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| 2004/1/16-17 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:11809 Activity:nil |
1/16 Yellowcake found: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/01/15/international1719EST0714.DTL \_ Hmm, 2 lbs of unrefined ore containing 1% uranium. The guy at the enviornment ministry says: "It could be from anywhere in the world," Call me when this one hasn't been debunked after a week. \_ Yeah, but the guy who actually knows something says he's sure it came from Iraq. I'm not saying this somehow ends the yellowcake controversy. It's just another data point. \_ Of course. We each have our agendas. |
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| www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/01/15/international1719EST0714.DTL After a preliminary investigation by a company that specializes in removing radioactive waste, the Dutch government decided to call in the International Atomic Energy Agency to investigate further. A spokesman for the IAEA confirmed the agency had visited Rotterdam on Wednesday but had no further comment. Environment ministry spokesman Wim van der Weegen said scrap metal companies in the Rotterdam port, which is Europes largest, report around 200 findings of radioactive material per year, often from old hospital equipment or normal industrial uses. But the finding of an estimated two pounds of uranium oxide is odd, Van der Weegen said. Experts said that around 2 pounds of yellowcake, the amount found, would not be useful for either a bomb or fuel. Alan Ketering, a researcher at the nuclear research plant at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said yellowcake contains less than 1 percent of U-235 used in nuclear weapons. He said it would need to be refined many times with sophisticated technology before it was dangerous - and the amount found in Rotterdam would not be nearly enough. Anybody can dig it up and purify it to make the yellow stuff, he said. However, he said there was no obvious non-nuclear industrial use for yellowcake and it would be strange to find it in random scrap metal. The material was found in a small steel industrial container apparently used to connect pipes or electrical wires, Environment Ministry spokesman Van der Weegen said. After testing, the material was shipped to a nuclear waste plant in the Netherlands. Jordan does not have any known nuclear power plants or weapons and is a signatory to the nuclear test ban treaty. President Bush came under heavy criticism last year when he asserted in his State of the Union address that Iraq was shopping in Africa for uranium yellowcake - intelligence that turned out to be based on forged documents. The original suspicions apparently came from a British dossier and Britains Foreign Office continued to maintain Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Niger, although no evidence was offered. Last year, the United States agreed to pay $34 million to install radioactivity detectors in Rotterdam to scan a fraction of the 6 million containers that pass through it annually for hidden radioactive material. However, scrap metal companies are already outfitted with detectors, and Jewometaal found the radioactive material with its own equipment. |