Word: nuclearism
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Uranium for Free For the past 14 years, U.S. teams like the one in Chile have been engaged in a race against terrorists to gain control of the global supply of HEU - the compound from which a nuclear bomb can be most easily fabricated. President Barack Obama has said preventing terrorists from obtaining an atomic weapon is his Administration's top national-security priority, and last year he vowed that the U.S. would secure all vulnerable nuclear material within four years. On April 12, in one of the year's most important international meetings, Obama will host more than...
...accounted for, the NNSA team had to shift it through a crisis zone to a port on high alert for tsunamis. And their cargo was unstable. HEU must be stored and shipped in certain geometrical configurations - long, flat sheets, for instance - so that it does not spontaneously start a nuclear chain reaction, spewing out heat and radioactive by-products. When it has been used in a nuclear reactor, as some of the Chilean HEU had been, it becomes radioactive. Twelve hours before the earthquake, the NNSA engineers had overseen the fitting of 1,500-lb. (680 kg) protective impact limiters...
...fact that one of the most dangerous materials known to man came to find itself in Chile is the result of one of the great gambits of the 20th century. In the mid-1950s, as the international community became seriously concerned about nuclear proliferation, states that had nuclear weapons offered the world a bargain: they would give countries HEU in exchange for an inspection regime that could verify it would be used only for peaceful research and not weapons. Atoms for Peace, as the U.S. called the program, became the founding principle of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA...
...told, over several decades, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council distributed some 44,000 lbs. (20,000 kg) of HEU - enough for 800 nuclear weapons - to around 50 countries as diverse as Australia, Jamaica and Vietnam. Although that figure is a drop in the bucket compared with the estimated 4.4 million lbs. (2 million kg) of HEU in weapons and storage in the U.S. and Russia, the Atoms for Peace HEU is of particular concern because it is used in civilian reactors that are often poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. As William Potter, director...
...armed attackers stormed Pelindaba, a supposedly secure facility that houses hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium in South Africa. The attackers gained access to the facility's control room and shot an emergency-services officer in the chest. They fled without making any effort to steal the nuclear material, and the reason for the break-in and the attackers' identity remain a mystery. "The break-in validated what we do. Current international security guidelines are woefully inadequate," Bieniawski says, adding that no amount of physical protection can provide total security or combat the "insider threat." All confirmed cases...