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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..
"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!"
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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.
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.
- 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
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 . . . !!!
On-Line Uranium Auctions
Online uranium? How does the radioactivity get to me? Via email?
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
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
I amazed noone was in here crying hoax already. Jeez...
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
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 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.
...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!!!
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.
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
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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?
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); }
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
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
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
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.
...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.
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.
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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
It's U235 that is needed for a bomb. In nature's uranium there is 0,7 % U235 and the rest U238. To make a bomb you must have about 95 % U235. I think that pakistan tested this kind of U-bomb in 1998. (they had bought enrichment plant from france)
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:
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.
...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.
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.
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?
You're damn right he's saying that. I'd rather have an amount of nuclear waste in a container buried deep in the desert than a large amount of free radioactive radon particles spewing out of the top of the nearest coal burning facility.
Wait a second, you do know that, barring accident, no radioactive materials escape nuclear plants, don't you? Perhaps not.
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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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
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...