The U.S. Energy Department on Friday added helium to its list of critical materials, citing its essential role in semiconductor manufacturing and energy generation amid risk of global supply disruption. The designation opens up additional federal financing for helium producers and subjects the supply chain to closer government monitoring. Helium is produced mainly as a byproduct of natural gas processing, with the U.S., Qatar and Russia as the top global producers.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-27
X-energy announced its Xe-100 reactor design, which employs helium gas as a coolant to operate at lower pressures and higher temperatures. The reactor uses TRISO fuel pebbles that are resistant to corrosion and melting, and can produce up to 80 MW of electricity or provide industrial heat. The design emphasizes intrinsic safety, as rising temperatures naturally slow the nuclear reaction.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-10-06
Physicists at the University of Surrey have designed a new type of qubit, the Superfluid Helium Oscillator Quantum (SHOQ) device, built from superfluid helium-3 rather than superconducting circuits. Published in npj Quantum Information, the team's calculations suggest the charge-neutral design could cut error rates roughly 100-fold compared with conventional superconducting qubits. Lead author Dr. Priya Sharma says it is the first reported qubit concept based on a superfluid.
sciencedaily.com
· 2026-10-01
Bruker plans to deliver its new scanning transmission electron microscope, called GAIA, to research labs in Canada, Germany and the United States by early next year. The instrument uses liquid helium to keep samples stable near absolute zero, as cold as about 7 kelvin, allowing atomic-resolution imaging for 30 hours or more. This follows separate work last year by U.S. researchers who built a similar cooling attachment reaching 20 kelvin for over ten hours of stable imaging.
nature.com
· 2026-09-22
Seattle-based Interlune is developing technology to extract helium-3, a rare isotope embedded in lunar soil by billions of years of solar wind bombardment, with the goal of eventually mining it from the Moon and returning it to Earth. The company has been working on methods to simulate and accelerate the natural process that deposits helium-3 into lunar regolith, testing extraction techniques ahead of any full-scale mining mission.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-26
Quantinuum has unveiled Helios, a trapped-ion quantum computer using 98 qubits, the largest such system built to date. The machine relies on a new four-way X junction hardware design paired with Helios runtime software, allowing it to move and process data across multiple paths simultaneously rather than in a single line, as earlier machines required.
tech.slashdot.org
· 2026-08-23
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