U.S. holding 324 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium, report says

[mike r]

Source: Los Angeles Times

The Energy Department is holding 324 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium at the same time the Obama administration is urging nations to reduce or eliminate their stores of the material, according to a report to be released Tuesday by the nuclear watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

The Washington-based group wants the administration to declare a portion of the U.S. inventory of highly enriched uranium as surplus and increase the amount that is blended down each year into commercial reactor fuel.

The inventory began to swell years ago after the U.S. agreed to a series of nuclear arms accords resulting in the decommissioning of thousands of nuclear warheads. The U.S. stopped making highly enriched uranium after the end of the Cold War.

The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, defended the rate at which it is blending the uranium into commercial fuel, noting the difficulty and cost of the process. It did not comment on the size of the surplus, which is classified.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-uranium-20100914,0,7187215.story

[truthisfreedom]

1. 714,420 pounds. 324,000,000 grams. Density of Uranium is 18.9 grams/cc.

324,000,000 divided by 18.9 is 17,142,857 cubic centimeters. That's exactly 600 cubic feet. A cube 8.4 feet on each edge. But they can't store it that way, it would go into fission if any of it was stored in even as small a form as a grapefruit-sized ball. This stuff is stored, no doubt, in many, many very deep, very large bunkers.

[mike r]

3. Some details on new storage facility at Oak Ridge:

http://www.energy.gov/news/8779.htm

...Now that construction of HEUMF has been completed, the Y-12 National Security Complex has begun consolidating HEU previously stored at multiple locations across the site into HEUMF. Originally scheduled to take 13 months, Y-12 has adopted an accelerated plan to transfer much of the plant's inventory of enriched uranium to the new high-security facility within 90 days which is expected to save about $26 million in security costs.

The largest construction project at Y-12 in more than 40 years, the $549 million building was completed in 2008 and began receiving material for storage at the end of January. HEUMF is a large (approximately 300 ft. by 475 ft.) reinforced concrete structure that will provide storage capacity for thousands of containers of material to be held in specially designed storage racks.

Construction of HEUMF began in 2004. Approximately 91,000 cubic yards of concrete, 5,800 tons of rebar, and 1.5 million linear feet of wiring were used in its construction. HEUMF is one of two facilities whose joint mission will be to accomplish the storage and processing of all enriched uranium in one small, centralized area at Y-12. Design work on the second building - the Uranium Processing Facility - is under way.

[Pirate Smile]

2. Aren't we going around the world and picking up this stuff in other countries to bring it back here

to keep it locked up from terrorists? Remember the big article about our super secret mission to get some of it from the Chilean Government at the same time as the huge earthquake happened?

Here it is:

Chile gives its last weapons-grade uranium to U.S.

By The Washington Post and The Associated Press
JORGE SAENZ / AP


Luis Manriquez lowers a transfer cylinder containing highly enriched uranium onto a forklift at a reactor in Santiago, Chile, in February.

When the shaking began just after 3:34 a.m. on Feb. 27, Andrew Bieniawski woke up with a start in his room on the 15th floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Santiago, Chile. A picture fell off the wall.
He raced to the lobby. He had arrived from the United States just the day before to oversee a delicate operation that the U.S. government and Chile had been quietly setting up for more than a month, and now an earthquake was tearing apart the center of the country.

The magnitude-8.8 quake killed 486 people, set off a tsunami, cracked buildings and roads, cut off electricity and phone lines, and spawned dozens of aftershocks.
While the disaster unfolded, Bieniawski and his team from the Energy Department had another worry: They had packed 39.6 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough to make a nuclear bomb, into a shipping container, ready for a secret evacuation by road to a port and then by sea to the United States.

The quake threw up several new hurdles for the secret mission, and Bieniawski's first concern, he recalled in an interview, was this: Was the container damaged? Grabbing a phone before the lines went dead, he learned that the weapons-grade material was intact. But his team's problems had just begun.

The Santiago operation put Bieniawski, associate deputy administrator for global threat reduction at the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), on the front lines of an effort to clean out nuclear materials from reactors and other facilities around the world so that they will not fall into the hands of terrorists.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011585556_nukechile12.html

[truthisfreedom]

4. entirely possible.