Helium Is Hard to Replace

The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.

Construction Physics
Is there any way to actually produce helium other than nuclear fusion? I would assume not, but I'm not an expert in this field.

If you have something that emits a lot of alpha particles as it decays, you could surround it with a source of electrons, I suppose. The details would have to be left as an exercise, and I doubt you'd get enough helium to be very useful unless you were dealing with large amounts of ridiculously-radioactive substances.

Same with fusion. Due to the implications of E=mc^2, fusion yields a lot of energy and a uselessly-small amount of matter. There don't seem to be many good ways to get a lot of helium besides either waiting millions of years for it to show up naturally, or carefully recycling what we already have.

> you could surround it with a source of electrons, I suppose

Water would be the best for this. The cross-section is good and water can ionise easily. But yeah, you would not get a lot of it.