TED TURNER NUCLEAR UPDATE: (Gee, using the words “Ted Turner” and “nuclear” in the same sentence is a bit disturbing. . . .) InstaPundit’s consulting nuclear physicist (a former IAEA inspector who prefers to remain nameless here) sends this note regarding an earlier post:
You can find details of what the Serbs had at the IAEA research reactor database http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/rrdb/ – go to Yugoslavia and look up RA-B. Its fuel was 80% enriched UO2 – since this was the enrichment of the Hiroshima bomb uranium you would have to say that it was “weapons grade” even though real modern weapons use material at 93% or better.
Most research reactors were originally designed to use high enriched uranium (HEU – note it is not Highly Enriched Uranium but just High Enriched Uranium). The US, the IAEA and other countries (such as Australia) have a long running program called the RERTR to reduce the enrichment of uranium in research reactors, so most new reactors use fuel at 20% instead.
One minor quibble – you don’t enrich plutonium – no macro scale enrichment program for Pu enrichment has ever worked. You just try to produce it without too many higher isotopes. As to the facility you were referring to – it is more correctly called a critical assembly than a reactor.
Reader Norman Yarvin writes:
The Osirak reactor used 93% enriched uranium.
Yes, that’s right: Iraq was shipped enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb — and the Iraqis still have it, according to Khidir Hamza; they recovered it from the ruins of the reactor. (To be exact, he claims they have twelve kilograms of 93% enriched uranium, and fourteen kilograms of 80%, all from Osirak.)
The source for all this is Hamza’s book “Saddam’s Bombmaker.”
Reader Ian Wood adds:
According to WaPo, the U.S. government paid $2 million for transportation and related costs, Yugoslavia provided 1,200 troops for escort, and The Nuclear Threat Initiative, the nonprofit group co-founded by former Senator Sam Nunn and Ted Turner, pledged $5 million. That money is going to help clean up the area around the reactor site itself (including the removal of two tons of nuclear waste–*not* the enriched uranium), as well as help to pay some of the scientists at the Vinca research reactor facility. Russia will reprocess the enriched uranium slugs at its facility in Dimitrovgrad.
So, us taxpayers paid for the removal and transport of the problematic nuclear material, which I’m happy to kick in for. Private money will clean up the radioactive mess left by the Communists and give impoverished nuclear physicists less incentive to go work for, say, Iraq.
More evidence of the corrupt values instilled by capitalism, I suppose.
No doubt.