To determine the extent to which the federal government’s response to the helium-3 shortage was affected by DOE’s management of helium-3, we reviewed the DOE Isotope Program’s strategic planning documents, helium-3 sales data, and information on NNSA’s inventory of helium-3. We also interviewed officials at DOE, DOE’s Savannah River Site, NNSA, and DHS, as well as representatives from Linde and GE Reuter-Stokes, the two principal companies that purchased helium-3 from the Isotope Program. Also, we used the federal standards for internal control to assess DOE’s management of helium-3. To determine the federal government’s priorities for allocating the limited supply of helium-3 to various users, we reviewed documents of the integrated project team. We also reviewed the helium-3 allocation decisions, criteria, and process of the interagency policy committee convened in 2009 by the National Security Staff, which report to the National Security Advisor, to oversee the integrated project team and make policy decisions to manage the helium-3 shortage. The policy committee is a multi-agency committee consisting of key agencies and departments that use helium-3 applications to support their missions, including the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), DOD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Department of State, DOE, and DHS. We also interviewed officials at NIST, the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institutes of Health (NIH), DHS, DOD, DOE, DOE’s Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, and NNSA, as well as National Security Staff. To describe the steps that the federal government is taking, if any, to increase the helium-3 supply and develop alternatives to helium-3, we reviewed feasibility studies that presented options for alternative sources and recycling unused equipment and interviewed representatives from Ontario Power Generation, a Canadian power company. We reviewed research and documentation, including test results, on alternatives to helium-3 that are being developed by companies and interviewed representatives from these companies and officials at DHS, DOD, DOE, NIH, NIST, NNSA, and Oak Ridge National and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories. We conducted this performance audit from April 2010 to May 2011, in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. The unique physical properties of helium-3 have led to its use in a wide variety of national security, scientific, industrial, and medical applications. Helium-3 is widely used for detecting nuclear material and safeguarding nuclear weapons because, among other things, of its ability to efficiently absorb neutrons. In radiation detection equipment, helium-3 is used to detect neutrons that are emitted by nuclear material. In radiation detection portal monitors, long, thin metal tubes are filled with helium-3; neutrons passing through these tubes react with the helium-3, creating charged particles that are detected by the monitors. Also, as a nontoxic gas that is not absorbed by the human body, helium-3 is used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to research pulmonary disorders, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Helium-3 is rare because it is currently extracted solely as a byproduct of the radioactive decay of tritium. During the Cold War, the United States produced tritium in nuclear reactors and stockpiled it for the nuclear weapons program. Helium-3 is also available from natural sources, such as subterranean natural gas deposits, but it has not been pursued commercially in the past because it is found in very low concentrations. NNSA and its predecessor agencies produced tritium at the Savannah River Site K-reactor in South Carolina and purified tritium by removing helium-3 at the Mound Plant, a weapons research laboratory in Ohio. Following the end of the Cold War, as the United States reduced its nuclear weapons stockpile and ceased producing tritium, its inventory of helium-3 decreased commensurately. In 1988, DOE shut down the K-reactor for safety reasons and, in 1995, closed the Mound Plant, thus eliminating the U.S. government’s large-scale ability to produce and purify tritium. NNSA has been able to meet the tritium needs of the nuclear weapons program by maintaining the existing stockpile and recycling tritium from dismantled nuclear warheads. To maintain the current tritium stockpile, NNSA extracts helium-3 from tritium on a daily basis and stores the helium-3 in pressurized cylinders at the Savannah River Site. To remove trace amounts of tritium and other impurities, NNSA ships these cylinders of helium-3 to Linde in New Jersey, which operates the only commercial facility in the United States licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to purify helium-3 of trace amounts of tritium. While NNSA’s helium-3 inventory at the Savannah River Site is constantly changing, as of early February 2011, it was almost 31,000 liters. NNSA estimates that about 8,000 to 10,000 liters of helium-3 will be made available per year from the current tritium stockpile. Like the United States, Russia extracts helium-3 from its tritium stockpile. According to National Security Staff documentation and representatives of Linde, Russia has curtailed its sales of helium-3, indicating that its supply is likely waning. Isotope production and distribution has been a long-standing mission of DOE. DOE’s Isotope Program provides isotopes to support the national need for a reliable supply of isotopes used in medicine, industry, and research. DOE transferred the Isotope Program to DOE’s Office of Science from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy starting in fiscal year 2009. In anticipation of this transfer, in August 2008, the Isotope Program organized a workshop to discuss the nation’s needs for isotopes, and identified those isotopes with supply challenges. As noted in the workshop summary report, the workshop assembled, for the first time, stakeholders from all the different areas of the diverse isotope community to discuss the nation’s current and future needs for isotopes and to consider options for improving the availability of needed isotopes. The workshop enabled the Isotope Program to discuss and develop program priorities, including those isotopes, such as helium-3, that were in short supply. This workshop identified 12 isotopes, including helium-3, that faced supply challenges and had less than 3 years before their supplies at that time were completely consumed. In August 2003, the Isotope Program signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NNSA to make available an initial 103,570 liters of helium-3 for sale, followed by at least 10,000 liters of helium-3 per year from 2004 through 2008. At the time the MOU was signed, NNSA’s inventory of helium-3 was estimated at about 260,000 liters. Following this agreement, the Isotope Program held a series of public auctions to sell helium-3. A public auction process was used, according to program officials, to encourage competition. The Isotope Program and NNSA determined the quantity and minimum price of helium-3 for each auction; the price was set to recover the costs to extract helium-3 and the administrative costs of selling it. Linde and GE Reuter-Stokes, a company that manufactures helium-3 tubes for radiation detection portal monitors and other neutron detection applications, have been the two buyers of helium-3 who participated in the Isotope Program’s public auctions. From 2003 through 2009, the Isotope Program sold, or NNSA transferred, more than 209,000 liters of helium-3—an average of almost 30,000 liters of helium-3 per year, as shown in table 1. Given NNSA’s capacity to extract between 8,000 and 10,000 liters of helium-3 annually, this rate of sale exceeded the extraction rate and decreased the inventory. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the demand for helium-3 nearly tripled, because of the increased focus on radiation detection applications. Specifically, DHS’s Radiation Portal Monitor program, NNSA’s Second Line of Defense program, and DOD’s Guardian program all use helium-3 in radiation detection portal monitors deployed at domestic and foreign ports, border crossings, and military installations. DHS alone has deployed over 1,400 radiation detection portal monitors domestically. The largest demand for helium-3 has historically been for homeland security and scientific research, but demand for other applications, such as in MRIs for lung research, has also increased. The federal government’s awareness of and response to the helium-3 shortage was delayed because no DOE entity had stewardship responsibility for the overall management of helium-3. As a result of this lack of stewardship responsibility, officials from DOE’s Isotope Program, which sold helium-3, and NNSA, which extracted it from tritium, did not communicate about the helium-3 inventory or its extraction rate. Without stewardship responsibility, key risks to managing helium-3, such as the lack of understanding of the helium-3 inventory and the demand for helium-3, were not identified or mitigated by either entity. While the Isotope Program’s mission includes selling isotopes and providing related isotope services, senior program officials said that they interpret this mission to exclude helium-3 and other isotopes that the program sells but whose supply it does not control.