“That’s simply not enough to maintain our equipment,” Washton says. The shutdowns have been forced by successive cuts to PNNL’s helium allocation from Messer, its supplier, from a preshortage average of 2400 liters per month to 940 liters in March. As of 25 March, she had deactivated two NMRs and scheduled another to be mothballed in May. Nancy Washton, a catalysis science group lead at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), maintains 28 instruments with superconducting magnets: 24 NMRs and four Fourier-transform infrared spectrometers. She was so alarmed that she might run out of liquid helium that she asked other, nearby researchers to help her condense helium gas, which she planned to obtain from commercial suppliers-only to learn that the suppliers had no gas available either. Margaret Eastman maintains four nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers at Oklahoma State University. A shortage of the noble gas has meant she can operate only one or two of the four scanning tunneling microscopes in her lab, each of which requires 100 liters of liquid helium per week for experiments in quantum physics, superconductivity, and graphene, among other areas. But that’s only part of the Rutgers University physicist’s helium woes.
Credit: Bureau of Land Managementįor Eva Andrei, the cost of liquid helium has more than doubled in the last two years, from $930 for a 100-liter dewar to $2000 today. The federally operated Cliffside Helium Plant in Texas, which helps maintain the US helium supply, has been closed since January.
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