Replies

just did search at google under "red mercury, uranium"... got this link= http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/nuke-weapons/nonproliferation/8829.html

The search turns up a page about a uranium seizure... red mercury is conjuctured to be used in fuses for the Suitcase Nukes that the Russian KGB made!

quoting:Thomas Nilsen 1997-09-21 12:00

3.8 kilograms stolen uranium seized in Caucasus

Russian police seized 3.8 kilograms of stolen uranium in the home of a man in the North Caucasus town of Ivanov on Thursday. The uranium has been traced to originate at the nuclear research center of Sarov (Arzamas-16).

The police seized the stolen uranium after they detained a gang suspected of trying to sell the highly radioactive substance, according to Interfax news agency. Several times the gang had tried to offer the uranium to prospective buyers in Moscow, the Baltic states and elsewhere. The uranium-238 was kept in a metal cylinder inside a lead isolator. Uranium-238 can be used to produce nuclear bombs by scientists with the bomb-developing know-how.

The police investigators also seized two jars containing highly toxic red mercury-oxide weighing about 2 kilograms. Red mercury is also belived to be a substance for developing small nuclear devices, like those suitcase-sized nuclear bombs former Russian security advisor Alexandr Lebed a week ago claimed that Moscow had lost the track of.

The police says to Interfax that the uranium comes from the federal nuclear research center in Sarov (former Arzamas-16), from where a container went missing in 1994. On september 16th, employees and scientists of the center startet protest actions because of the state's salary-debt to the center. They claimed that the center is in a catastrophic position and its safety jeopardized, because of poor financing.

I am glad they intercepted this...

but honestly, the good NEWS isn't making my stomach feel any better...

This is what they caught.
How much has "slipped through" before?

Dems f'ing with their petty labor disputes about job security for the employees of the new homeland security act, are pretty damned stupid, and I am sure, THIS kind of stuff HAD to be included in their security "briefings".

The apparent facts are... this stuff has been shipped before. It's probably already here or riyhad, kuwait, jerusalem, ankara, cypress, london, berlin or paris. One or all. It will be a miracle if we DON'T take some hits.

The nuts are into assymetrical war, so they might do some stuff that makes 9/11 look like a sunday school picnic... to put it mildly.

Not to be paranoid, per se, just realistic.
We may stop a good amount of pot at the border with mexico... but how much gets through??? Would the arabfascists work harder to get their "toys" across our borders, than mexican coyote types?

I am not encouraged.
With friends like daschle, why should we be?

Uranium 238 is not the sort that goes off. Uranium 235 is. Weapons grade U means refining U-235 out of the background U-238, which is by far the most common isotope in naturally occurring uranium. The U-235 typically runs 0.5% to 1% of the U content of a uranium ore. It has to be refined to more like 90% of a sample to sustain a chain reaction. U-238 can be used for nuclear fuel in reactors, but it reacts too slowly to be useful for explosions (its half life is on the order of 4 billion years, almost 10 times longer than U-235).

U-238 can be gradually enriched into plutonium in a special "breeder" reactor, absorbing particles emitting by a running reactor (actually, a tiny portion absorbs neutrons and then undergoes beta decay, emitting electrons and turning into plutonium - left running long enough this builds up and can be extracted from the remaining U-238 around it). But in itself it is not useful for bombs.

When the article says "weapons grade uranium", that means a sample of uranium that is around 90% U-235, seperated out of a much larger amount of uranium ore. The seperation process is quite difficult, and is the step the Iraqi's have not managed to solve on a large scale themselves. So U-238 getting to Iraq, while obviously not helpful, doesn't get them a bomb or solve the problem holding them up. Enough U-235 of high enough purity does. Or plutonium.

I hope that helps.