Free Republic

US wakes up to Osama's nuke dreams CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK ASHINGTON: Alarm bells are clanging in the US and other western establishments over reports that Osama Bin Laden may have acquired or developed crude atom bombs with help from renegade Pakistani nuclear scientists. Accounts of Bin Laden's pursuit of nuclear weapons has been in the air for some time, but they acquired an added urgency this week following the arrest in Islamabad of two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists whose activities in Afghanistan were being scrutinised by western intelligence agencies. The scientists were reportedly taken into custody for questioning ...

IT SOUNDS impossible: a nuclear reactor that generates electricity from nuclear waste. Yet that is what Claudio Filippone, a nuclear scientist and director of the Centre for Advanced Energy Concepts at the University of Maryland, proposed a few years ago. He has now devised an improved design, called CAESAR (“clean and environmentally safe advanced reactor”) that is even more counterintuitive. As well as being environmentally friendly—it can produce electricity without causing any extra pollution—his new design could also help prevent nuclear proliferation. Conventional nuclear reactors run on fuel rods made largely of uranium-238, enriched with about 4% uranium-235. If you...