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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..
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.
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 . . . !!!
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.
...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!!!
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.
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.