by
Loren Bonner, DOTmed News Online Editor | September 26, 2013
The U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously to pass a bill that would prevent the premature closing of the Federal Helium Reserve, which supplies roughly 30 percent of the world's helium.
The High Technology Jobs Preservation Act (H.R. 527)
was passed in the Senate on Sept. 19 and received House approval Wednesday night.
President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law quickly, since the Bureau of Land Management has indicated it would have to shut down the reserve on Oct. 1.
Under the existing law, the reserve was being forced to close when all its debt was paid off. That happened sooner than expected — this October — but without all the helium being sold off.
"This continues part of the existing framework, which is that the federal government still operates the reserve itself and it sells helium to the refiners who are on the pipeline," Brian Connell, director of government relations at the Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA), told DOTmed News.
The Bureau of Land Management will continue to sell the helium to private company refiners until there's none left in the reserve, according to Connell. When that happens, the government will sell the reserve facilities.
"Then the government is totally out of the helium business," said Connell.
The High Technology Jobs Preservation Act is a substitute amendment to the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act, which was approved nearly unanimously by the House in April. That legislation differed mainly in how the revenue the federal government makes on the reserve would be spent.
Helium is critical for manufacturing and running MRI scanners. It's currently the only element on earth that can keep an MRI magnet at its necessary operating temperature, which is an extremely cold 440 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. But it's also an essential gas for other types of advanced manufacturing, and is used in scientific research.
"If the BLM [Bureau of Land Management reserve] were to shut down at this point, you'd be taking about half the world's current helium supply off the market overnight and that would mean you wouldn't be able to manufacture new MRIs or maintain existing ones. Literally they would have to shut down the machines and patients wouldn't get the scans they've been prescribed," said Connell.
