The Journal of the American College of Radiology published an editorial Wednesday afternoon asking that radiologists, their institutions, and their professional societies advocate for helium to be relisted as a critical resource under the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act. [1] The editorial cites MRI's 30 percent share of global commercial helium demand and ties the request explicitly to recent supply disruptions from war, trade interruption, and industrial demand. It asks, in addition to the statutory relisting, for accelerated development of ultralow-helium sealed MRI units, deuterium-tritium fusion-power research, and next-generation reactors. [1] The paper's Tuesday Day Ten account carried the Airgas force-majeure architecture as the supply-side record. Day Eleven is the day the radiology specialty asked the federal government to treat helium as a national-security material.

What the JACR editorial does is move the conversation from procurement to designation. Airgas's March 17 force majeure established the economic facts: 50 percent allocation ceilings, $13.50 per hundred cubic feet surcharge, healthcare prioritised over industrial clients, academic and research-lab clients de-prioritised. [2] Those facts describe supply. The JACR editorial describes what radiology wants the federal government to do about supply. Relisting helium under the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act would give the Defense Logistics Agency authority to stockpile it, to set reserve-release protocols, and to treat the fuel that cools MRI magnets as it treats titanium, rare earths, and manganese. This is policy language, not procurement language.

The US Federal Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas, once held up to a year of national supply and was depleted and sold to a private operator, Messer, in January 2024. [3] AdvaMed — the medical-technology trade association — publicly urged the Biden White House to delay the privatisation until supply-chain problems were resolved. The sale went forward. AdvaMed's argument at the time was that the reserve supplied fewer than 15 percent of national helium in its last years, but that the structural role of the reserve — as a price-stability instrument and a crisis buffer — was irreplaceable without a comparable successor. Radiology's ask on Wednesday is, in effect, for Congress and the executive to reverse that decision by restoring the statutory framework for federal stockpiling. The 2013 Helium Stewardship Act, which authorised the reserve's wind-down, would need to be modified.

The arithmetic behind the ask is straightforward. There are approximately 50,000 MRI scanners operating worldwide; they perform more than 95 million scans per year, of which 40 million are in the United States. [4] A full helium refill for a conventional 1.5-tesla scanner runs, at pre-conflict prices, between $45,000 and $100,000. At current prices the same refill runs between $68,000 and $170,000. [4] The 15-percent net shortage the global helium market converted to after Iranian strikes on Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG complex has compressed against an installed base of scanners that depend on continuous helium top-ups. Philips's BlueSeal 1.5-tesla line uses approximately seven litres of helium instead of the conventional 1,700; the installed base is overwhelmingly conventional. The transition to ultralow-helium systems the JACR editorial asks for is a capital-stock transition measured in decades, not quarters.

What is structurally new on Day Eleven is the specialty's institutional voice. Individual radiologists have been quoted in Bloomberg, AP, Scientific American, and Al Jazeera coverage since the March force majeure. MRI safety consultant Tobias Gilk's line — a scanner without helium is "a very expensive paperweight" — has circulated as the non-technical shorthand. [5] The JACR editorial is the first time the American College of Radiology's own publication has advanced a specific federal-statutory demand. The editorial's authors name four policy asks, and the first one is the Stock Piling Act relisting. That is an advocacy agenda. The specialty is now formally asking the Defense Logistics Agency to treat helium the way it treats tungsten.

The corresponding data point on the federal side is the National Institutes of Health's continued silence. The NIH has not issued MRI-triage guidance for teaching-hospital scanners caught between the "healthcare prioritised" and "academic client" categories in Airgas's allocation architecture. CMS has not commented on scanner-downtime reimbursement. The paper has carried this silence across Day Nine and Day Ten as the cleanest case in the helium thread of a policy response running behind a clinical reality. The JACR editorial can be read as a ten-week accumulation of that silence expressed through the specialty's organ of record. When the NIH does not issue guidance, the specialty writes a policy ask to Congress.

Semiconductors remain the competing demand. Helium is used as an inert atmosphere in advanced chip fabrication, and AI-infrastructure buildout has sharpened chip-fab helium demand since 2024. The Al Jazeera framing that the paper carried on Day Ten — semiconductor buyers have longer contracts and larger balance sheets than hospital purchasing offices — is the competitive-allocation frame inside which the JACR editorial lands. [6] Radiology is asking the federal government to rank its claim on helium above the chip-fab industry's claim. The Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act's authorising language ranks materials by national-security criticality, not by commercial demand. Whether MRI helium survives a ranking exercise against semiconductor helium in a contested hearing is an unsettled empirical question.

The thread's next data point is the American College of Radiology's Washington response to the editorial it just published. If the ACR's government-relations team advances specific legislative text — the relisting amendment the editorial calls for — the policy ask becomes a bill, and the bill becomes a procedural timetable. If the editorial sits as editorial, the day's artifact is the specialty staking a position on the record. Either way, Day Eleven is the day radiology as an institution asked for helium to be a strategic material again. The war built this. The specialty just drafted its first federal response.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago