Helium

A silly question: many pebble bed reactor designss use helium for cooling. As far as I can tell, recovering helium from the air is at present economically unviable [1], which leaves us with the roughly 30 billion cubic meters in the ground.

How much of the helium used in cooling a PBR is lost to the atmosphere? That is, how many cubic meters per GW per year should we budget for?

Rather like oil, conventional helium sources vary considerably in the cost to produce a given amount of helium. At the moment, the nation that appears to be blessed with the largest supply of cheaply recoverable helium is the US, accounting for something like 90% of the commercial helium sold.

Of course, one need not stick to helium if supplies are dodgy: there are designs that use other, more abundent inert gases.

1: Which is a pity because there is almost a thousand times as much helium in the atmosphere than in the ground.

Helium

A silly question: many pebble bed reactor designss use helium for cooling. As far as I can tell, recovering helium from the air is at present economically unviable [1], which leaves us with the roughly 30 billion cubic meters in the ground.

How much of the helium used in cooling a PBR is lost to the atmosphere? That is, how many cubic meters per GW per year should we budget for?

Rather like oil, conventional helium sources vary considerably in the cost to produce a given amount of helium. At the moment, the nation that appears to be blessed with the largest supply of cheaply recoverable helium is the US, accounting for something like 90% of the commercial helium sold.

Of course, one need not stick to helium if supplies are dodgy: there are designs that use other, more abundent inert gases.

1: Which is a pity because there is almost a thousand times as much helium in the atmosphere than in the ground.

Helium

A silly question: many pebble bed reactor designss use helium for cooling. As far as I can tell, recovering helium from the air is at present economically unviable [1], which leaves us with the roughly 30 billion cubic meters in the ground.

How much of the helium used in cooling a PBR is lost to the atmosphere? That is, how many cubic meters per GW per year should we budget for?

Rather like oil, conventional helium sources vary considerably in the cost to produce a given amount of helium. At the moment, the nation that appears to be blessed with the largest supply of cheaply recoverable helium is the US, accounting for something like 90% of the commercial helium sold.

Of course, one need not stick to helium if supplies are dodgy: there are designs that use other, more abundent inert gases.

1: Which is a pity because there is almost a thousand times as much helium in the atmosphere than in the ground.