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mesouschrist t1_jbko5ad wrote

Reply to comment by luckyluke193 in Why is water used as coolant since it is a poor conductor of heat? by Red_Panagiotis

IDK what hospitals are doing, but I work in a physics lab, and nobody is ever letting their liquid helium just boil into the atmosphere unless something has gone catastrophically wrong. There's a whole infrastructure for recovering boiled off helium and sending it back to the liquefaction plant.

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luckyluke193 t1_jblh3o3 wrote

Sure, but usually the liquefication plant fills it into dewars, and the magnet system needs to be refilled manually.

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CocktailChemist t1_jby03y8 wrote

Can’t say I’ve ever seen that for an NMR. A standard 400 MHz instrument has to be topped up with 70-100 L of liquid helium every 6-12 months.

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