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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."
... for at least keeping this ONE story under wraps until a prudent moment!
We can't let those French Canadians have nuclear weapons!
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I would have waited until AFTER Dick Cheney left the White House to be seen buying Uranium....esp. with all that oil you have up there......
Monstar L
Mmmmmmmmm, Yellowcake.
According to Xemplar Energy, the energy in one pound of yellowcake is equivalent to the energy in 31 barrels of fuel oil. So that 550 metric tons could keep 30 nuclear reactors going for a year.
Since there is so much yellow cake in the world that they're literally tripping over it in a country everyone knew had none--the stuff must have been naturally occurring and just sitting around in "bunkers" eroded from underground water formations, since we all know Iraq wasn't importing the stuff or planning to use the stuff--it tells me there is more than enough uranium yellowcake in the world to power our needs virtually forever.
Now if we can just build a few more nuclear reactors...
So the primary hazard is mass panic.. exactly the same as a (uranium based) radiological dispersion device (dirty bomb) then. Also not too dissimilar to what the US have been doing for the last 5 years - shooting uranium all over the place.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Is there any radioactive material that is potent enough for a dirty bomb? Wouldn't blowing the material up just spread it out so that it's doesn't emit enough rem to do damage?
Even if you could find a material potent enough how would you store it? How would you move the bomb into a strategic position without killing yourself from radiation poisoning?
I think a dirty bomb is about the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
I'm shocked.
Why do people always feel the need to stress that yellowcake could be made into weapons, no matter how far from being a weapon it presently is? It's like saying:
...though making a high quality steel tool from rust is significantly easier than making a weapon from yellowcake. The ubiquitous anti-nuke meme (it's radioactive, be afraid!)? Or just boilerplate like measuring energy use in average households equivalents or heavy things in adult male elephants?
-- MarkusQ
It is gratifying to hear we've disassembled the last remnants of Iraq's non-existent WMD program.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
Maybe because the lie was used to trick the American people into starting a war that has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, wrecked our economy, undermined our position in the world and put us in a far less secure position, killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized the middle east, and lined the pockets of the friends and supporters of the people who told the lie with money stolen from the US treasury on the basis of that lie?
The problem was it was a lie, crafted and used to achieve a specific dishonorable result. The fact that other claims that could have been made about superficially similar subjects were true (and were known to be true at the time) has absolutely no bearing on the situation.
--MarkusQ
Even if this yellowcake was a WMD, it wouldn't be harmful on its own. The only WMD we ever had to worry about is the "Death to America" attitude. All the physical WMD's in the world won't kill many people if they're not wielded with the motive to kill.
stuff |
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.
so now we're led to believe that CANADA is pursuing nuclear weapons?
They just purchased 550 Metric tonnes of yellowcake uranium from a supposed Terrorist state and we're just letting them do it?
Canada is a ticking bomb here people!
We need to attack Ontario now!
Why isn't bush willing to protect us from these terrorists?
They're using their grammar skills there.
In order to keep up appearances, the American government will be forced to give Iraqis some sort of democracy, and they (as a Shia majority) will absolutely elect someone friendly to their neighbor Iran. This was probably pre-emptive move to get the uranium out the grip of Tehran.
As we all know, countries cannot be left to conduct business on their own terms, because it could possibly be harmful to the only interests that matter: ours.
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.
Nuclear bombs aren't like gunpowder. You can't build them by mixing uranium with charcoal in your backyard.
And that assumes you have uranium at all. The yellowcake would have to be heavily refined ("enriched") first, by spinning it in a centrifuge an unbelievable number of times to separate the heavier isotopes from the lighter ones. It takes years to produce any appreciable amount of weapons-grade uranium. So Yellowcake is about as easy to turn into nuclear weapons as raw iron ore can be turned into fighter airplanes: You need knowledge, manpower, technology and years of work.
That's why the claim that Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake was not so much a big deal but rather ridiculous - whether or not it was true, he couldn't have done anything useful with that stuff for many years, during which he could not have kept his intentions hidden.
all the while, pumping the iraqi countryside full of depleted uranium... :-P
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.
The yellowcake in question has been sitting there for close to twenty years, maybe longer. Sadam might have had dreams of making a weapon with it back in the 1980's, when he had (or thought he had) support from the US, but the program was shut down dead by the early nineties and never got going again. Nor would it have even without the US led invasion and occupation. To say that it "was being accumulated," etc. grossly misstates the actual situation.
--MarkusQ
"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."
Carbonized iron (steel) is about three times the weight of aluminum but also nearly twice as strong, so you need less of it.
Here's what the plane would look like.
(The USSR didn't have much aluminum - or any way to import it - in WW2.)
Couldn't believe that, but 6 months later there was a big expose in "The Observer"...
So aside from the OMG it's nuklear panic most laymen have about this stuff it's no big deal.
One interesting fact though - in facilities like that they have a novel system of alarms. Most of us are familiar with alarms which "go off" when there's a problem. Not so (at least in this one). The alarm went "beep bop" all the time. If it *changed* then you really really had to panic.
(You were supposed to run along the pavement (sidewalk) in the direction of the little green arrows and wait at the green painted area).
Big warning signs "Danger you are now entering a criticality evacuation area" all over the place.
Oh, and nice English "Bobbies" with sub-machineguns and a shoot first , ask later policy.
One of my more fun assignments :-)
Andy
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
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.
Of "wrong" and "lying", are we?
we invaded and occupied a country, have allowed the pubs that did this to remain in office, and it appears that the dems are going to do nothing about it. All in all, it does not speak well of us Americans. I know that many other countries allow their traitors and criminal politicians to get off scot-free. But we are Americans. This is NOT suppose to happen. Sadly, we allowed reagan off with all that he did. Likewise, Clinton for lying (though it was a lie on a question that should never have been asked of him). And now this. Interestingly, pubs and dems made more of a todo about Clinton, than they have about W.. Supposedly, Obama will pursue this if he gets into office and has said that he will free up ALL previous president records (except those for national security). I just hope that he keeps his word. He has already broken the one about accepting public funding only.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
It's hardly news. In fact, one of the reasons the CIA was skeptical about the claim (which Joe Wilson found to be false) that Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger was that Iraq was known to already have substantial stocks of yellowcake--just no way to process it, so there was no reason for them to be trying to buy more. This was just one of the pieces of information that was ignored by the media because it didn't fit with the "Iraq is actively seeking nuclear weapons" narrative that the Bush administration and much of the US media were promoting as a pretext for invasion.
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
Doesn't this prove that Iran was behind something? Let's go get 'em
They must be building a bomb!
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").
Your spelling aside, what exactly are you putting your ass on the line for? You said it best yourself:
"Hell, someday, maybe there will be an administration that will stop thinking of military troops as a well equipped police force, I doubt it but one can hope."
Why enlist if you disagree? We should boycott the army and stock up on privately owned weapons to defend ourselves if our representatives won't withdraw the troops. The war is totally wasteful and we're just going to prompt more criminal attacks. We should be investing in defense and alternative fuels and research instead of bullets and gasoline and the paychecks of reluctant troops. It's diplomatically and economically more sound.
How every wanker on slashdot is an expert in politics, chemistry, and virtually every other discipline on the planet? Not to mention how they seem to be able to be everywhere, at every time, and know everything. Guess the Atheists are wrong- Godhood is apparently sitting behind the keyboards of countless slashdotters.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a neocon thinktank. wrote a letter to Bill Clinton, in 1998, demanding that the USA commence military action against Iraq. One of the signatories of the letter was Dick Cheney. Egg on your face, sir.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The uranium in form of 4-inch, cone-tipped bars was hidden under a thin layer of soil and embedded in walls in and around several military complexes of Iraq. Photo of one of one of the uranium bars
This is another proof that Iraq attempted to produce nuclear WMD.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2