AP Exclusive: Chile gives US weapons-grade uranium

[Dave]

>>This stuff is beyond scary.
>>With this stuff around the world, the USA has to lead and get it safely stored away.
>>http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...dg9mQD9EV0QD80

AP Exclusive: Chile gives US weapons-grade uranium
By MICHAEL WARREN and MEG KINNARD (AP) – 4 days ago

SANTIAGO, Chile — With President Barack Obama shifting his nuclear nonproliferation strategy to rogue states and terrorists, Chile has become an example of how small countries can play a big part in making the world safer.

Vast amounts of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, is being stored in relatively insecure locations around the world. Just 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of it — the size of a grapefruit — could create a mushroom cloud of radioactivity and devastate an entire city if detonated.

At a nonproliferation summit Monday in Washington, Obama will encourage leaders from 47 countries to work with the U.S. to secure and remove this weapons-grade HEU from reactors, as Chile finally did last month.

"We are happy to see it go," Fernando Lopez of the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission told The Associated Press, which exclusively witnessed the secret transfer of the material from reactors near Santiago to the United States.

"Countries normally don't want to be loaded with waste from other countries," Lopez acknowledged. "To put it in a safe place is valuable for everybody."

The new U.S. strategy considers a nuclear attack by terrorists or the spread of nuclear weapons technology to rogue nations to be greater threats than the Cold War fear of a communist enemy initiating a nuclear Armageddon.

Obama acknowledged the reduced threat from old enemies as he and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a treaty Thursday to reduce the number of nuclear warheads their governments have ready to fire.

"For the first time, preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is now at the top of America's nuclear agenda," Obama said.

Even as aftershocks from last month's magnitude 8.8 earthquake shook their equipment, U.S. and Chilean engineers worked together to carefully extract Chile's last HEU. It was no simple operation — the radioactive material was carefully loaded into specially designed casks and then lowered into two huge shipping containers for the ocean voyage. All told, 60 tons of metal were needed to keep just 18 kilograms (40 pounds) of HEU from leaking radioactivity.

After two and a half weeks at sea, including passage through the Panama Canal, a specially outfitted double-hulled ship arrived under U.S. Coast Guard escort at the Charleston Weapons Station in South Carolina last month.

Customs agents and nuclear inspectors made radiation checks as the containers were loaded onto flatbed trucks and then driven to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where much of it will be converted to safer fuel and resold for nuclear power.

A year ago, Obama made a promise to lead a global effort to recover all of this material within four years — ambitious because it not only requires years of planning and diplomacy, but also highly specific technology and expertise.

No other country but the U.S. has put all these elements together — even Russia depends on U.S. help to safely dispose of uranium.

The U.S. has already helped convert or verified the shutdown of 67 reactors in 32 countries from HEU to low-enriched uranium, or LEU, which is much harder to weaponize. It also has secured HEU supplies in more than 750 vulnerable buildings and removed 2,691 kilograms of weapons-grade nuclear material for safer storage.

To help keep his promise, Obama has proposed a 68 percent increase in the Global Threat Reduction Initiative's budget to $559 million for fiscal year 2011, not only to recover more HEU but also to prevent smuggling of nuclear material by strengthening export and border controls and port security.

Next year's $2.7 billion budget for nuclear nonproliferation work begins to do this for plutonium as well, committing $300 million for a plant at Savannah River to convert 34,000 kilograms of plutonium recovered from warheads to fuel for nuclear power.

Warren reported from Chile and Kinnard reported from South Carolina.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...dg9mQD9EV0QD80

[A-1]

Oh HELL!

Here we go again.

Weapons-grade U-235 is NOT used in nuclear power plants. It is NOT used in the U.S. Navy's nuclear propulsion reactors. It is NOT that easy to come by.

Iran is using the uranium hexafluroide gas in centrifuges to try to get enough to make a weapon.

Making a nuclear weapon is no simple task as North Korea's nuclear weapons test yielded a reported 1 kiloton of TNT equivalent illustrates.

The weapons possessed by India and Pakistan are U-235 weapons. The other fissionable isotope is Pu-239. However, the expertise needed to make Pu-239 fission requires intimate knowledge regarding how to make conventional explosives explode in a manner that creates an implosion.

That means making a sphere-shaped object collapse in a volumetric symmetry in micro-seconds. The problem with an implosion weapon is not one of obtaining Pu-239, it is a engineering problem requiring experts in conventional explosives, metallurgy and precision machining of Plutonium and other metals, and Plutonium is a very, very deadly poisonous substance, even if it didn't decay with alpha in a half-life cycle of 25,000 years or approximately 5 times the age of the sphinx in Egypt.

So, we see that this article is at best propaganda.

Weapons grade U-235 must be at least 89% pure, with only 11% U-238 contamination to be able to sustain a reasonable neutron-driven chain reaction that will increase fast enough so that it will explode instead melt down.

IF, and that is a capitol if, IF one can get U-235 basically the construction of a weapon requires a ballistics expert who can get muzzle velocities in excess of 2500 feet per second, causing two sub-critical masses of weapons-grade U-235 to assemble fast enough in a neutron-rich environment to avoid obtaining a fizzle yield which is apparently what North Korea obtained with their 1 kiloton test. Also a good metallurgy engineer and a hell of a team of quality machinists with a precision machining capability of brittle, exotic metals. Not to mention a sealed negative-ventilation shop to prevent contamination along with cleanliness to rival a microcomputer chip manufacturing facility.

There are several tricks to make the neutron-rich environment, also called 'the tamper' and that is the secret of making one of these things fission properly.

There is no doubt in my mind that Iran and North Korea are capable of getting nuclear weapons, eventually, but I am not concerned for the immediate future, despite what "I'm a NUT job says to the national enquirer-like world media.

The Obama administration is doing the right thing trying to decrease nuclear weapons despite of what the IGNORANT BITCH Sarah Palin has to say about the matter, the stupid $#%%$&.

I fear for Obama because the last U.S. President who took on the economic system ills and nuclear disarmament in his first term ended up assassinated in Dallas Texas and ... well... the Ignorant Bitch and her cross hairs deserves to have her $#%^%^& shaved.

She just has no business with cross hairs... of ANY kind...

By the way, if somebody really knows what they are doing 2 kilograms of U-235 is all that is necessary to make a weapon that will have in excess of a 20 kiloton yield and yes, unfortunately, it could be housed in an 18" X 24" X 6" attache case , but one person may have trouble lifting it without attracting a LOT of attention.

I am going to bed. This is bullshit...