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On-Line Uranium Auctions
object.orient() writes "Yahoo! News has a story about a web site that will be starting on-line auctioning of uranium fuel for nuclear powerplants. Wow, now all those blueprints for nuclear weapons I downloaded might be useful! (Seriously, they say it's safe from terrorists.)" Granted, it does look like you have to be a registered purchaser and it's not plutonium or anything - but the whole thought amuses me, in a science project gone awry way..
Karma is frozen in the upward direction only.
I can understand that. But why does it go down when I meta-moderate. Not "when I am meta-moderated" but "when *I* meta-moderate".
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Am I the only one who was disappointed as a kid when they found out that a nuclear fission reactor was nothing more than a giant steam engine?
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...about 1 microcurie of the stuff...
...criticality of Am241 occurs at about 2 curies...
...order 2,000 good and fresh smoke detectors...
That would be about 2 _million_ fresh smoke detectors.
Well seeing as the most naturally occuring isotope of Uranium, U238 has a half life of 4.47 Billion years, I can't see it causing that much trouble (radioactively).
According to the site:
Another successful auction has been completed using UraniumOnLine. This time a buyer bought 56,320 kg U as UF6 for delivery at USEC on 30 Nov at an amazing price of $23.05/kg U as UF6.
So much for needing to "crack the far more secure communications of the power plants and storage facilities."
--- Remove all references to mud-dwelling quadrupeds to email me.
There are over 100 nuclear plants in the US, and the typical refuel cycle is 2 years. If you want to hide a staff to keep an eye out for unmarked trucks, great. But I think a few grand to an apropriately morally-challeneged geek would be a lot more cost effective.
:)
As for Dolph, what for? A heist like this only requires that an invoice be fudged, to get "your" crate get loaded on your truck at the dock. No need to shoot people. Really, international espionage is over-dramatized in Hollyweird.
Once the hack tells you who had *bought* it, you'd know whom to crack next. Elementary really. IANASpy BTW, really.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
heheh - unless those docs come from the military, you're not gonna find the incomplete part I was referencing....
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
IIRC, South Africa's bomb tests showed that they could get a couple kilotons yield out of 80% U-235. This is still a hell of a long way from the 3% U-235 mix used for light-water reactor fuel.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
cyclotrons are used to accelerate atomic particles. I think you are thinking of gas centrifuges.
"Oh I'm sure in 1984 you can go down to the corner drugstore and get plutonium..."
Well maybe be not but I can get some uranium and feed it to the lil' breeder reactor in my garage...
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
So what? Bananas are radioactive (Potassium-40). You get an annual dose of about 39 millirem from radioactive elements in your own body, most of the dose is from Potassium-40 (see this page).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The Chernobyl disaster was as much a function of reactor design as poor disaster mitigation. The USSR reactor design at the time raised the graphite control rods from below rather than the American method of lowering them. The advantage of the American method is in the event of a runaway reaction the control rods drop in to the core stifling the reaction before the core can melt through and breach the reactor core housing.
Ummm... no. The Soviet RBMK reactors (like Chernobyl, which was/is an RBMK-1000) lowered the rods into the reactor core, whereas the American reactors are not graphite-moderated at all (rather, they are moderated by heavy water.)
In Chernobyl, the "American method" you describe above was exactly how Chernobyl's plant worked: the crew attempted to lower the rods into the reactor, but they jammed because they tried to lower them too fast...
Ok, well I only have one problem with the matter, and that is they have the gall to use BLINK... I almost had to hurl. No kidding.
"a powerful and unexpected ally..."
Nuclear is also second cheapest. The differences in cost and safety are slight, but gas is still the winner. Coal, Al Gore are you listening? is a big looser.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Nuclear power is something which is far too dangerous to tolerate even when it is under the most stringent of security at power plants,
Ughh. Yes, let's go back to using large animals and small piles of wood for our energy need. We can't tolerate dangerous things like a barely controlled continual explosion just feet from your body (i.e. the internal combustion engine in a car). You know how many people those kill every year in spontaneous catastrophic failure, with hundreds of millions in daily use (awful things, they clearly must be banned!).
The nuclear power station for a whole region is analagous to the internal combustion engine for the person, just as nuclear weapons are analogous to personal firearms. Yeah, it's dangerous, if it's made or maintained by an incompetent, or the owner insists on running it without proper maintenance. Yeah, it sounds dangerous if you describe it in terms of what can go wrong. But that doesn't mean it's actually more dangerous than other things.
Any big power source kills lots of people when it goes wrong. Think of dams bursting or coal-mine explosions.
Chernobyl? The world's experts knew it was unsafe. A good argument to listen to your mechanic, and not your pocketbook.
Three Mile Island? Far from a disaster, that was a little hiccup in the early days of nuclear power that lead to even greater modern-day safety.
Compare that to all the people that have died over the years from coal-dust explosions and being burned by petroleum products. And nuclear power becomes better understood and safer with every passing year.
And the rewards... !
If fission power plants were developed to their potential, electricity would be so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering except for industrial uses. Aluminum would become cheaper than wood, cheaper than good garden dirt. Coal would be left in the ground and nobody would just burn oil. That haze in the sky, whether you're too accustomed to it to notice it or not, would be a thing of the past, as would smog and acid rain.
That's the kind of cheap energy we need to make things like space travel affordable. By the end of the 1960's we had adequate rocket technology for space colonization, if only it was mass-produced with cheap energy and we used small onboard reactors on spacecraft instead of trying to carry up huge amounts of chemical fuel, both for our machines and ourselves.
The only possible justification for not using fission power is the expectation that fusion power will become available shortly. We've pretty much put our civilization on hold waiting that development. Compare the changes in the first 70 years of the 20th century to the latter 30 years: we went from "Bigger, Better, More" to "Smaller, Cheaper, More Efficient." Car and house prices stopped going down, consumer goods became less substantial. We didn't get smarter, we regulated away progress in energy production so this is the only progress we can still have!
but for a company to trade it over the Internet is just asking for trouble! With the trend of backdoor penetrations into ecommerce by hackers over the last few years, I doubt any online site is truly safe from a determined and persistent hacker. And uranium could be a big prize for the right person.
They're finding a buyer over the internet. That's all.
Would it have made you happier if they they did it over the telephone, or with smoke signals?
They will still be meeting with the buyer in real life and going through all the security protocols necessary to transfer the fuel (moving uranium is hardly a simple matter of tossing it on a truck and sending it off). It's not like they're FedExing the package to anyone whose credit card clears.
The internet sale doesn't add the least bit of risk, it's just a natural use of the most efficient mode of communication we have.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I would like to point out that this stuff can still be dangerous even if it's not made into tactical grade nukes. Take a couple of rods, store them in a locker in grand central... instant evacuation=terorist activity. Throw a couple in the county resevoir=3 headed frogs. Put a couple in a bag with some sticks of dynamite..explode.. they will be digging up the soil and burning it for years.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Correct, only remember that Iraq's ability to do so has been closely monitored for the last decade. I would be more concerned over the instability of Pakistan and India with nuclear arms than any other hotspot in the world.
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Sig it.
Hacking the site, no matter how expertly done, would gain you the knowledge of who had *bought* the uranium. Since nuclear power plants do not typically wait until they're running out of uranium before buying some more, this gives you no knowledge beyond the date at which a book entry was presumably made on the ledgers of a storage facility, the locations of which are also public knowledge. In order to know when it's going to be delivered, you'd need to crack the far more secure communications of the power plants and storage facilities.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
None of the new things Amazon sells is a logical extension for a book and music store. I mean lawnchairs? Hardware (read: hammers and nails, not SCSI cables and USB hubs)!? Soon they're going to start selling CARS (seriously)! I wouldn't be surprised to see uranium (or anything else) on amazon at this point.
Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
up and at them
up and ATOM
up and AT THEM
UP AND ATOM!
UP AND AT THEM!
- Sure you say, it's not bomb-grade material, but it's still radioactive. It can be used to poison and irradiate any number of people in the wrong hands
Oh, puuuulease! If it's simple radioactivity or poison you want, there are a billion easier ways to get them then by going onto a secure, public, invitation-only online auction. There are hundreds of radioactive isotopes of various elements that are a whole lot easier to get than uranium. And poison? Just visit any toxic dump site.No, Chicken Little, the sky is not falling.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Nuclear plants do indeed have their own suppliers; the company backing this site is one of the biggest. This site is a B2B exchange just like a billion others. It's main use is for the plants to trade inventory. The web allows them to do so anonymously (nobody wants the competition to know whether they're desperate buyers or sellers). The uranium will not typically move back and forth across the country; what's being traded are rights to receive the uranium when you need it.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Let's just hope.
On an offtopic note, how much TNT would you need to make a shockwave that's rideable?
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I hope your car is about as big as a submarine.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Thank you. Good heavens, I get so bloody tired of the anti-n-ergy activists. They have nothing in their arsenal of banal facts but scaremongering. And that they do well.
Coal, oil, fossil fuels... All are dangerous (right now!) and all are running out. Use the fossil fuels such as oil as petrochemical fodder. Pleeeeese, lets stop burning the stuff.
And about wind-machines and solar panels. Does anyone know the energy required to produce aluminum. Ungodly amounts of energy, in the Mwe, to produce it. Where's that energy going to come from. If we had entirely wind-generated power, most of it would be used in the production of the bloody turbines themselves...
Also, check out www.atomicengines.com. Read up on the next generation n-ergy plant, the atomic engine. Fantastic.
___A__R__F___
By your definition, no "proper" breeder reactor could have been built, because the weapons-grade Pu to fuel it has to be made in a breeder reactor. Check on the history of the Hanford N reactor to see where you went wrong.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I've always wondered how long it would be before some terrorists blow up a major city with an atom bomb. I mean, face it, there are some radioactive elements out there whose critical mass is measured in grams, and I'm sure there are lots of ex-communist countries' not-too-careful-about-ethics scientists who would be more than willing to sell such quantities to Joe R. Terrorist for a couple of M$.
Building an A bomb is easy, isn't it? Basically, you just hit together two blocs totalling more than the critical mass. In the case of Uranium, you have to separate the U235 from the U238 and such tedious details, but basically, it isn't hard.
So which will be the first city hit, and when? Honestly, I don't think it will happen in North America, Europe or Japan, because terrorists have generally more immediate targets. But still, it makes you shudder.
Presuming you could get past the security protocols, you'd still have quite a job to turn power plant grade uranium into weapons grade stuff. Iraq hasn't been able to do it after about two decades of trying.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
mmmm... military... you mean reactors in the subs and carriers? didn't they have enrichment as high as 30-40 % U235, so they dont have to change fuel so often.
Hmm, western and eastern versions of light water reactors need 3.x % U235, RBMK (chernobyl) about 2 % and candu (heavy water moderated) 0,7 %. Bomb needs about 95 %.
On-Line Uranium Auctions
Online uranium? How does the radioactivity get to me? Via email?
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Actually that's not entirely true. Heavy water reactors, such as the ones used in Canada, only require roughly 1% U-235.
But this whole discussion is rather silly. A terrorist could just as easily cause massive damage by using a device to scatter radioactive material all over a populated area. He wouldn't even need a fission reaction, although that is much more spectacular...
I had a friend in high school and in boy scouts years back who made a makeshift nuclear reactor using americanum extracted from smoke detectors. This is no joke...the story was featured in Harpers magazine a couple years ago. When the EPA found out about it, it cost them like around $50,000 to clean it up. Just a nuclear reactor in a shed in a suburban backyard. Crazy, isn't it??!
Time is fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog
As others have noted, the big threat is that Russian warheads will wind up with "FOR SALE" signs. Reactor fuel (raw, spent or re-refined) is not a proliferation threat.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I do wish they would let the various Nuclear Powers compete in a mushroom cloud competition in the Olympics.
Those things are just too cool.
At least until said terrrorists build a city sized diffusion plant to diffuse uranium hexaflouride into bombable and non bombable isotopes.
Or at least until the terrorists build a breeder reactor to generate plutonium.
Silly scare mongering, Hemos, we expect better of you.
George
This is just great. Now I guess I will live the rest of my life in the local fallout shelter.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I amazed noone was in here crying hoax already. Jeez...
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
True, but look at the medium of which this is being done on. The relative ease of use of this auction will allow for a buyer to purchase of a lot less cost than it would be to go through a regular physical auction. Its a lot easier to shadow buy at an online auction, due to the ease and anominity. A double edged sword that will undoubtedly be heavily scrutinized by the rest of the press.
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Sig it.
The first Bomb(tm) used in war was made with U238. I beleive there were about 100,000 who can attest that it did work.
The bottom line is that Nuclear power is extremely safe compared to every other form of power we have available. Three mile island and Chernobyl not withstanding. Have you ever seen what coal soot can do to your lungs?
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-- Slashdot sucks.
The time machine used plutonium, not uranium.
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The big fun-fun part of it is that it produces this unfriendly mix of Pl-139,140,141,etc. Aka Reactor-grade plutonium. Weapons grade plutonium is ==pure== Pl-139. You could hold it in your hand. The only way to get weapns-grade plutonium is to pump gob-boodles of Mwe (and millions of $) into a specially designed isotope seperation process. So, you get this nice hogde-podge of fissle material that gets used again and again and again untill all you've got left is some light to heavy metals in the half-life range of tens of years. Most of which are either alpha or beta emitters (ie tin foil is a great shield material).
Terrorists don't have the capital or the time to turn reactor-grade pl into weapons-grade. It's easier for them to buy pre-assembled warheads from the former Soviet republics of Kasakistan, Uzbekistan, etc. Those poor folks have nothing to eat. And nothing to sell but hiiigh priced oil and big boom-booms. What would you do? Starve?
___A__R__F___
YES! I just posted about that! I was friends with that kid in high school! We were in boy scouts together too. Wow, I feel almost famous now.
He didn't get too sick, but he had burns on him. Shit, I probalby got radioactive poisoning from him. To avoid jail he joined the navy, and is still there as far as I know.
Time is fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog
I'm just curious where you learned those numbers from (I'm NOT disputing them). They're right, but, um, incomplete
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
You can make a nuclear bomb just nicely out of uranium. Sure, it takes more work, and it's possibly not as big or as good, but hey, it still goes bang.
Well that can be said of lots of things that are already legal and being sold online. The point is that this isn't going to result in lots of people making and deploying the things that people think of when they hear the scary phrase "nuclear bomb."
IIRC, most of the good ones use Plutonium anyway.
Normally I would agree with you, but I would like to offer a counter example: James Acord. He first started gathering uranium from old fiesta-ware plates (for a few years the oarnge plates were colored with uranium). He broke up the plates to concentrate the uranium. Not enough to do anything with, but enough to alarm some people.
He then managed to score a few tonns of uranium blankets that were to be used in a german fast breeder reator. The reactor never went online, and so Siemans had a few tonns left over. They gave it to James Acord for an art project. I don't think the art project was ever built, and I don't know where the uranium is today. Mr Acord has (had?) an NRC license for the material, so in a sense it is under control.
To read more about James Acord, Nuclear artist look at http://www.hanfordnews.com/1999/dec8.html or http://www.artscatalyst.org/htm/eots/n uc.htm
W
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
We are also beginning the implementation of a new auction site dedicated to areas of nuclear procurement other than fuel. We expect to be online within weeks at www.nukeauction.com.
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When people talk about "Weapons Grade" and "Industrial Grade" theyre talking about the ratio of the Uranium 238 to Uranium 235 (forgive me, i dont have my Nuc-Rad notes with me. if i did i could tell you the exact ratio for reactors and weopons.) Both are unstable and have long half-lives, BUT, there is no way to make a nuclear power plant explode like a giant nuke. When a power plant is running, it starts the process by opening the control rods and exposing the fuel pellets to neutrons which slam into them at high speeds. The neutrons break the U atoms into protons and more neutrons. This process is the nuclear chain reacation. It produces Plutonium, neutrons, and of course, heat. When a nuclear weapon is detonated, the same process occurs, only at a much faster rate. The reaction is started when the fuel "goes critical" this means that the atoms are too heavy and will start to break apart (and remember E=MC^2, so the energry realeased is quite powerfull). Also note that the fuel pellets are inacive until the reactor is started, that is, you can take a pellet in your bare hands, even put it in your mouth (if thats what you're into) and you will not be exposed to any radiation. However, when you bombard the pellet with a neutron, I would suggest you get yourself as far away from it as possible, and get to a hospital immidatly. Unfortunatly, it is impossible to tell when you are reciving a radiation dose until it is too late. But if you have an unexposed pellet, there is almost no way to make it into weapons grade. (also you'd have to refine it, carve it into a perfect sphere and have an implosion device just lying around).
Gee, I was betting on fuel cells. I suppose this stuff beats methanol for power density.
Ryan
The bottom line is that Nuclear power is extremely safe compared to every other form of power we have available. Three mile island and Chernobyl not withstanding. Heh, oh, those two, notwithstanding...heh, and the atom bomb isn't dangerous either, Hiroshima notwithstanding.
Once I thought I was wrong...I was mistaken.
There is a chance a large object will slam into the Norteast United states. The resulting explosion and dust particles will block out the sun. Tidal waves will damage coastal property around the atlantic.
How the hell did peoples' perspectives regarding nuclear energy become so warped?
You need weapons grade plutonium to get a bang out of the thing, and inorder to get that you would have to have a special reactor, now how many terroris have special reactor for making weapons grade plutonium? I suppose after a few months we'll learn that US Military has lost a reactor..
Thanks for the corrections and additional info - the details were (obviously) fuzzy in my mind... I was trying to get at your first two numbered points, but I was a wee bit ticked by the troll...
;-)
Safeties off on a reactor... write that one down as a no-no
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
The point is threefold:
- The design of the RMBK reactors used at Chernobyl was grossly unsafe. This is only a flaw in that design, it does not apply to PWR's, BWR's or HTGR's.
- Even so, the reactor wasn't a problem until it was operated in a patently unsafe manner.
- There still wouldn't have been a problem if the reactor had a proper containment building around it.
With US-style safeguards, nuclear power is safer by far than coal, and even safer than wind (working on towers is dangerous). There are more people killed every year in chemical plant explosions than could possibly ever die from all US nuclear accidents from Three Mile Island onward, and most years there are more bystanders killed by chemical plants than could ever die from nuke accidents from TMI on up. Funny, where's the greenie hype about chemical plants? Looks like selective blindness to me.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Oh whew...I guess it's a good thing their message board drops new submissions into a bit bucket. I just posted a lengthy alarmist statement about how the membership agreement doesn't say that you have to have some kind of DoE certification before you can become a buyer on the site...it just says anyone can sign up who wants to sign up.
:-)
Shouldn't this be a more closed-loop sort of thing? I mean, let the general public see who's buying what, how much and for what price (maybe), but keep the delivery date a secret (so Dolf Lundgren & Co. can't hijack the transportation vehicle), and don't give the general public the ability to sign up in the first place. If nothing else, it just looks really bad.
Whether I'll ever get invited into an auction or not, I don't *want* to be able to sign up to be a buyer on a nuclear fuel site, damnit...and I don't want any of you other nerds to be able to either. Jesus, we're dangerous enough as it is having all the root passwords for so many servers in our collective posession...the last thing we need is even the faintest possibility of being able to create nuclear weapons!
If anyone has any family in Redmond, WA, I recommend you quietly convince them to move.
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"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
that only works if its 'noo-kyoo-ler' web site
...is user feedback, of course. For instance
Negative comment for user EvilMidnightBomber from Bob's Surplus Nukes, Inc.:
Warning: Do not deal with this guy! His check bounced, he refuses to answer e-mails, and he nuked Manhattan! Stay away from!!!
As another poster has pointed out, it is the 238 (IIRC) isotope that is dangerous. This isotope makes up a small (less than 1%) fraction of the uranium metal. The major expense of the Manhattan Project (which was approx $1E9 (in the 1940's!)) was the isotope separation facility at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. The danger is that U238 is easy to use in bomb making, slap 2 hemispheres that are each 2/3 of a critical mass together and you get a low-level explosion, the rest is just refinement. Plutonium, extracted from spent fuel rods, is much easier to extract, but harder to make a bomb from (you need a spherical implosion, tough to do). Fat Man was a plutonium bomb, Little Boy was U238. I would recommend reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
Best Slashdot Co
All these people talking about making bombs. Just get them from http://www.cheapnukes.com
You should go research some facts, troll-man. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of power.
Are you trying to tell me that nuclear power is inherently better than say, solar power? Of course coal plants are dangerous and polluting, but they're on the way out in many places and about time too.
What you seem to be missing is that although the risks of an accident may be less than for coal, the consequences are much, much worse! This is why nuclear power is an evil which we should do without, because if something ever really goes wrong, it will be a disaster for a huge geographical area and the people that live there.
The question isn't turning the stuff into weapon grade materials, like many of you suggeusted. It's really the coupling of a traditional explosive with the nuclear materials to create a fallout weapon.
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Crudely Drawn Games
The "Coal" itself is not radioactive. Its the (radioactive) halogen gas Radon that is set free when Coal is cracked. As a coal plant needs huge amount of coal to run (compared to the relative small amount of Uranium needed for nuclear plant), more Radon is set free by a properly run coal plant than by a properly run nuclear plant.
Uranium must be in metallic form to be used in weapons. Uranium used for nuclear fuel is in ceramic form, and is therefore unsuitable. Also, uranium for weapons requires higher enrichment than uranium for fuel. The equipment required to convert ceramic uranium to metallic form is unavailable to terrorists, or to most of the population for that matter.
Finely-divided (ground) uranium (and plutonium) is pyrophoric -- it would burst into flames spontaneously when you dumped it out of the plane. It would turn into Uranium Oxide -- U2O5, if I remember right -- which can be quite poisonous if inhaled (just like any heavy metal oxide), but is really heavy -- it would more likely drop to the ground and stay there. Because the half-lives of uranium and plutonium are so long, the level of radioactivity is quite low -- plus they're alpha emitters, and alpha particles can't penetrate your skin. If you dumped uranium dust out of a plane, long term, some folks who breathed it in on the way down would have higher incidences of lung cangers, but that would be about it. The real fallout danger from a nuclear burst is all of the short-halflife crap -- strontium-90, cesium-137 (I think that's the one), etc. -- that gets created when everyday dirt gets hit with a big neutron flux. The fallout danger from uranium or any other alpha emitter is negligible. There's lots and lots of uranium and thorium in the dirt already.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
Marty! Make sure you're the highest bidder! It's your dog, Marty! Something's gotta be done about your dog! Doc Emmett
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It's boron nitride (BN), not nitrate.
James Accord is a most curious figure, and I confess I hadn't heard of his project before today.
Thanks for the links!
"Delivery" in the context of a futures exchange doesn't mean physical delivery to the plant. "Delivery at USEC" means the time at which the buyer takes ownership of the uranium in the warehouse (USEC is presumably a secure storage facility). Sorry for not making this clear before
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Hydropower is also being opposed by the greenies because
- it destroys runs of migratory fish
- it creates emissions of greenhouse gases (methane) from the decay of submerged organic material
- it displaces people from their traditional lands and obliterates the archaeological record of an area.
I'm not saying I agree with all these charges, but if you are going to claim hydro is so great it is up to you to rebut the counterclaims.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I always wanted to run my car on nuclear power! And I can finally put that reactor I've had my eye on in the garage...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
First an iFeel mouse, now an iGlow website?
It's getting funnier by the minute!
How to make a sig
without having an idea
Another interesting, if off topic, online auction house with govt. surplus stuff is at LevyLatham, some pretty weird stuff. Your (USians) tax dollars at work.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Very good, have a cookie!
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Moderator's essentials
22 pound sphere of Uranium cut in two at the equator...
I just can't get this picture out of my head: You, standing next to a critical mass of uranium and holding a hacksaw.
I agree that it's much more interesting. I also like lithium Deuteride tho... Just not enough to get the domain...
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
1) This has GOT to be a joke. Ain't NO WAY this is gonna fly in the US, or anywhere else in the west. 2) To folks saying "it's very difficult to make weapons grade uranium out of power plant grade usranium" - BS, if it's going into a WESTERN designed power plant. If it's going into a Chernobyl-esque plant, yup, they use very low enrichments, thus they blow up when they get too hot. But not most western designs, thus they self regulate when they get too hot. Now, I've oversimplified my #2 option above, but you get the picture. If this is real, it is Real Bad (tm) - me, I'm betting it's a joke
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Yes, nuclear power is a safe form of power in the near-term.
The critical issue you miss is the effects of nuclear power on the long-term. Containment of nuclear wastes is an ongoing problem for us now and the future. Now I am no fan of coal either, but don't be foolish enough to think that nuclear waste is a miracle energy.
I was perusing federal newsgroups about nuclear reactors several years ago, this was happening over two years ago.
"We have guided missiles and misguided men." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
If you read the story (or even other comments) you'd see that there is no anonymity here. The auctions are by invitation only, and they're unlikely to invite a new buyer without some serious investigation. Also, any newcomers to the market can probably expect a visit from the FBI.
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Uranium, Spam
Radioactive, unstable
Neither is a food
Nuclear fuel online
Uranium- a fun gift?
Stock up for Christmas
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Option 2 is actually a bit more difficult. I'm just gonna leave it at that for, um, various reasons. ;-) I still say it's either A) Real Bad, or B)A Joke
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
barring accident, no radioactive materials escape nuclear plants,
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."
Care to reconcile?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Who cares, it'll still cause terror...
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
Sorry
I should have qualified that...
You can't make a bomb from the stuff they use in reactors.
It's alot of effort to enrich the uranium.
Sign up all you want, guys. Good luck buying anything unless you've been approved, which you won't be.
And this should clear up a lot more:
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Excuse me, that was not flamebait. It was a valid criticism of a viewpoint I see far too often in the U.S. (of which I am a citizen) - that we view 3rd world "terrorists" as Evil People, yet judge our own as above and beyond reproach. How is it flamebait to point that out?
Please respond.
InThane
Everyone's talking about "you can still make a weapon", but they're missing a point: nuclear fuel for power plants is enriched at 3% or so for the US, and isn't enriched at all in Canada. To make a bomb, you need 90+% enrichment. Enriching uranium is extremely expensive, and i really doubt terrorists/third world countries have the time and resources to do it.
Colin Winters
plus they're alpha emitters, and alpha particles can't penetrate your skin
Which is why I mentioned the whole "inhaled or ingested" thing. It can be a hazard in the lungs, and it can be a hazard in the LLI.
There's lots and lots of uranium and thorium in the dirt already.
Not that much in most regions. And in the regions where there is a higher than usual concentration (E. Washington / W. Idaho, for example) there is a measurable increase in cancer and similar diseases.
You're points are reasonable; they're not totally out to lunch -- but I disagree with your general opinion that there's basically no danger with what I've described.
I've been a reactor operator and rad worker for many years (and taught reactor physics for a few years), so I'm not totally ignorant on the subject.
-- CP
cool - I'm working on the PERL script now
Yes. A modern nuclear power plant does not underestimate the power of human stupidity. It's called a fail-safe system. The laws of nature itself conspire to make it not possible for the plant to have a "leak".
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is why plutonium bombs are all implosion designs; a gun can't get a mass of plutonium into the right shape fast enough. The chain reaction starts prematurely, the bomb comes apart before more than a tiny fraction of the Pu has fissioned, and you get a "fizzle". This is the reason that it is nearly impossible to use recovered plutonium from power reactors to make bombs. Power reactor fuel spends years in a heavy neutron flux, and it is chock-full of higher isotopes of Pu (like Pu-240, Pu-241 and Pu-242) which have far higher spontaneous-fission rates than Pu-239. You'd need a bomb design made from scratch to use this stuff if you could use it at all. ISTR reading that the Russians had actually done isotope separation on their already-weapons-grade Pu to get rid of some of the higher Pu isotopes and make their weapons more reliable. If you're going to need gas-centrifuge gear anyway, you might as well go with uranium. Your chances of success are far better that way.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Oops. My bad. So much for doing math in my head, I always seem to lose the decimal.
Ya know, I never do that when I'm calculating capacitor values and reactance and stuff like that.
...
Better call ahead for that order. Maybe get them to bump up the credit limit on your Home Depot card.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I smell a hoax.
It's one thing to auction off furbies, pokemon, and other crap, but URANIUM????
Sounds like a load of hooey.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Doc Brown's future vision of being able to but plutonium at every street corner seems to be coming true.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I read a story in Reader's Digest about a kid who built a small reactor out of the radioactive stuff in smoke detectors. He got really sick from the radiation, and the EPA(I think) came in and carted off all of his equipment and the shed he built it in as nuclear waste.
Now, give that kid a credit card and this link, and just sit back and watch the fireworks.....
Creed
I hate that feeling where you dont know if it is your program that spanks, or if its the other end screwing you over. This time, the evidence is in my favor...
---Dave Bacon, 6/21/00
...and it's not plutonium or anything...
I'd like to note that nuclear weapons can be made of other things besides plutonium. In fact, the fission cross section of Pu-239 is high, so it is quite difficult to make weapons out of plutonium. One cannot use a gun assembly like Little Boy, the U-235 bomb that dropped on Hiroshima, and instead one surrounds a subcritical mass of plutonium with high explosives that, when detonated, compress/implode the material to get it to go critical. This is a delicate business best left for the pros e.g. Los Alamos Nat. Lab. An attractive and moderately low-cost alternative to plutonium that has been tried by at least one country (India, IIRC) is to breed U-233 from thorium to make material for weapons. (This is one place where the South Park song "Blame Canada" is actually fitting since, if I remember right, the materials were bred in reactors supplied by Canada).
The problem of uranium purification is a difficult one, and it would be nearly impossible to surreptitiously acquire enough reactor-grade uranium to construct a weapon without the world's intelligence agencies being clued in to the fact, mail-order uranium notwithstanding.
If I were a terrorist I'd forgo the whole nuclear weapons thing and just start manufacturing anthrax. Acquiring the materials is trivial (just go find a field of sheep), and you get considerably more deaths per dollar with biological agents than with nuclear weapons. Furthermore, they are easier to deploy, and they are much more difficult to detect and disable.
Bioweapons--the poor-man's nuke.
56,320 kgs of Uranium - $1,298,176.
1 Nuclear Reactor (for breeding) $3,000,000,000.
The looks on the faces of the screaming American heathen pigdogs - priceless.
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Pokéthulhu
Gotta catch you all!
First off, Amazon didn't start anything... they were just one of the first to make it so big that they still don't have a plan for profitability...
Please read the article. The aucion is by invite only. You can't juts sign on as '5kr1p7_k!!dd!3' and hope to get a good deal on some uranium. It's very controlled.
Try to have a clue before you start spouting things like "Nuclear power is the spawn of the devil! Repent ye and be saved!"... fool.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
of course if Libyan terrorists do come to steal your uranium, you could always add a flux capacitor to your DeLorean, and travel back in time to make sure that it doesn't happen.
- passion
This assumption depends on a) a ludicrous overestimate of the amount of naturally occurring trace radioactive elements (uranium, thorium etc.) in naturally occurring coal and b) an assumption that nuclear power always works without error and without leaks.
So in other words, if a nuclear power station is safe, then it's safe. Thanks, guys.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Every Pleb in the street knows what Uranium is.
Drop it in his baby's drinking water and see how nuts he goes...
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
Yay! A Freakazoid ref on slashdot! The world is now complete!
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
"Ohhh, look at this beauty, folks!", the auctioneer shouted as the fully loaded fuel assembly floated across the stage. "She's got Seimen's own special burnable poison and higher enrichment, so she'll burn beter and longer than most. They claim 18 months between refuels. Bidding starts at 1 million dollars!"
"Mr. Shadow bids, it's nice to see that face of your's Mr. Shadow!"
"Shakarami of qari bids one up.."
Don't think so. It's more likely that the Wazzo Regulated truck line is going to drive the same route it usually does between the Nether Regions fuel plant and the 2km out there power plant.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeah, this was yesterdays news. And you have to be registered and have a backround check by the usual parties. And its all such pitiful stuff you'd have to be an Iraqi tyrant with labs, engineers and the UN not breathing down your neck. Besides, no matter that the buyers identities are private, you can bet the Energy Department knows who is on the invoces.
I was in Prague, the Czech Republic, years ago when some character was busted with a trunk full of high grade uranium. You don't exactly read about this happening in Cleveland, but it's pretty alarming how much from former Soviet stores is still unaccounted for.
Hmm... maybe they left it behind the photo copier...
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...Now i can finally build that backyard reactor project. ;-P
I think it is a pretty good idea to keep it online and in the open for all to review. Not only do you have to be an invited participant by the New York Nuclear Corp but also any purchase that is made is surely going to be monitored closely by the Feds . Only problem that remains however is who is to stop the buyer from just relaying the goods to another shadow buyer?
You are a unique individual...just like everyone else.
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Sig it.
Geez, someone mentions Uranium and everything thinks "bombs". As many have pointed out here, getting from Point A (non-weapons grade Uranium) to Point B (a bomb) is not a trivial task.
There are plenty of other things a terrorist can do with Uranium, which is a significant health hazard if ingested or inhaled.
Grind it up fine and dump it in NYC's water supply, perhaps? Dump the dust from a plane over a populated area?
Not trying to scare monger, just pointing out that there's more to terrorism than bombs.
-- CP
...the terrorists hire a bunch of hax0rs to trace WHO bought the stuff and where it's being shipped, so they can hijack it.
This is scary.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
To all those idiots out there who think that there is going to be a security issue with this bit...you need to be beaten with a clue-by-four.
What do you think the uranium producers are going to do, ship it to your house vie UPS or FedEx? Come on...it's not like they're going to ship this to just anyone. It's just a lot harder to fly all the uranium buyers to an auction than it is to use a web site.
So say someone does break in and tries to buy reactor grade uranium. When they list their address as:
Osama Bin Laden
123 Main St. Apt. 4
Somewhere in Afganistan
It's prolly NOT going to be delivered. You trigger happy morons deserve nothing but flame for not thinking through your comments. You're just like a tabloid...if you can sensationalize it, print it. This is very similar to a Chicago suburb getting all in a fit because the U.S. Navy wanted to ship napalm through their town on it's way to be destroyed. Never mind the fact that they allow tankers full of sulfuric acid and chlorine through there all the time...
Luddites, be damned...be damned to the eternal stoneage you would rather have.
Way back when, I picked up a copy of "Science Made Stupid" at the Adler Planetarium gift shop. Among other things, it included spoof plans for building your own backyard nuclear reactor, which advised that you "wear rubber gloves" [sic] when handling the uranium rods. Quite a giggle - might be time to pick that one up off the shelf and check some auctions.:)
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
um, why? is it because a reactor is able to control/feed the reaction, and a bomb is just left to feed off itself?
You're saying one kind of radioactive waste product is alright, but another isn't? Where do you draw the line... can we have a figure in say children with leukemia per square mile?
Uh, no.
Weapons grade uranium is 90% U235. The rest is U238 (plus some other junk).
The uranium used in reactors is also U235.
Naturally occuring uraniu m is 0.72% U235.
Naturally occuring uranium is slightly enriched, to 3% U235, for use in reactors.
And, actually, there are multiple ways of seperating isotopes. Centrifuging uranium hexaflouride is just the cheapest and easist way, requireing ten passes to get weapons grade. Previously, magnetic deflection of ions (like in a mass spectrometer) was used.
Ok, to return to my point, I should have said the most difficult part in getting fuel grade uranium to explode, is the construction.
The reason weapons grade uranim is used is because it's a lot easier to make explode, in a controlled manner. And it gets you big bangs.
Fuel grade uranium will not get you a much bigger bang than, say, 13 kiltons, assuming your careful about how you build it.
That is a mere fire cracker compared with todays 100 megaton bombs. At one 100000th of that power, it's the same size as the Hiroshima bomb.
If you were ever going to build one from fuel grade uranium, it would be a terror weapon. Even if all it did was blow up a block, that wuold do.
[Aside: Fuel grade uraium can be made into a bomb: the chain reaction co-efficent of a nuclear reactor is 1 (by definition). This is controled by control rods, that allow the maximum chain reaction co-efficent to be reduced (but not enchanced). Thus the natural peak chain reaction co-efficent of the fuel must exceed 1.]
Alternativly, you could build an FBR to produce plutonium, but that's getting off the point.
You can make a nuclear bomb just nicely out of uranium. Sure, it takes more work, and it's possibly not as big or as good, but hey, it still goes bang.
However, given that you need licenses to import uranium, you need to shape it in an inert atmosphere (argon), you need licenses to work with boron [0] too, and lets not even consider tritium. Krypton switches arn't exactly common, and high explosive is not trivial to obtain either.
The most expensive part of a bomb is not the knowledge, and not the raw material either. It's the construction.
I hardly think that anyone is going to use this to build a bomb.
[0] Boron is needed to control the reaction. It's also probably (as boron nitrate, the comonly used ceramic form)the single best ceramic. It's used in bulletproof ceramic vest, it's got a tensile strength and elestic modulus somewhere in the 'oh, my god!' region, and requires to be dome formed at 2000 centigrade.
I just registered to be a bidder.
That's funny as heck!
Doc: "I'm sure in 1985 you can get plutonium at your supermarket, but in 1955 it's a little harder to come by!"
Bill: "Don't worry dude! I'll just wait until the year 2000, buy twice as much plutonium as we need from the internet, and use half of it to bring us back some now!" (plutonium appears from nowhere: cue air guitar)
Gfunk007
(Yes i know it's not plutonium but i couldn't resist!)
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Imagine a UPS delivery person wearing a brown lead suit coming to your office...kinda supsicious, huh???
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
1.21 jigawatts... 1.21 JIGAWATTS...
;)
"it may be available in any corner drugstore in 1985, but here in 1955 it is a little hard to come by..."
looks like any crazed scientist or other weirdo can now
There is one counter-argument to the coal vs. nuclear power debate that is too often forgotten. Using uranium in a fission reactor produces plutonium which then needs to be disposed of. The problem is just that, what do you do with all this radioactive waste? You can't, after all, just bury it in a landfill and hope it goes away. At least Coal smoke breaks down in the atmosphere.
Holly crap!! its going for >$8.0 a lot!!!!!!
Dirty Pirate Hooker
What's the big deal about Uranium. If you spend a couple of million dollars in Russia, you can buy weapons-grade plutonium. No need for reactors.
:-)
If you spend enough, you can probably get a free bomb to go with it
Can you just Fed-Ex this, or is UPS an option? right...
The opinions posted here in no way reflect the opinions of the Advanced Cryptography Systems Research Group. In fact th
"Nuclear power is by far the safest form of power."
If we're talking about safe forms of power I think we can not exclude hydro-electric power. It is for sure much safer and environmentaly friendlier than nuclear or fosil fule power.
Haven't you people seen UHF? Don't you remember the part when Philo had his "Secrets of the Universe" show, and taught us all how to make plutonium out of common household items?
Dear my! What are those things coming out of her nose?
Spaceballs!
Does this mean that I can finally light my house with a nice, soft, light-blue glowing source?
But, seriously, why is this needed? Don't nuclear power plants already have their own well-established suppliers? The article didn't make it clear what kind of benefit this really has. Power plants must already have their supplier list, otherwise they couldn't operate...
I looked the site over. It doesn't seem too different than the sites they use to do men's apparel or socks or pistachios. Of course, the +1, Funny potential is high, but nuclear fuel isn't that bizarre.
IIRC, the isotopes used by reactors are different from the isotopes used in weapons-grade uranium. So it isn't much of a danger-- it would take the resources of a third world country to process U-235 into U-238 (or is it the other way backwards-- I always forget). Either way, Third World countries have plenty of uranium-- what they are missing is processing technology, such as gas-centrifuge systems and other technologies. And we, happily, are watching those technologies pretty closely.
Tritium, on the other hand, is useful for both industrial and military purposes, and so is much more interesting. ;)
#5. You can kill the poor auctioneer when it gets in the millions...
#4. They never state the condition of the container.
#3. Have to give out your Dilythium Express number.
#2. Seller only has 2 good ratings... both from small middle east countries.
#1. Shipping and handling more than most lifetime incomes.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Can't wait for the media to get hold of this one. If there's one group of people who know how to blow things up out of all proportion it's them.
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Ignore reality - there's nothing you can do about it.
Actually, the time machine used electricity. A hell of a lot of it. The plutonium was just to run the nuclear reactor (presumably just a normal fission reactor of some sort) in the back to get the electricity.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That's the key. So long as that is safe from being screwed with.
Even if I were to break in and order some uranium from them, I doubt they'd deliver it to my house, anyway. I'm sure it would have to be a radiologically-licensed lab.
I had initially figured it would be some sort of novelty website, selling natural uranium for people. Natural uranium (U238) is basically lead, but a little bit heavier and with different chemical properties. Not very radioactive, quite harmless unless you ingest it (like almost all heavy metals). But they appear to offer a search among a variety of isotopes and pellet configurations, so the fuel is suited to different reactor types.
and it's not plutonium or anythingWell, all American light-water moderated reactors run on U-235. "Enriched" uranium. It's an isotope that occurs in nature - it's uranium but with a few less neutrons than usual. This makes it more prone to fission, and therefore more useful as fuel. Chemically, it's ordinary uranium, but just a little heavier, so it's separated from U238 with a physical, not chemical, process.
U235 is dangerous. It's more dangerous than many isotopes of plutonium. For example, Pu239 is dangerous as all hell - but chemically, not because of the alpha particles it throws off.
Remember, Japan got to taste-test a Uranium and a Plutonium bomb.
but the whole thought amuses me, in a science project gone awry way..Nah. People are just afraid of nuclear anything. Just take some precautions. Bad things will happen from time to time (as they always do when technology fails). But, nuclear technology is a boon to mankind. No one would ever suggest that we give up aviation because a plane crashes. No informed person would advocate that we give up nuclear technology because there was an idiot at the controls at Chernobyl. As we've learned from plane crashes, we learn from criticality accidents and mishaps.
Ionizing smoke detectors save more lives each year than all the people who have died as a result of Chernobyl.
And on the ceiling in your bedroom, that little smoke detector contains one of the wonderful by-products of the plutonium produced for the arms race: Americium 241. Alpha emitter, so it creates a positive electrostatic field around itself. Half-life of 49 years. Fairly active stuff. And you have, in your bedroom, about 1 microcurie of the stuff. Even if you open your smoke detector, as long as you never eat or inhale your smoke detector, you're perfectly safe: alpha emitters are harmless outside your body (alpha particles can't pass through skin) but if you get them in your body, you're in trouble.
Criticality of Am241 occurs at about 2 curies. From that, you'd get a big blue flash, a lot of heat, and a lot of weird cancers. So, head down to Home Depot, and order 2,000 good and fresh smoke detectors. Pull them all apart and get the Am241 out of them. Keep two separate, but equal, piles of Am241 chunks. Melt them down in separate containers, and pour them into molds that have complementary shapes. Put them, always spaced about a foot apart, in the container of your choice. Use conventional explosives to force the two of them together. There ya go. You're now a nuclear power, ready to take on India or Pakistan. Kinda makes you wonder why it took them so long to get that far. (Canada had to sell each country a CANDU nuclear reactor back in the 1970s, for "civilian use". Good idea. Thanks. Yet another way that the Canadian government makes me feel proud to be a Canadian. <sigh>)
There's nothing to it, the cost is only a few grand, and all the info required is basic and common knowledge; most of it you could acquire at any good municipal library. But, I assure you, you won't get to build your little nuke. Someone in the Feds will discover you've got a very strange interest in smoke detectors.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Let's see what I remember from my third grade report on nuclear disasters (Dad did some programing work for the nuke program, and was originally a physicist, so I had NRC demo matierials and everything):
Three Mile island nuclear plant had two "major" accidents, both released less radation than the radioactive dye used in heart surgery (by an order of magnitude).
The Chernobyl disaster was as much a function of reactor design as poor disaster mitigation. The USSR reactor design at the time raised the graphite control rods from below rather than the American method of lowering them. The advantage of the American method is in the event of a runaway reaction the control rods drop in to the core stifling the reaction before the core can melt through and breach the reactor core housing.
I may not have a nuke plant in my back yard, but I would much rather live near a nuclear power plant than a fossil fuel power plant. (Acctually, about 2 miles from my parents house is a small hydro electric plant which wins.)
Spyder
Now I can power my ups with something that can survive the San Fransisco Brownout/Blackout season!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Guess you need to factor in the length of the auction and the total shipping time to accurately figure the price-per-pound to see if you're getting a good deal.
The local CVS pharmacy has it on sale right now, and I don't have to pay shipping. Plus.. the Radio Shack next door promises me they'll have a flux capacitor soon. Then I'll go back in time and kill that damned milkman that was always winking at my mo...
The french know what's up: Breeder Reactors are the closest things to perpetual energy machines that humans have created.
The chain reaction of splitting an isotope of plutonium (gasp! we *can't* use plutionium! oh, grow up) eventually yields the same isotope of plutonium.
Generated waste is very very small, humans get their kilowats. Stop being so damn disproportanatly scared of nuclear power.
Next refuel - 10 years. Would be a bear to maintain though :)
Send me One Hundred Billion Dollars for each microgram you desire, plus 19.99 to cover the cost of shipping.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In an effort to stay in the middle of the e-tailing fray, Amazon.com has just opened its weapons-grade plutonium site. And as it has done with other business segment introductions, Amazon will stage an enormous give-away of nearly a metric ton of radioactive material. "We're very excited about this new market," said amason president Jeff Bezos. "We feel that other hazardous materials may come on line very soon, including oily mung and vials of anthrax!" www.ridiculopathy.com
Nazi stuff... then the French would have to ban it. History, BAD! Nuclear weapons, GOOD!
Nosce te Ipsum
Radioactive
eBay auctioneers make a
Nuclear web site
Quick; where can I grab myself a copy of the Nuclear-Reactor-HOWTO.tgz (pref. >= version 2.6 which has the Tsjernobyl update)? Once I located that one I'm ready to build my own powersource which will reduce my bill. Then I can spend that money on my phonebill for Internet access ;) I knew that, in the end, Inet visits would pay themselves ;)