Word: uranium
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...After Lopez-Lizana reported that the uranium was 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...
...Bieniawski, the assistant deputy administrator for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), had arrived in Santiago, Chile, to join a group of scientists and nuclear engineers on a top-secret mission to remove a potential nuclear bomb from the country. Around 40 lb. (18 kg) of highly enriched uranium (HEU) - with enough latent energy to destroy a portion of a city - had already been inventoried, secured and made ready for transport to a highly secure facility in the U.S. Running ahead of schedule, Bieniawski had taken his team out for dinner with Chilean nuclear agency officials before heading...
...country's President to declare a state of emergency. Within minutes of the quake, Bieniawski had gathered the NNSA officials in a hotel lobby, where the group spent the next four hours trying to make contact with two sites - a military base and research reactor - where the uranium had been stored. Unable to reach one of the sites by phone, the head of the Chilean nuclear agency, Fernando Lopez-Lizana, eventually had to drive there himself. (See pictures of the removal of the Chilean uranium...
...unspoken shadow over both meetings will be Iran's pursuit of the capability to build nuclear weapons, undeterred by Washington's attempts to stop it with a combination of talks and coercion. Iran is a signatory to the NPT, which gives it the right to enrich uranium for energy purposes. But because Iran violated NPT transparency requirements, the Security Council has punished it with a series of limited sanctions. Efforts to ratchet up the U.N. sanctions, first imposed in December 2006, have thus far come to nothing...
...nuclear reactors, or will get them through an alliance with Pakistan. Egypt says they might withdraw from Non-Proliferation Treaty. In Syria, there's still a sense that they haven't abandoned their ambition. And even Turkey says they want fuel cycle facilities [the ability to enrich uranium], and they've opposed bans on fuel cycles in the nuke-suppliers group...