A friend wrote in response to my previous entry contrasting the way the Journal and the Sierra Club handled the story of Urenco and LES bringing nuclear materials refining to New Mexico. She mentions several things I should pass on to you and ignores a few things we should not.
For starters, she points out that the story of Urenco and Dr. A. Q. Khan, notorious nuclear pirate, is 30 years old and says nothing about Urenco today. I’m forced to glibly retort that I wonder if the kind of president Nixon was 30+ years ago really says nothing about Republicans today. OK, so maybe Urenco is stellar today. Haven’t Worldcom and Enron taught us to mistrust any corporate claims?
She mentions that this story has found new legs as part of a whisper campaign being put forward by a competitor. That’s news I am happy to pass on here, based on my trust of her research. She suggests it is bizarre that environmentalist are allied with this competitor. She is also very frustrated that environmentalists refuse to consider nuclear power as an alternative to more immediately destructive and widely used sources like coal (or, though she said nothing of this, as an alternative to less immediately promising sources like wind and solar). My friend is nearly a Vulcan in wishing all of society would weigh all of the options relatively and rationally. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way, but bless her for wishing people, on the Left and Right, were more rational.
My friend and Moskos said nothing about how this plant is of a type that threatens to escalate nuclear proliferation. The “Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [has called] for a worldwide, permanent ban on centrifuge technology,” says Marilyn Berlin Snell in what my friend disparages as a “hit piece.”
<quote>One problem with Iran’s proposed enrichment facility is that, unlike the older, gaseous-diffusion technology to enrich uranium, centrifuge plants can be much smaller and use much less energy, making them harder to detect. Centrifuge plants, of which there are only a handful worldwide, can also be easily and covertly retooled to produce weapons-grade uranium, the key component in nuclear warheads.</quote>
This new centrifuge plant could be one of the reasons that Iran said just last week that the US has no grounds for moralizing with other countries on nuclear proliferation (nuclear bunker busters may be another reason); Moskos makes no mention of this in his “far more journalistically respectable look” at the issue.
One of the reasons Moskos so irked me was how he blithely quotes a guy who works for Urenco in repeatedly dismissing and downplaying any and every concern. Are we to simply accept these words because an engineer says them? “There is no issue regarding waste”; “You may store them [waste cylinders] in my back garden. I have no problem with that”; “Leakage is no discussion”; “the barrels … can be stored safely”; “The air coming out of our plant has less radioactivity than the air which goes inside.” Surely a guy who works for the company wouldn’t lie/exaggerate/tell us what we want to hear. Again, have we learned nothing from Enron, Worldcom or BushCo?
And surely a fine journalist like Moskos would have asked tough questions and corroborated these happy-face claims through other sources. Surely.
It may well be that the Sierra Club didn’t publish a dispassionate, fair and balanced report on Urenco/LES. It may also be that one shouldn’t expect investigative reporting from the “Spare Change” column. I see my role as connecting others to two radically different views and asking some questions. mjh
A little something about uranium hexafluoride — you’re soaking in it now!
UF6 is not flammable, not explosive and inert in dry air. On the other hand, it reacts with water – the humidity of the air is sufficient – to undergo a rapid conversion into water soluble uranyl fluoride (UO2F2) and hydrogen fluoride (HF). In the presence of excess water hydrogen fluorine forms hydrofluoric acid, which may cause serious burns. But even at very low concentrations – long before a possible health threat – HF is clearly visible as a grey white fog.
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In order to dispose of the byproduct, it must be changed from uranium hexafluoride back to the more chemically stable uranium oxide form. This process is called ?deconversion.?
There are no commercial deconversion facilities in the U.S. at this time. …
There are currently more than 700,000 metric tons (MTs) of byproduct owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) stored on site at these locations. LES will produce 7,800 metric tons per year at full production. …
Once the uranium hexafluoride byproduct has been ?deconverted? to uranium oxide, it can be disposed of in existing facilities or in abandoned mines. …
These facilities could bury the byproduct deep underground or contract with a company who owns an abandoned mine to bury the byproduct in its mine once the proper permits were obtained, for example, the Cotter mine in southern Colorado [mjh: west of Colorado Springs and Pueblo; can we assume the waste vehicles will go straight up I-25?].
http://www.nefnm.com/documents/infosheets/uranium.pdf
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So, the low humidity of New Mexico may save our lives (except during monsoon season). At least you’ll see the big white fog coming towards you. And all this immensely safe waste will be shuttled all over. I can’t understand why environmentalists don’t just roll over. Let’s all buy furniture made out of nuclear waste! mjh