Posted on 05/16/2012 7:40:05 AM PDT by Abathar
-- Kodak -- the company known for decades for its cameras and film -- this week confirmed it used weapons-grade uranium in an underground lab in upstate New York for upwards of 30 years.
A company spokesman and a former scientist for the firm say there was not enough material to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.
Former Kodak researcher Albert Filo said the uranium was alloyed with aluminum in plates sealed in sleeves that were not moved for three decades. The amount of fuel was about 3½ pounds, which experts say is less than one-tenth of the amount necessary to make a crude nuclear device.
The alloyed material "could not be readily converted to make a nuclear weapon," said Eastman Kodak spokesman Christopher Veronda. "Disassembling the device and removing these plates was a process that took highly trained experts more than a day to perform."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Yep - back in the mid-late '60s, my Dad designed a perimiter laser intrusion system for a super secret building that was built inside another building. No clue what it was for except is was for governmment work.
ha! Wonder why this surfaces now?
Many interesting things were going on back then.
And APRF along with it. Now we have just WSMR.
Know anything about Kodak’s gadget?
“True, but as far as terrorists are concerned a nasty dirty bomb would be 100 times more effective than a tanker explosion the next day.”
Which shows what they know.
1. Remove clothing and put in wash. Start washing machine.
2. Take shower
3. Put clothes in dryer. Turn on.
4. Schedule doctor’s visit for iodine and check up.
5. Dress.
6. Go out to dinner.
You can’t melt apart an alloy. Copper melts at 1084, tin at 230, but when brass melts at 930, you don’t get liquid tin with chunks of copper in it.
Nope, it was news to me. ACRR is still going over in area V.
you are correct but separating the Uranium from the Aluminum is the easy part.
The hard part is stealing the devise without dying from radiation poisoning.
Although this devise is not technically a reactor it is still performing its function by the process of nuclear fission. The Californium produces neutrons that strikes the U235 that fissions and produces more neutrons. By fission the U235 produces highly radioactive daughter products.
What the article does not mention about the expert technicians dismantling of the devise is that it would be necessary to use special tools that would permit the technicians to remain at a distance from the devise to avoid lethal doses of radiation.
If terrorist could steal this devise without killing themselves they would then need special factories to then not only separate the U235 from the Aluminum they would also have to separate the U235 from all of the highly radioactive daughter isotopes and do it safely so as not to kill themselves in the process.
None of this is easy and requires a very special set of skills that your average terrorist does not pick up at the suicide bomb school.
They should have developed a first strike capability. They could have taken care of the digital photography threat to their existence in a proper way; back when it was possible.
Did you know there is a diamond in the pool? Someone was irradiating gemstones in N GIF as a piggyback, and someone dropped a diamond in the pool when it fell off the ledge. The rock shop near SNLA, Southwestern Minerals, would get business whenever we were in town for GIF.
No volunteers to get it.
Have you seen the new GIF? The old one looked like something on the set of Alien. The new one is a fantastic facility.
http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/newgif.htm
The work was done by scientists an engineers from what is now Eastman Chemical Co in Kingsport Tn at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge.
There is a really good PBS special titled Y 12 tht details the work and the fantastic transformation of farmland into a mega secret facility for enriching uranium.
Today we will visit the museum at Alamogordo NM where the fruit of that effort resulted in the atomic bomb test
and of course every rochesterian recalls the cancer cluster across the street - I think it was Rand St
Thanks, I didn't know that.
(you might mean bronze, though.)
This supports my theory that Kodak was planning a nuclear strike against Polaroid.
Long term effects of a single tanker truck explosion versus a dirty bomb are on different scales.
I’m not saying what was in kodak’s locked basment building was posing a danger. But a burning gas blaze from a truck is not the same thing as a disaster that can happen with weapons grade uranium.
No, U-235 is not good for a dirty bomb. Its half-life is something like 700 million years. Remember that a substance which is not radioactive has a half-life of infinity, The U-235 decay rate just isn’t sufficient to be a threat. I’d hold 3-1/2 pounds of U-235 in my bare hand all day long, if you want me to.
Why do you need iodine? The purpose of taking potassium iodide pills is to block the uptake of radioactive isotopes of iodine so that they won’t be concentrated in the thyroid. Potassium iodide pills will have no effect on the uptake of uranium.
Tin, zinc, whatever (yup I goofed).
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