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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.
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.
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
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.
It is gratifying to hear we've disassembled the last remnants of Iraq's non-existent WMD program.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
You choose a material that is biologically available. Then that brings strong alpha emitters up close to cells in the body. For example you might want something that could replace small amounts of calcium in people's bones and teeth with a radioactive isotope. Or something that would replace carbon in the fat in internal organ, skin and brain. That way when you spread the radioactive material far it can quickly be concentrated into human beings doint maximum damage. It also can decimate the environment due to bio-accumulation.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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
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.
all the while, pumping the iraqi countryside full of depleted uranium... :-P
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
As much as I *hate* to stick up for Bush, the truth of the matter is that Saddam bluffed and we called him on it. He did everything he could to make everyone believe he had WMDs.
That still doesn't justify the invasion, and it doesn't justify the continuing occupation.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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."
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.)
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.
What are you talking about? He said he didn't have any, and (after dicking around a bit) he let in UN weapons inspectors, and they said he didn't have any. The the US ignored this info, fabricated their own with faulty intelligence, and invaded.
I don't like Saddam at all, but I knew, as did a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration, that Iraq did not have WMDs and that an invasion was a bad idea. I had arguments to this effect with many people at the time, but about 2/3 of the nation was in a rabid war frenzy. I'd say about 1/2 still are.
Our nation fucked up -- please stop trying to rewrite history.
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.
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.
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
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.
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