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550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed From Iraq
Orion Blastar tips us to an AP report that 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" uranium has successfully been removed from Iraq. The operation lasted three months, and it required 37 separate flights and an 8,500-mile trip by boat to reach a port in Montreal. Quoting:
"While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth 'tens of millions of dollars.' A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors."
Furthermore, it's truly quite amazing how Bush manipulated the intelligence to show that Iraq had WMDs, even going so far as to manipulate Russia's, Jordan's, France's et al intelligence to show the same thing. He even went back in time and had the Carnegie Institute write the book Deadly Arsenals which outlined Iraq's WMD program, and of course while he was back in time had the Clinton Administration link Iraq with Al Qaeda just to show off. A truly impressive whitewash that no one has been able to uncover with a 5-second google search.
At least they did .. id have expected them to hide this one until the very end.
Its not the 'smoking gun' that would finally exonerate Mr Bush, but it sure does point in the right direction. ( even tho we went to iraq for several reasons all supported by international treaty violations, its the WMD line item that irrational people seem to desperately latch onto as the ' i told ya so' )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Further: the reason Saddam had the Yellowcake was because he was actually putting together a nuclear reactor back in the 1980s. Thanks to bombings by Israel and the US, Saddam had no choice but to sit on the damaged reactors and fuel, and try to build a nuclear research program.
The fact that the nuclear fuel he'd had for years is completely unenriched just tells you how little cash he had to spend on the program. Simple fact: nuclear programs are fucking expensive, because enrichment is not a simple process. This is why I laughed my ass off when Bush claimed that Iraq might have a nuclear program to fear, even after we bombed them to the stone age in 1991, and then strangled their international trade for the next decade. Complete bullshit!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
From TFA:
U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.
This was old yellowcake from the first Iraqi attempt at a nuke plant (which the Israelis bombed in 1981). Saddam couldn't use it because there were UN inspectors watching it.
So it was plausible that he might want some, but not true that he tried to get it from Niger. That was concocted evidence.
Sadam had declared this depot of uranium during the last Gulf War. It was put under U.N. jurisdiction and monitored for years.
Sadam had lots of weapons and stockpiles that were put under U.N. seals, and monitored by personnel and remote cameras. These depots were located all over Iraq and most were intact when the U.S. invaded. Fortunately, this nasty stuff stayed in the depot despite all the chaos.
Unfortunately, much of the material that was under U.N. jurisdiction did disappear right after the U.S. invasion. In one depot, the U.S. troops acknowledged that a long range rocket depot was still intact, left for the Battle of Bagdad, and when they came back, it was all gone. This particular depot was about 50 miles from the Iraq/Iran border, and there is some thought that maybe the Iranians saw their chance to grab some "Weapons o' Mass Destruction" before anyone noticed. Then again, Iraqis may have entered this compound and sold its contents for scrap. We will never know.
RTFA: "Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said."
But I guess many stupid/ignorant people will read the headlines and "understand" it the same way you did.
No wonder Bush got re-elected.
So Yellowcake is about as easy to turn into nuclear weapons as raw iron ore can be turned into fighter airplanes
Heh. I'd love to see the airplane you'd make out of iron. Iron is very very heavy. A better way to put it would have been "...as raw bauxite can be turned into fighter airplanes", as they are largely made of aluminum, not iron.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Nuts. Unless you've got some super secret enrichment technique that you haven't shared with the rest of us, you are quite simply dead wrong. Yellowcake is just a mix of uranium salts, and making it is no more complicated than any typical mining operation; drill some holes, crush some rock, and leach the minerals out with a suitable leaching agent. Dry the result and repeat. You don't need specialized equipment, or even a great deal of skill. It is a low tech, low precision step.
Enrichment, on the other hand, is a bear, requiring precision engineering, lots of finiky equipment, and a great deal of skill.
--MarkusQ
Yes, Iraq did have a nuclear program, back in the 1970s and 1980s. It didn't go well. They couldn't get any of the separation processes to work. A mid-level physicist in the program defected to the US and wrote a book about it, which gives a view of the strange world of working for Saddam Hussein. If he was annoyed at a manager, he sent them to a torture camp to be tortured for a while, then put them back to work. If they did well, he gave them one of his ex-mistresses.
Iraq tried to build calutrons, which do isotope separation in one or two steps but can process only tiny amounts of material. So it's necessary to build a large number of them to enrich enough uranium for a weapon. The US built some sizable calutron plants during WWII, but they were too slow to be useful when fed with natural uranium. They were used as a final upgrade step for uranium partially enriched in the gaseous diffusion plants. None of the other nuclear powers ever bothered much with calutrons, except little research-sized units. Iraq never actually built enough calutron capacity to accomplish much.
Iraq's yellowcake (uranium oxide, unenriched) is left over from that era. Extraction of yellowcake from raw ore is an ordinary chemical process, usually performed somewhere near the mine. It's the first and easiest step of the process, and that's as far as Iraq got.
"Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said."
the heck they were co-operating!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blix
As has been said repeatedly before, having a stockpile of unused 27-year-old yellowcake != trying to buy more from Niger. The former was never contested, as everyone knew he had yellowcake stockpiles. The latter turned out to be a pile of crap.
550 tons of material sitting unused for 2+ decades doesn't lend much credence to the idea that he was pursuing nuclear weapons. Much to the contrary, it's a good clue that he wasn't. It would be as likely that Iraq was stockpiling silicon for use in microprocessor construction absent anything resembling a facility that could create the intermediate compononents necessary for the final product, let alone the final product itself.
This is not something that can be used in Bush's defense, unless one lacks the most basic reasoning skills. Then again, that seems to be a common trait amongst those who attempt to defend Bush...
Bush did not make an argument about Yellowcake that Saddam had. He said he was buying more... which ... was...a... LIE.
Or possibly a mistake.
"Regularly"?
The only incident that comes to mind for me is the Halabjah gassings during an Iranian incursion. (Of course, using chemical weapons specifically on Kurdish military positions may have warranted much less press.)
From a partisan perspective, it's worth noting that the Reagan/Bush administration blamed the incident on the Iranians, claiming the symptoms matched Iranian chemicals instead. And on the other side, that they continued to grease exports to Saddam of bio/chem weapon components after that time.
Yes and no. For this purpose, the fact that uranium is radioactive is mostly incidental. Purified uranium is (approximately) .7% Uranium-235 (radioactive) and 99.3% Uranium-238 (stable) -- but this is also irrelevant. Uranium, radioactive or otherwise, is poisonous, and breathing uranium dust is one of the more hazardous methods of ingestion. Most of the other commonly known radioactive materials (e.g. plutonium) are poisonous as well. This is the principle behind a dirty bomb -- to use the material as a poison, with its radioactivity mostly incidental.
That said, the real danger from a dirty bomb using yellowcake appears to be fairly minimal. First of all, yellowcake isn't really pure uranium. Rather, it's compounds relatively high in uranium, such as uranyl hydroxide hydrate, uranyl sulfate hydrate, sodium para-uranate, and uranyl peroxide hydrate. To produce anything very poisonous, you'd have to purify the uranium.
Then you're left with a few more problems, such as the fact that purified uranium is a soft, dense metal so that:
There's also the fact that while uranium is poisonous:
All in all, the real threat from uranium in a "dirty bomb" is pretty minimal. For this purpose, lead would be about as effective, and a whole lot cheaper and easier to get.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
No, this is the 'smoking gun' that only confirms Wilson was telling the truth. Wilson was already saying that the new purchase of Yellow-cake from Niger made absolutely no sense because Iraq had plenty of it already.
I couldn't find the direct quote from Joe Wilson, but if anyone is willing to do a search through youtube/NPR -- I remember Wilson also repeating this fact several times during his NPR interviews.
At first I thought you were joking.
Bush, Cheney, et al told so many lies in the lead up to the Iraq war that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Just off the top of my head (and sticking to things we know):
To claim that they didn't lie about anything regarding Iraq is either a sign of coolaid overdose, sock puppetry, or terminal cluelessness.
--MarkusQ
A weapon of mass destruction is one which can kill lots of people at once. Nothing more, nothing less. Chemical and biological weapons are most definitely weapons of mass destruction, even if they aren't quite as devastating as a nuclear blast.
I'm at a loss to understand how you rationalize your belief that chemical and biological weapons do not qualify as weapons of mass destruction... and I'm not buying a book for a "lengthy discussion" to find out what your rational is. Perhaps you could present your argument for your position without requiring people to pay for someone else to explain it?
The US is DESTROYING its stockpiles of chemical weapons. It's taking time with the environmental issues associated with tons of VX nerve agent but it is happening now and should be done before too long. Didn't Iraq's UN sanctions come from invading Kuwait and USING chemical weapons? Did the US ever invade Kuwait or gas Kurds? It's apples and oranges.
Yes a classic sketch by BBF ripped from Bill Hicks a decade earlier:
I wondered about that too, you know during the Persian Gulf war those intelligence reports would come out:
"Iraq: incredible weapons - incredible weapons."
How do you know that?
"Uh, well... We looked at the receipts Haar."
"Ah but as soon as that cheque clears, we're going in."
"What timeâ(TM)s the bank open? 8? We're going in at 9."
Yellowcake isn't a WMD. On top of that, Bush was floating the idea that the Iraqis were trying to get yellowcake (which they have tons of) from Niger. That's part of what the whole Joe Wilson scandal was; his visit totally debunked that fraudulent work of propaganda.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Here is what President Bush said: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Given that:
I find it pretty sad that you are still blindly claiming that it was a "lie". Try thinking for yourself once in a while instead of following the Bush-hating sheep.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Saddam wanted Iran to think he still had WMDs for his own security. No credible person disputes that. No matter how many times you retards repeat it,
So, Saddam was able to simply lie about WMDs and cause the US to waste hundreds of billions of dollars as a result?
He may have lost the battle, but damn! did he win that war.
George W. Bush never blamed 9/11 on Iraq.
O'really? Perhaps you are right. He never outright blamed 9/11 on Iraq, but he sure as shit intimated it on a frequent basis, making at least 28 false statements about Iraq's links to al qaeda. But at least he has plausible deniability - it wasn't his fault the public heard "al qaeda" and thought "9/11" no, no, no, no!
The risk of Iraq engaging in a terrorist attack was very real and the scale could have been huge with state sponsorship.
Eh? Just where the hell did you get that from? Because it sure as shit don't follow from anything else ya said.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Why do you believe Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear reactor for power, when his country was one of the three top oil producing nations?
After all, he was no environmentalist (notice how he deliberately ordered his army to burn fields of oil as it retreated at the end of the First Gulf War).
There was no need for it for peaceful purpose; the country didn't need it. That was probably the determination of Israeli and U.S. intelligence. Clearly it was a masquerade for building up sufficient supplies of nuclear materials for a nuclear arsenal.
President Bill Clinton signed the United States House Resolution 4655 in 1998. He stated the following words at the signing ceremony (February 17, 1998):
Joe Wilson went on a fact-finding mission to Niger and returned and reported that Saddam was likely trying to get more yellowcake from Niger in his report. Wilson said Cheney sent him on that trip to Niger (lie). Then Wilson wrote the opposite of his report findings in a NY Times Op-Ed, that Saddam wasn't seeking more yellowcake. So either Wilson was lying the first time or the second. Which was it?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
http://www.factcheck.org/bushs_16_words_on_iraq_uranium.html
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The full story is somewhat worse that that flagrant error. As the article notes, this yellow cake has nothing to do with the bogus claim of yellow cake imported from Niger, which did not exist. This is the yellow cake that was genuinely *known*, which makes what happened to it so odd.
The true weirdness is the way that even though the reason to invade Iraq was ostensibly in search of "weapons of mass destruction" such as illicit nuclear materials that could be fashioned into a bomb, even though Tuwaitha was well-known to be a nuclear site since the 1980s and that this yellow cake was stored there, even though the military had to roll past it on the way to Baghdad, was it secured as one of the first priorities of the military during the invasion?
No. Instead, local people looted the site and they were rolling out the drums and emptying the yellow cake out on the ground in order to use the drums for water and food storage. Thank goodness no genuine terrorists were looking for the stuff, or they could have gotten truckloads of it for free.
This is what you call a failure of leadership, a failure to adhere to stated priorities, or a sign that the stated priorities had little to do with the actual priorities.
What was secured promptly and securely as a top priority? The oil fields in southern Iraq.
What sources are you referring to when you say: "a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration", since virtually all the media was highly uncritical and passed on reports from the administration?
Foreign media. Most people who were cynical about the administration's motives long ago realized that the US media wasn't to be trusted to seriously contradict the President.
That's how I heard a lot about how the aluminum tubes that the administration was saying were for uranium centrifuges absolutely could not have been used for the purpose (instead before for rocket tubes). Foreign sources were also the biggest sources publishing Ambassador Wilson's logic for why Iraq wasn't getting yellowcake from Niger and were the ones who brought my attention to the fact that the "roving chemical weapons trailers" were actually for making hydrogen balloons to get artillery with. (The latter bit only came out after the war, though.)
The mainstream US media lost all credibility with me very early in the Bush administration when when went from hounding Clinton's every step to kissing Bush's ring pretty much within the span of a single year. I'm not the only person who feels that way by a long shot, and those of us who read the BBC and other foreign news were the ones who caught on pretty quickly that the causus belli was being manufactured.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I was being generous -- I'd hate to throw 4 of the worst wars of the 20th/21st century ALL at the feet of the Democrats, after all!
No, Iraq doesn't figure in to that. We still had more men MIA in Korea than we have dead in Iraq, and hopefully Iraq isn't going to wind up giving us a new North Korea to deal with for the decades to come (nope, we're dealing with Iran *right now*... ohboy)
But yes.. Democrat Presidents have a knack at getting us in to wars. Hell, Clinton got us into a lot of limited action / policing activities all over the globe, and he threw hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles into Iraq all the damned time with practically no effect whatsoever (remember when he shot something like 150 tomahawks at a powdered milk factory because they were making biological weapons there? LOL AMIRITE?)
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
No. It was willful negligence more than anything else. Read "State Of War." The reports of Iraqi attempts to buy yellowcake uranium were based on a forged document. Moreover, the President relied on a source known as "Curveball" to make assertions regarding Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program in the State of the Union Address even though the German intelligence organization (and the US State Department) said Curveball was unreliable. Turns out that Curveball was an alcoholic Iraqi ex-pat living in Germany working at a McDonald's, and the guy had delusions of grandeur. Oops.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
So...the 9/11 BIPARTISAN commission were just 'Republican Water Carriers'?
How predictable. If they agree with you, they're "speaking truth to power" but if they don't, they're sellouts.
I'll freely say that the intel on Iraq's WMD programs was sketchy, inconsistent, and largely inaccurate due to excessive dependence on defectors who had their own agendas (Who EVER takes defector information without considering their context? What a rookie mistake....).
But this doesn't mean that Richard Wilson isn't just a partisan media whore who was given this assignment through some insider discussion within the anti-Bush bureaucrats @ Langley, as a very neat & tidy way to use someone to fling poo at Bush & co.
As far as it being a LIE? You have a little tougher slope there:
Somehow, Bush managed to brainwash all of the following in the years BEFORE his presidency & before the invasion?
(from http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp)
-Styopa
You need to go back and look at the polls for going to war. When W first pushed that, he had about 20% support for it. It took him a year to build a case of lies for it. The nation did NOT want to invade Iraq. It was lies from W, Cheney, and Rove that convinced ppl to go along with these psyhopaths. Calling ANY of these 3 a fall guy is like calling Charles Manson a fall guy.
As to Clinton, the vast majority did not care about it UNTIL he was caught lying about his situation with lewinski. Until that point, the polls showed that Clinton was doing awesome. Once he was caught lying, then things turned.