Word: uranium
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Like most of those after uranium (element 92), "ununseptium" is artificially made. This latest find supports the idea that as-yet-undiscovered stable elements exist, but no one knows for sure if there is an end point to the table or if additional artificially engineered elements will expand it even further. The question of how much bigger the 141-year-old chart can get is anything but elementary...
...Such limited achievements are not without value. Since 2004, U.S. leaders of all stripes have agreed that the greatest threat to American security is the possibility of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon. The only plausible way that could happen is if a group could steal or buy uranium or plutonium from an existing store, and there are many poorly guarded stocks of uranium and plutonium around the world...
...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...
...When he is unable to convince or pay countries to give up their HEU, Bieniawski offers to upgrade security around their material. That mission gained urgency in November 2007, when two teams of 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...
...Threat Is Real HEU is of particular concern because of the relative ease with which it can be turned into a mushroom cloud. The uranium bomb exploded over Hiroshima was never tested, so simple was its mechanism. Peter Zimmerman, former chief scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says a group of terrorists in possession of HEU could build an atom bomb using readily available hardware at a cost of around $2 million; if detonated in a city, such a bomb could kill hundreds of thousands. In Chile, I asked Bieniawski if he felt confident that al-Qaeda was still...