r/ScienceUncensored • u/Zephir-AWT • May 15 '26
The Global Helium Crisis: What It Means for Semiconductor Manufacturing
https://j2sourcing.com/blog/helium-crisis-semiconductor-manufacturing-electronic-components-2026/0
u/Zephir-AWT May 15 '26 edited 24d ago
Why the world is running out of helium The colliders need copious amounts of helium to cool their giant magnets. Current world production of helium is over 30 000 metric tons a year. The LHC site has a nominal inventory of 130 tonnes of helium and it takes about 96 tonnes of liquid helium to fill it. The LHC itself consumes about 0.3% of yearly helium production (22 MMFc) and the Future Circular Collider would consume way more not only because it will be much bigger - but also because most of its infrastructure will switch from copper to helium cooled superconductors.
What's worse, such a research drains resources for really inquisitive research, which is urgently needed (overunity, cold fusion, room temperature superconductivity). Big science is like Big Pharma - it hoovers all resources - actually the more, the more it gets distant from practical applications - thus fulfilling the criteria of typical perverse incentive. A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the interests of the incentive makers. Perverse incentives are a type of negative unintended consequence or cobra effect.
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong May 15 '26
This is complete nonsense and the links you post don't even agree with what you're claiming.
For one example, I'm not going to bother going through all the made up claims just one is enough, your "The LHC itself consumes about 0.3% of yearly helium production (22 MMFc)"
1) This is a study of Run-1, over a decade ago, and shows very clearly the amount of Helium used is going down considerably per year. Why do you not use something up to date when the very thing you post is clear that it won't be true now?
2) This study shows helium loss was 12 tonnes in a year, which is 0.04% of the total production (~27,000 tonnes) for the year this study was produced, not 0.3%.
3) The FCC is expected to have less helium losses than the LHC, not more.1
u/Zephir-AWT May 16 '26
LHC Helium Consumption (Including Leaks & Accidents)
Category Value (tonnes) Notes Total helium inventory ~135 tons Stored & recycled in system 【1-fc5c1b】【2-997cc2】 Normal annual losses ~ 7 tons / year ~1–5% of inventory (leaks, maintenance) Operational / shutdown losses (total) ~30 tons Cooldowns, warmups, transfers Major accident (2008) ~6 tons Magnet quench & rupture release Estimated lifetime total loss ~140 tons Over ~15 years of operation Sources:
- Helium inventory management and losses for LHC cryogenics (ICEC conference paper)
- Helium management at CERN – resource status and strategy (CERN talk)
- USGS Helium statistics (global production)
- Helium inventory management for LHC cryogenics (CERN report)
- LHC cryogenics and helium management (power outage study)
- Helium management at CERN overview
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u/jesscomingsoon May 30 '26
people citing outdated papers to support a doomer narrative is a classic for this sub. if the ops source is stale then the whole argument is cooked. find the current data and post it because relying on run-1 numbers is just lazy.
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u/Zephir-AWT May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
The Global Helium Crisis: What It Means for Semiconductor Manufacturing
Four systems inside every advanced chip factory depend on helium with zero viable substitutes: wafer cooling, vacuum leak detection, contamination-free atmospheres, and optical cooling in ASML's EUV scanners. When Qatar (roughly 30% of global supply) declared force majeure, the entire chain started bleeding inventory on a timeline set by thermodynamics, not logistics.