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On-Line Uranium Auctions

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-marge-it-makes-the-whole-room-light-up! dept.

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..

14 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Safe even then. by Tau+Zero · · Score: 3
    All one has to do is drop a few pounds of powdered Uranium, way up-stream in the Mississippi, and we're all in for a world of hurt.
    That would be a really expensive way to accomplish not very much. Uranium is one of the more reactive metals (it's used in anti-tank ammo because it bursts into flame when it pierces armor plate; metals like uranium are called "pyrophoric"). Uranium powder in water would oxidize rather quickly. Guess what? Uranium oxide is not terribly soluble in water, so it goes down into the sediments and stays there. The biggest threat is from heavy-metal poisoning (not radioactivity) and even then the threat would be tiny. Ion exchange resins could remove any uranium which got into the treatment plants. The biggest problem would be that a few miles of the river might not be all that safe if you wanted to eat the fish.
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  2. fear-mongering luddite! by TheDullBlade · · Score: 4

    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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  3. completely wrong by streetlawyer · · Score: 3
    You don't need to hire hackers to trace who bought the stuff. There are not so very many nuclear plants in the world, they are all pretty big things, their locations are a matter of public record, and they all get pretty regular deliveries of uranium. If you think you can hijack one, then just hire Dolph Lundgren and Alan Rickman, and away you go (for some reason, it seems impossible to hijack anything without at least on of those two).

    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.

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  4. Still Safe by JJ · · Score: 4

    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.

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    So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
  5. Shrooms by mbrod · · Score: 3

    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.

  6. Re:Yet more wonders of capitalism by Amphigory · · Score: 5
    Nuclear power is something which is far too dangerous to tolerate even when it is under the most stringent of security at power plants, but for a company to trade it over the Internet is just asking for trouble!
    You should go research some facts, troll-man. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of power. The average coal power plant puts out more radioactivity per year than all the world's nuclear power plants combined. Yes -- that's right -- coal smoke is mildly radioactive.

    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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  7. Solution to the terrorist bidder problem... by Guppy · · Score: 4

    ...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!!!

  8. You think that's safe? Think again. by Tau+Zero · · Score: 3
    Dam bursts have killed more people in this century than every nuclear accident outside of Russia. Hundreds of times as many people, as a matter of fact.

    Hydropower is also being opposed by the greenies because

    1. it destroys runs of migratory fish
    2. it creates emissions of greenhouse gases (methane) from the decay of submerged organic material
    3. 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.
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  9. The real bear is the physics by Tau+Zero · · Score: 3
    In fact, the fission cross section of Pu-239 is high, so it is quite difficult to make weapons out of plutonium.
    That's a non-sequitur. A high fission cross-section is good (gives a smaller critical mass); the problem is the very high rate of spontaneous fission, which can initiate a chain reaction before the mass is properly assembled in a prompt-supercritical configuration.

    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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  10. Online ordering doesn't really change anything. by Claudius · · Score: 3

    ...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.

  11. Good idea by AbbyNormal · · Score: 4

    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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  12. Plutonium irrelevent... by DarkMan · · Score: 5

    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.

    1. Re:Plutonium irrelevent... by Performer+Guy · · Score: 3

      No, the hard part is enriching the material to make the weapons grade material. The atomic weights of the different isotopes is extremely close and it makes separation extremely difficult. There is no chemical difference so there is no easy means of separation.

      The manufacture of a fission bomb is not very hard for knowledgeable engineers, this was done over fifty years ago from scratch, it is easily doable today and the design doesn't have to be at all sophisticated. A fusion bomb is more tricky but the info about the Teller-Ulam design is already out there and easily obtainable.

      There's supposed to be an international effort to prevent nuclear proliferation, including civil applications like power generation because of the obvious application to weapons production. The bottom line is that this material is a prerequisite for anyone embarking on a WOMAD program. How does a site like this comply with international non proliferation objectives? I expect it does this the same way the market handles it now, with export licenses and restrictions on the point to point trade. This is just another market place, these things are already traded, at least this way the DOE can outbid the terrorists instead of having to beat them to the salesman every time, although it seems unlikely that unsavory trades would pass through such a public forum.

  13. Re:Does this mean? by Chris+Pimlott · · Score: 3

    "I know we normally buy our uranium for Universal Elements but I got a real good deal on this website, they have a 30 day money back gaurentee... plus I got frequent flyer miles"