550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed From Iraq 647
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."
Troll prophylactic... (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we build more nuclear reactors now? (Score:2, Interesting)
According to Xemplar Energy [xemplar.ca], 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...
Re:It's about time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its easier to make WMD out of oil (napalm) than it is to make them out of yellowcake.
This stuff was most certainly never going to be used in any kinds of weapons program. Iraw never had the facilities to process this stuff at the levels required, and even if they did it would probably be cheaper and easier to just buy black market soviet stuff en masse.
Re:Like comparing rust to steel (Score:3, Interesting)
Uranium, due to it's huge number of electronic states, actually makes a pretty good radiation shield. It also makes decent fishing weights, armor plates.. a number of uses of uranium are listed here [wikipedia.org]
Fixed that for you (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:RTFA (Score:1, Interesting)
But I guess many stupid/ignorant people will read the headlines and "understand" it the same way you did.
What is more tragic, is that the guy who made a comment you replied, is the same guy who submitted the story.
Re:Wow. So a lot of that was much ado about nothin (Score:4, Interesting)
Carbonized iron (steel) is about three times the weight of aluminum but also nearly twice as strong, so you need less of it.
Here [globalspec.com]'s what the plane would look like.
(The USSR didn't have much aluminum - or any way to import it - in WW2.)
Re:Can we build more nuclear reactors now? (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed, and it's amazing how the AC and others who still support Bush try to distribute and redirect the responsibility away from the White House: "But, but, but, THEY said the same thing too!"
Yes, and they didn't go and invade Iraq, instead preferring to use diplomacy and trade tactics to try to convince Saddam to give up the WMDs, and the UN sent inspectors to make damn sure that he wasn't building WMDs. None of them falsified or glorified intelligence reports, nor did they link Iraq to 9/11 like the Bush administration did to justify military action. The bottom line is, Cheney and his cronies were itching for a war in Iraq, and the WMD rumors were only one piece of the picture they were painting for us.
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:2, Interesting)
How good that in the US, they don't even have to quickly hide the stuff from an inspection, because everyone already knows they have the largest collection of WMDs in the history of the world, but nobody's doing something because he will be bombed by exactly those weapons if he did.
It's a bit like the bully who's feared by everyone.
In a way I hope that China will get strong enough to not have to back down even for the US. If their power were balanced neither one of them could have a monopoly.... (Oh god... did I just find a similarity between Microsoft and the US? ;))
Oh, and with "the US" I basically mean the government. Because - face it - without their governments even American, Russian, Chinese, Irani and even French people would be friends (most of the time... there are sport events too ;)).
Maybe one time we'll have a world government... to counter all those pesky attempts to have an alternate way of life that is not depending on a monopoly... :\
Yellowcake - more info (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:2, Interesting)
Well when combined to independent research from Switzerland that Saddam had calutron technology [nuclearweaponarchive.org] than can enrich yellowcake uranium to weapon's grade, and documents that the UN has ignored such reports, might well bring about reasonable doubt that Saddam had plans to enrich the uranium to weapon's grade had he been left alone. But then I used to work for lawyers, so what do I know?
Also from the original article:
"The yellowcake wasn't the only dangerous item removed from Tuwaitha.
Earlier this year, the military withdrew four devices for controlled radiation exposure from the former nuclear complex. The lead-enclosed irradiation units, used to decontaminate food and other items, contain elements of high radioactivity that could potentially be used in a weapon, according to the official. Their Ottawa-based manufacturer, MDS Nordion, took them back for free, the official said."
Shows that Saddam could have made weapons out of them.
But then I've had a personal attack on me that I lack basic reasoning skills, by someone named Fjandr that didn't seem to notice that part of the article. So I guess it dismisses all of that, because that is what fallacy based personal attacks are designed to do.
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:3, Interesting)
The media is actually reporting things right this time. It's just that people infer what they want to believe.
If they were reporting things right, they would address the inference and refute it.
But that's just me, I have high standards.
At least there was some coverage [nytimes.com] of last month's final report on the exaggerations and lies leading up to the invasion of Iraq. But NBC, ABC, and CBS actually ignored it, while MSNBC dedicated only 90 seconds to the story.
You'd think this would be big news.
But then, only a tiny handful of US news outlets reported on Colin Powell's use of a plagiarized and largely outdated 10-year-old term paper (written by a California college student) in his presentation of WMD "evidence" to the UN.
The US media likes wars and all this Nationalist fervor because not only does it sell papers, but the parent companies of our media outlets profit mightily as well. So, alas, truth-telling presents a major conflict of interest for the media here.
For the raw facts, there's really only a few sources left [democracynow.org].
Under wraps? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's about time... (Score:3, Interesting)
Its easier to make WMD out of oil (napalm) than it is to make them out of yellowcake.
You get a lot more bang for your buck with nuclear weapons than you do with napalm. And I'm puzzled why you made the comparison. It's like saying breathing is a cheaper and easier than selling cars. So no way would someone be sell cars - even if they had this well-lit lot with a couple hundred cars on it - and a history of attempting to sell cars.
This stuff was most certainly never going to be used in any kinds of weapons program. Iraw never had the facilities to process this stuff at the levels required, and even if they did it would probably be cheaper and easier to just buy black market soviet stuff en masse.
I hate statements like this. First, this stuff was used in a weapons program. Iraq has a long history of attempting to make nuclear weapons dating back to the 70's. This yellowcake apparently dates back to the ending of Iraq's first attempt to get nuclear weapons, when a nuclear reactor at Osirak (allegedly used to convert uranium to plutonium) was bombed by the Israelis in 1981. The story says that this yellowcake wasn't touched after 1991. But one wonders why Iraq didn't try to sell it off, if they weren't using it. Seems to me that they had some reason for keeping it around.
My take is that they were going to resume the nuclear weapons program once sanctions had lifted and UN inspectors had been sent home. So everything that could have some potential use towards that goal like 550 tons of yellowcake, a broken reactor at Osirak, or a pile of research scientists were kept around.
Incidentally, maybe it is cheaper and easier to buy black market soviet uranium with a high concentration of uranium 235. I don't know, but surely it's not that obvious a choice for a country like Iraq. That market is filled with traps and decoys. It might be easier for a country like Iraq with a delicate diplomatic situation and powerful enemies to decide not to get caught in a high profile uranium smuggling case involving the Russians, an ally they desperately needed. Calutrons may not be efficient, but they won't rat you out or turn out to be foreign agents in disguise.
Re:Can we build more nuclear reactors now? (Score:3, Interesting)
how about this: How German Intelligence Helped Justify the US Invasion of Iraq [spiegel.de], though the article reads more like "How German intelligence sent the US intelligence on a wild goose chase". More here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,542708,00.html [spiegel.de] , http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,542888,00.html [spiegel.de] , http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,558224,00.html [spiegel.de] .
I find it interesting that ever since WWII ended, some European country fails at diplomacy and US has to clean it up and get the blame ... think about France not recognizing that Ho Chi Minh won the elections in Vietnam and forcing him to side with the Chinese, or some other European countries supporting unilateral declarations of independence in Yugoslavia ...
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't recall Blix saying that - it doesn't sound like him. Usually he went out of his way to claim that everything was lollipops in Iraq - something I still don't really understand.
The thing I don't get is why, given Saddam's previous behavior, everyone seemed willing to give Iraq a pass. The international community has no mechanism with which to deal with people like him. Does anyone really think they would not have tried to make a bomb as soon as he could? Even if they couldn't achieve fission, they had the technology to refine it enough to make a bunch of dirty bombs, load them on scuds and contaminate large swaths of territory.
I guess the central question is this: At what point does war become the right course of action? How bad does it have to get? Bush invaded because he claimed the threat was bad enough to warrant action. Regardless of whether or not he was correct, where do you draw the line?
Re:Itching for war (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, by "US" you mean "Russia", to which the US gives several billion dollars a year to dispose of their stockpile which is far larger. The US nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it used to be, and most of what is categorized as a nuke is actually a disassembled trigger rather than a warhead, and the US will have finished disposal of its chemical weapons in the next few years (not so for several other countries). The nukes (both US and the fissile material the US buys from Russia) are turned into reactor fuel.
You might want to double check your assertions about US weapons of mass destruction. The Cold War was a long time ago.
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is what made the story so ridiculous. Iraq already *had* large amounts of yellowcake. It was produced as a byproduct of phosphate mining back in the 70s and 80s, back when they actually had a nuclear program. The concept that they were going to buy more was transparently idiotic to anyone who had actually studied the Iraqi nuclear program. Which is why there was such an international uproar: because a lot of people actually *had* studied the Iraqi nuclear program.
The same thing with the aluminum tubes. Iraq's centrifuges called for flow-formed maraging steel rotors. Unless they had *entirely scrapped all of their previous progress that they spent ages developing*, an aluminum that's ill-suited for welding and would easily have snapped under the centripetal force wouldn't have done a darned thing for them. On the other hand, it was the exact same type of tubing known to be used for small Iraqi military rockets. The concept was widely mocked by the international community and the international press. In the US, not so much. In fact, they mocked the concept that it would be used for Iraqi rockets (despite us knowing about said rockets), talking about how even we use poorer alloys than that for our rockets, and completely ignoring the fact that the Iraqis used a higher quality aluminum to compensate for lower manufacturing quality.
Like Canada needs to import uranium (Score:1, Interesting)
As I seem to recall, Canada supplies 85% of the words uranium. We don't really need to buy any from Iraq. At least its going to be 'slowly cooked' producing electricity, likely at either Bruce or Pickering. Where I live they have been talking about building a Candu Twin. I suppose its better to cook it and make electricity than try to harm people with it. Although the idea of letting people overeat and then switch on the air conditioning to cool their fat bodies when the temperature starts to get a little warm can be considered harm too.
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, if you're speaking of the genocide against the Kurds, there was international outrage, it made the front page of every major European newspapers, and UN sanctions were going to be imposed against Iraq. It's just that the US vetoed those sanctions and shortly after -- the US gave Iraq one billion dollars in loans (that never got paid back by the way).
Like I said, it did have a mechanism, but the US vetoed it. At the time of the genocide, the US government supported Saddam, and more importantly -- it supported Saddam when there was an international backlash against him for that specific War Crime. So, you've got it completely backwards.
Him and countless others. It's not as if North Korea was a big surprise for instance.
Him and countless others. By the way, are you even aware that we're contaminating our very own soldiers (in addition to the locals) by using depleted uranium as heavy ammo? This is 'Agent Orange' all over again. Make the soldiers handle something toxic (and by the way, I am not a tree-hugger -- I am aware that not all radiation is toxic, but in this case depleted uranium and even pulvarized depleted uranium is tremendously toxic). Tell your own soldiers that it's perfectly safe. Deny everything for as long as possible. Label all the critics conspiracy theorists (not that this label is not sometimes correctly warranted). And watch your former soldiers drop like flies ten to thirty years from now.
Do you know a little bit about dog training? Forgive the analogy, but dogs are pack animals just like we are, and when I use that term -- I mean no disrespect by it. But when a country does something wrong, you must come down on it immediately -- not ten or twenty years later -- otherwise your intervention will seem self-serving (or at the very least completely disconnected from the original event). And when one of your friends (or one of your family members) does something horribly wrong, let's say that a family member of yours commits a genocide -- well you stop him -- or at the very least you stop supporting him -- and you do that immediately. This ethics of "You're either for us, or you're against us" is the most retarded tribal thinking there ever was. This kind of tribal thinking is something I would expect from Iraqi or Iranian people, not from the President of the United States. When someone does something wrong, whether they're with us or against us, you come down hard on them. Same thing if our very own people have done those horrible things, we take care and punish of our own people for Crimes of War as swiftly, as transparently, and as fairly as we do it for others. That's the only way we can stop this kind of tribal feuding in the long-run.
How bad? But the neo-cons wanted to invade Iraq a long time ago, and for reasons of strategic hegemony -- not supposedly because things were "bad" in Iraq. This is documented, from their very own mouths. Asking this question implies that you do not seem to know this.
So now, let me ask you. When we know that our own government is making bad decisions, and when we know that our own government is clearly contradicting the constitution (for instance, the Constitution makes t
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:2, Interesting)
No, actually, there's one more thing here;
Saddam was about to start selling his oil in Euros. Not dollars. That's more or less a direct blow to the US economic empire. Of all the crazy conspiracy theories I've heard, my bet is that the Iraq war was simply a very inefficient way of trying to protect the US economy, nothing else.
The only one who can tell for certain, however, is Bush and the people that control him.
Re:Thanks, media, (Score:2, Interesting)
Eh, I'm not exactly making this up. Fact is, Iraq was already selling oil in Euros [cnn.com] and fact is that there's no denying that the US dollar is tied very deeply with the OPEC countries and oil. Now add two and two together, and it does look like a clever ploy to keep the US dollar steady, and thus protect the economic empire of the US. It's more than a plausible theory. Of course, it could also be that the Bush administration is simply woefully incompetent, which isn't exactly a better alternative, but eh. Whatever.
And yes, I'm more or less of the opinion that president Bush is nothing but a mere puppet. I do not dispute that he's the president; but he's nothing but a "useful idiot" (no offense to Bush personally, but he *isn't* a strong leader). If he isn't a puppet, then the man is much, much smarter than most realise.
And for the record; I'm not any more anti-US than most European people, and I admire some things about the great land in the west, but I think Bush has been the biggest mistake the country has ever done in a long time, and I really *do* hope that the US starts realising that it isn't alone in this world, something it seems to forget all too often. Else the consequences of it's ignorance will lead to yet another great nation falling apart...