TJ Cox: “While Dave Berry has made fun of the National Helium Reserve, and while P.J. O'Rourke called it a program that is…”

“While Dave Berry has made fun of the National Helium Reserve, and while P.J. O'Rourke called it a program that is amazingly stupid, even by Government standards, and while most people when they think of helium think of party balloons, the truth is that there is a very real and important high-tech application for helium. It is irreplaceable in many high-tech applications, and it is very important to our high-tech economy that we do our utmost to conserve what is a very finite and limited resource. Every time you make a long distance phone call, you are using helium, because the fiberoptics that carry your voice are manufactured with its aid. If you ever had an MRI, you know of the uses of helium in superconducting, because it is the cryogenic properties of liquid helium that make possible the high magnetic fields used in magnetic resonance imaging. Deep sea divers do not get the bends because of developments in oxygen and helium mixtures. All of these and other uses of helium, even the Federal Government's own uses at NASA and the Department of Defense, are high-technology, and are examples of just how important it is to us today, as it was not in the 1920's when this program was started, to conserve all of the helium that we can. We cannot forget that we manufacture helium as a byproduct of natural gas.”