Long May 12, 2012 Washington Post story by Brad Plumer short: "The U.S. is running out of helium."
Caption for the graphic up top: "While government prices for crude helium have not quite doubled over the last 10 years, the price for privately-held, grade-A helium has nearly tripled in the same time period."
Excerpts from the Post article follow.
Thanks to a 1996 law that has forced the government to sell off its helium reserves at bargain-bin prices, the country's stockpile of the relatively rare and nonrenewable gas could soon vanish.
Party supply stores are already feeling the pinch, as helium shortfalls are driving up the price of balloons. But it's not birthday parties we should worry about. A severe helium shortage, experts say, would cause problems for large swaths of the economy, from medical scanners to welding to the manufacturing of optical fibers and LCD screens.
So how did we get to this point? Back in the 1920s, when blimps and other airships seemed like a useful military technology, the United States set up a national helium program. In the 1960s, it opened the Federal Helium Reserve, an 11,000-acre site in the Hugoton-Panhandle Gas Field that spans Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. The porous brown rock is one of the only geological formations on Earth that can hold huge quantities of helium. And the natural gas from the field itself was particularly rich in helium — a relative rarity in the world.
By 1996, however, the Helium Reserve looked like a waste. Blimps no longer seemed quite so vital to the nation's defense and, more important, the reserve was $1.4 billion in debt after paying drillers to extract helium from natural gas. The Republican-led Congress, looking to save money, passed the Helium Privatization Act, ordering a sell-off by the end of 2014.
There was just one small hitch. According to a 2010 report by the National Research Council, the formula that Congress used to set the price for the helium was flawed. Bingaman has dubbed it a "fire sale." The federally owned helium now sells for about half of what it would on the open market.
And, since the Federal Helium Reserve provides about one-third of the world's helium each year, this has upended the entire market. There's little incentive to conserve, recycle or find new sources of helium. And once helium escapes into the air, it can't be recovered.
Worse, under existing law, the Federal Helium Reserve could run out of money to operate as early as mid-2013. When that happens, it will still have a large chunk of the world's helium supply locked in the reservoir — but no one will be able to access it.
About 40 million MRI exams are conducted each year to help doctors diagnose everything from strokes and cancer to torn ligaments. Yet a helium shortage could ruin them. Tom Rauch, a health-care supply-chain manager for General Electric, explained that the powerful magnet in an MRI machine must be constantly cooled by liquid helium. Without timely refills, the magnets run the risk of permanent damage.
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