Who knew that the shortage of helium would be the way to put an end to a clown show?

[Baitball Blogger]

Who knew?

[usedtobedemgurl]

1. It's over? We are pulling out?

[Baitball Blogger]

5. Not yet. But in this absurd, seat of the pants war, the way the loss of helium will affect our economy

seems to be waking Wall Street up.

They can take us down without one missile strike. We just have a president who is stupid enough to poke the bear. Sadly, even after he leaves office we will probably get a hit from the discontent he's created with our allies.

[Tetrachloride]

2. Alvin is running out of helium too.

[edhopper]

3. We can just speed up the track

and solve the problem.

[Phoenix61]

4. The tech bros won't be happy. nt

[blogslug]

6. Shutting down our National Helium Reserve always felt like a mistake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

The National Helium Reserve, also known as the Federal Helium Reserve, was a strategic reserve of the United States, which once held over 1 billion cubic meters (about 170,000,000 kg)[a] of helium gas. The helium is stored at the Cliffside Storage Facility about 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Amarillo, Texas, in a natural geologic gas storage formation, the Bush Dome reservoir. The reserve was established with the enactment of the Helium Act of 1925. The strategic supply provisioned the noble gas for airships, and in the 1950s became an important source of coolant during the Cold War and Space Race.

The facilities were located close to the Hugoton and other natural gas fields in southwest Kansas and the panhandle of Oklahoma, plus the Panhandle Field in Texas. These fields contained natural gas with unusually high percentages of helium—from 0.3% to 2.7%—and constitute the United States' largest helium source. The helium is separated as a byproduct from the produced natural gas.

After the Helium Acts Amendments of 1960 (Public Law 86–666), the U.S. Bureau of Mines arranged for five private plants to recover helium from natural gas. For this helium conservation program, the Bureau built a 425-mile (684 km) pipeline from Bushton, Kansas, to connect those plants with the government's partially depleted Cliffside gas field. This helium-nitrogen mixture was injected and stored in the Cliffside gas field until needed, when it then was further purified.

By 1995, a billion cubic metres of the gas had been collected, and the reserve was US$1.4 billion in debt, prompting Congress to begin phasing out the reserve in 1996. The resulting Helium Privatization Act of 1996 (Public Law 104–273) directed the Department of the Interior to start selling off the reserve by 2005...