I'm Right Again Dot Com

A new commentary every Wednesday   -  January, 28, 2015   


 

COMMIE WARHEADS POWER AMERICAN ELECTRIC PLANTS

     To those who hammered me for not knowing that the former State Treasurer (2011-2014) and new Governor of Arizona was the genius franchise-seller behind a chain of ice-cream stores that the Small Business Administration claims set some sort of record for business failures, I've an even better commentary with which to boggle your minds.

    I read very recently that beginning in 1993, power plants across the United States began to acquire recycled uranium from Russia, all of it coming from communist atomic warheads the "Reds" had nestled in silos and jet plane revetments all across Siberia, when it was the United Soviet Socialist Republic.

    I can remember the mid-60s, when Tucson was ringed, as were other cities in the America, with a dozen or more Titan missile bases. Helicopters ferried crews in all directions from Davis-Monthan AFB for shift changes. There's nothing like a chopper churning along 200 feet over your house to remind you of those guarding our freedom and safety around the clock. 

    Our government and the USSR reached an agreement 20 years ago after disarmament talks, whereby the Titan bases and a certain number of atomic bombs loaded aboard NORAD bombers were to be deactivated in return for the same number of nukes in Sovietsky bombers and ICBM bases to be destroyed in the USSR. The folks in Green Valley, Arizona, situated on Federal route 19, midway between Tucson and Mexico, persuaded Washington to let them preserve one Titan base as a tourist attraction. They've daily guided tours, in case you're one of our "snowbirds." Rest assured, the weapons of mass destruction are long since gone. 

    Inspectors from the two countries viewed the initial deactivation work of Titans and Russian nukes from satellites and spy-planes, and finally, on the ground, the dismemberment of WMD's removed from aircraft. Reporters from both Russia (probably KGB operatives) and the United States, were allowed—even urged, to be eye-witnesses to the various stages of dismantling.

     I later purchased some meters and switches from the silos that were made available to the public and consumed mostly by wire-heads, like me. By then, much of the equipment was obsolete.

    It never crossed my mind to wonder what happened to the fissionable material inside each warhead until I heard a dispatch recently on National Public Radio.

    According to NPR, we bought the Russian uranium from those bombs, and are still buying it from Putin's Russia. A consortium—through a collaboration of privately owned U.S. power companies and the Atomic Energy Commission—began buying weapons-grade uranium from Russia 22 years ago.

    According to a website for the United States Enrichment Corporation, a subsidiary of Centrus Energy Corp. (Colorado, Pennsylvania and Texas), a multi-step process is performed in Russia, whereby weapons-grade uranium is converted to a different diluted chemical form, lower enriched uranium (LEU), that is still very capable of producing enough energy to convert water to steam in sufficient quantities to turn the turbine-electric generators in American nuclear power plants.

    FACTOIDS: Only 17 percent of the nuclear fuel that powers our nuclear reactors is produced domestically. 13 percent of the fuel, the fissionable LEU used to power them, comes from Russia.

    Shortly after the USSR had a meltdown (in more than one way), Philip Sewell of our Atomic Energy Commission went to Russia to inspect the condition of what became a $17-billion dollar purchase of some 500 tons of weapons-grade uranium. He found unlocked gates, broken windows and a wealth of rust at scores of locations that don't appear on maps, and with very few people around to keep an eye on things. The Russian government was storing the purest uranium from thousands of decommissioned nuclear weapons in poorly constructed bunkers out in the boondocks, with almost zero security.

    "They didn't have the money to protect it, yet they didn't want to let go of it," Sewell told NPR's Jeff Brumfeld. "That scared the bejesus out of us," Sewell said. "Practically anyone could walk off with enough of the stuff to make an atomic bomb. We decided to try and persuade the Russians to sell it to us. At first they refused. It was a matter of pride, principle and patriotism. But in the end, they needed the money."

    We, the American taxpayers, paid Russia (I repeat) seventeen billion dollars for 500 tons of bomb-grade uranium. The last of that 500-ton batch of weapons-grade unanium, enough to make 20,000 nuclear bombs, was finally turned over to the U.S. in December, 2013, at which time a new agreement was signed with the "new" Russia.

    Since only about 10 percent of the electricity generated in the United States is produced in our nuclear power plants, it isn't as if the USA will go dark, even if we shut down all of our nuclear power plants today for some reason or another. 

   However, according to Centrus Energy, virtually the entire U.S. nuclear reactor fleet is powered by stores of fissionable material, 83-percent of it: 58-mllion pounds in 2012, is purchased from foreign countries, including Malawi, Namibia and Niger in Africa—not your most stable of trading partners—along with Canada, Brazil, China, South Africa what's left of the Ukraine, and of course, Russia. Putin could definitely put a speed-bump in the American road to self-sufficiency in energy...and security. But it would be no more than that, if our government acts judiciously and with some urgency.

    This may be too much to expect from our fractious lawmakers and the executive branch of government.

    It would be beneficial for our Washington delegates to keep in mind that Vladi Putin can stop selling purchases of Russian uranium anytime he wishes to retaliate, should we impose greater sanctions on Russia. 

    FINAL FACTOIDS:   There's plenty of yellowcake, the raw material from which fissionable material is refined, all over our planet, including the USA and particularly, Canada. Extracting it is injurious to workers' health, and lead time for bringing a new uranium mine to production is 10 years.

    Perhaps the construction of the Keystone pipeline from Canadian oil to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico might not be such a bad idea, after all.

 

-Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller

Phil's current post can be read at:  http://www.imrightagain.com

If you wish to comment, Phil can be reached at:  

k7os (at) comcast (dot) net


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