Good article on the coming helium crisis

We're running out of helium.

That could be bad. For health, for astronomy, for physics research, for kid's birthday parties... and lots of other things that I can't think of right now. So I looked them up:

• Helium is used to cool superconducting magnets in MRI scanners.
• As helium is lighter than air, airships and balloons can be filled with the gas to gain lift.
• Helium is used to condense hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel.
• Helium can be added to oxygen tanks so that divers can breath more easily. This is especially important for people that go deep diving (over 450 ft below sea level).
• Used in helium-neon lasers. These lasers can be used to read barcodes.
• Helium can be used to detect leaks in high-vacuum and high-pressure equipment.
• For materials easily contaminated by air, helium is used as a shielding gas in the arc welding process.
• Helium is used as a protective gas when growing silicon and germanium crystals and when producing titanium and zirconium. It is a fantastic protective gas as it is inert (unreactive).
• The age of rocks which contain uranium and thorium can be estimated using helium dating.
• Helium is often used as a carrier gas in gas chromatography.
• Helium can be used to detect leaks (small fractures) in some vessels.

So based on this, it would be bad news to run out of helium.

But no matter what we do, the world is going to run out of helium. And probably sooner than when there's no ice in the Arctic Ocean in the summer.

So here's the article about where the helium is and where it's going:

Last Federal Helium Reserve, near Amarillo, is running out

Helium is commonly used by NASA and the Defense Department and has applications including medical research and computer chip manufacturing.

But inhaling the gas to temporarily change the sound of a person's voice could someday be a thing of the past. Some say even private supplies could run out in 25 to 100 years -- and no known substance on Earth can replace helium.

and also

"When we opened the reserve years ago, we had about 32 billion cubic feet of helium at our spot," Theiss said. "We're down to about 18 billion cubic feet now."

Oh well. My first question: what can they do to cool the magnets in MRI scanners when they're out of helium?