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by tkzed49 766 days ago
300-1800W power draw seems impressive! It looks like standard machines are using something on the order of 25kW while scanning, which certainly sounds prohibitive for less developed infrastructure.
1 comments

Also, they need to keep vats of liquid helium around.

Difficult stuff to store. I knew they needed cold gas, but liquid helium is crazy.

There was some buzz years ago about using liquid nitrogen instead but I don’t know if it made it into widespread production

https://www.wired.com/story/mri-magnet-cooling/

Sounds like that's more about using a cryocooler to minimize the helium used-- but presumably that requires keeping the coils in a particularly hard vacuum to adequately insulate them.

There is some research towards operating at liquid hydrogen temperatures -- but hydrogen has its own logistical challenges.