richardson told the 8216;New Scientist8217;.

A US law states that the biggest store of helium in the world 8212; in a disused airfield in Texas 8212; must be sold off by 2015 and is being sold at far too cheap a price. This means that the Earth8217;s resources of helium are being depleted at an astonishing rate because it is too cheap to recycle.

Helium is formed on Earth as rocks steadily decay and nearly all of our reserves have been formed as a by-product of the extraction of natural gas. The only way to obtain it will be to capture it from the decay of tritium 8212; a radioactive hydrogen isotope,which the US stopped making in 1988.

So what should the US do?

8220;Get out of the business and let the free market prevail. The consequence will be a rise in prices. Party balloons will be US dollars 100 each but we8217;ll have to live with that. We will have to live with those prices eventually anyway,8221; he said.