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."

Comments

Re:Can we build more nuclear reactors now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wow. So a lot of that was much ado about nothin

[default luser]

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!

It was in Iraq but Saddam coudln't get it

[jfengel]

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.

RTFA

[TheLink]

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.

Nuts

[MarkusQ]

Maybe because the HARDEST part of the process is getting the yellowcake?

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

The Iraqi nuclear program in the 1980s.

[Animats]

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.

This is sarcasm right?

[Woundweavr]

"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."

Re:Thanks, media,

[Fjandr]

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...

Re:Thanks, media,

[stephanruby]

Its not the 'smoking gun' that would finally exonerate Mr Bush, but it sure does point in the right direction.

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.

[On July 22 2002, Deputy National Security Advisor Steven] Hadley said that this second memo [this one made by Wilson] detailed some weakness in the evidence, the fact that the effort was not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1595

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.

Beware of coolaid overdose

[MarkusQ]

The problem was it was a lie,

President Bush didn't lie about anything re:Iraq. If you've got a problem with anything he said, take it up with the intelligence community.

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):

• Bush used the claim that our allies had "learned" about Sadam's attempts to purchase yellowcake in the state of the union address, even after he had been told that the intelligence community had debunked it. He also failed to mention that our allies had "learned" this non-fact from the Bush administration.
• Cheney claimed that they "knew" Sadam had bio-weapon lans and "knew where they were"
• They all claimed that we would be "greeted as liberators"
• They claimed that the war would "pay for itself"
• Remember "mission accomplished"?
• Even the "he tried to kill my daddy claim" was a lie; there is no credible evidence that Sadam ever tried to kill Bush Sr.
• They planted stories in the press ("the smoking gun that is a mushroom cloud", "able to strike in 45 minutes") through gullible reporters and then "responded" to the stories as if they were based in fact when they were nothing but talking points they themselves had planted.
• They said that congress had seen "the same intelligence information we have" when in fact that was not the case; congress had been shown a carefully cheery picked version sculpted to make the case for war
• They claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11
• ...and on and on and on.

To claim that they didn't lie about anything regarding Iraq is either a sign of coolaid overdose, sock puppetry, or terminal cluelessness.

--MarkusQ

Re:Thanks, media,

[GodfatherofSoul]

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.