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Sandia Helps Secure Kazakh Nuclear Material
RedEaredSlider writes "A large cache of enriched nuclear fuel – some 13 metric tons — was stored in a nuclear reactor in the port city of Aktau, on the Caspian seacoast. The reactor was a Soviet-era fast breeder reactor, designed to make nuclear fuel for both weapons and power plants. The reactor, which started operations in 1973, also provided 135 megawatts of electricity, 9 million gallons of water per day and steam for hot water and heating for Aktau. It was shut down by the Kazakh government in 1999. Getting the material out of a seaport was one way to make it harder to steal, [Dave Barber of Sandia Labs] said. So the US and Kazakh governments embarked on a project to move it to a guarded — and remote — facility in the interior."
Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that a breakaway Russian Republic called Kazakhstan will be transferring nuclear fuel to the United Nations in a few days. Here's the plan. We get the fuel and we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
I am officially gone from
Eeks, were they wearing dosimeters?
A few months after we took Iraq, we secured and flew out almost 14 tons of Yellow Cake in 55 gallon drums, 4 to a pallet,on C-17's to Diego Garcia, where it was put on ships to other places. A year or two later 3 of our pilots came down with Lymphoma. Uncle Sam says it was unrelated...
Yellowcake isn't particularly radioactive. To get a significant exposure to radiation they would have had to essentially breath it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm guessing it was for the Desalination plant. http://www.panoramio.com/photo/7190472
That was probably part of the reason they built the reactor in the first place. (Old school desalination).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The US helped remove a half ton of fissile material from Kazakhstan in 1993-94 in a covert project called Project Sapphire at a cost of $27 million.
"The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a "secret" cache that was recently "discovered" by the U.S, and the yellowcake had not been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991."
Source
This doesn't sound like it was dodgy hidden under cover drums or anything like that. It sounds as if it was well regulated.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The material you're talking about is an alpha emitter. This means the radiation is stopped by things like barrels, walls, your clothes, your skin and air.
There would only be residual gamma radiation. This would become harmless on the way from the barrels to the cockpit. If you're not trolling you would do well to read up on how different types of radiation work.
The above poster was right about it being no risk unless someone ingested it. The pilots were exposed to dangerous radiation though: airplanes are routinely hit by powerful cosmic radiation which is much worse than anything coming from yellowcake barrels.
That would be the main health concern. As a freestanding gamma source you don't have much to worry about; but a mixture of uranium, decay products, and whatever delightful residues and impurities remain from the leaching process is not the sort of dust one would want to be breathing.
If the drums were properly sealed, no problem. If one or more of them were damaged, the handlers could quite easily be tracking around and breathing the dust. That would probably be unrecommended...