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 ...
You might have goofed on a detail, but your larger lesson was valid. Again I thank you for that.
Thanks - that's the obvious missing puzzle piece... Good for Kodak.
Well... in fairness, freeper bert has a better explanation, given above in post #33. Kodak actually ran the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge TN. The Y-12 plant was the "electromagnetic separation" plant, in which gigantic mass spectrometers were used to separate the U-235 isotope from uranium that had been semi-enriched by other means (principally gaseous diffusion). The product of Y-12 was weapons-grade U-235.
Thus Kodak had the stuff because they made it themselves.
The secret matters to which I alluded may have had something to do with Kodak being allowed to keep the stuff, but that's pure speculation of course.
From reading the article, it looks like neutron radiography. That would be a connection between neutrons and film.
Sandia did neutron radiography at ACRR, but with thermals. The Cf-U system would be with fast neutrons, unless they had B-poly in the path.
That block was a mess for quite some time - about as long as it would take for hazmat crews to remove contaminated materials.
I’m not trying to minimize the issue, but people do have an overblown OMGWTFBBQ reaction to “uranium” and “dirty bomb” etc. Yeah it’d be a mess and expensive to clean up - which it would be in fairly short order.
See #38. Abusing Kodak’s U23* materials would have, shall we say, disappointing results.
IIRC, the bigger problem would be the chemical consequences of igniting the stuff.
:)
Bet that would have made for a pretty good flash bulb.
Perhaps they were working on airborne imaging technologies that could detect weaponizable radioisotopes?
If so, its sad to see them where they are today. I know they did it to themselves, but nonetheless.
The Kodak operations at Y 12 were run with staff out of their Tennessee Eastman facility in Kingsport. Today’s Eastman Chemical was spun away from Kodak back around 1992 I believe.
They also provided major scientific and engineering support to the Holston Army Ammunition plant in Kingsport that is run today by BAE systems.
That still doesn’t tell the story of how they got the enriched uranium. The TV program on Y 12 goes to great length to explain how the facility evolved away from enrichment to very sophisticated problem solving. I would guess the alloying was done at Y 12 by the operating contractor at the time and sold to Kodak in Rochester. The contractor for many years has been Union Carbide but I am not sure they presently hold the contract.
In order to even think of making statements of this kind, one must know something of equilibrium phase diagrams and the thermal behavior of elements and their compounds and alloys. Do you?
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.
(1) Prove it, using the Cu-Sn binary phase diagram.
(2) What has this to do (even if it was true) with the behavior of compounds in a U/Al regime?
Respectfully ---
I wonder if years from now people will piece the reality of our time from sources like FreeRepublic... Thanks for sharing.
I’ve seen brass poured at a foundry.
I just watched the linked video on CNN.
What a pantload!
Kodak had a few pounds of uranium that they safely used for 30 years. It was in a secure area. It is now gone. It has been gone for 5 years.
Yet these dipshirts on TV are going on and on as if they just discovered some big cover up and thank God we weren’t all nuked to death.
Kodak is all but dead. What more do these clowns want? Blood?
Good Grief. What more evidence do we need that basic science education in this country is severely lacking?
Thanks I din’t know that.
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