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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..

2 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. 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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  2. 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.