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The Apollo Affair
- detritus 5y agoCrikey - 93Kg of highly enriched uranium is enough for 4 nukes and would cost about $1.4Bn in today's money. 'Curious' that the US didn't move entire mountain ranges to find the stuff... .
- dboreham 5y agoThat's because they knew where it went.
- eh9 5y agoAm I wrong or did I just read that it essentially “evaporated”?
- detritus 5y agoThat was the second 90kg of Enriched Uranium lost at that facility. The mind boggles.
- rdtsc 5y agoExactly. They couldn’t not investigate, but they also knew where it went and didn’t exactly want to dig too hard because they might accidentally find too much evidence.
- philipkglass 5y agoIt's more like $10 million in today's money, based on the $12/gram cost shown for highly enriched uranium in "UCOST - A Computer Code for Calculating the Cost of Enriched Uranium" (Atomic Energy Commission report, 1966) and then adjusted by CPI.
- detritus 5y agoHuh, I'd've assumed it the other way around given the infrastructure requirement at the time, but your cost sounds a lot more likely given its provenance than the [now, i realise belatedly, unvalidated] cost I Googled prior.
- shadilay 5y agoIt is absolutely insane that the government is allowed to be so reckless with highly enriched uranium. Also worth looking into the origins of Pakistan's nuclear program.
- tgv 5y agoPakistan built their own uranium centrifuge plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan. What that page doesn't mention, is that Khan simply copied the plan of the Urenco plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urenco_Group#Abdul_Qadeer_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urenco_Group#Abdul_Qadeer_Khan).
- nyolfen 5y agoi find the idea of 100+ kilos of some of the densest material on earth evaporating or being scrubbed off by mistake totally unfathomable, but i'm inclined to take the word of hersh. surely this kind of thing must have occurred in other nuclear programs?
- detritus 5y agoWith the Soviet programme, perhaps. Just by sheer scale, even a small % of loss would amount to a worrying quantity. All the other nuclear regimes around the world? Less so, I'd imagine. They'd be counting their beans a bit more.
- wgrover 5y agoFor a sense of scale, 93 kg of uranium would occupy a space a little smaller than one soccer ball: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+93+kg+of+uranium https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+93+kg+of+ura...
- throwanem 5y agoHEU would be supercritical in that configuration, wouldn't it?
- wgrover 5y agoI suspect you're right, so we can assume that it was never all in one piece or we would have known about it!
- throwanem 5y agoOh, I don't know. Lacking implosive compression the consequence would have been, not the sort of blast you seem to have in mind, but rather a "demon core"-style radiation accident. That said, it'd still be enthusiastically messy albeit in a more limited fashion, and there'd still be no reason for anyone to assemble the material that way - not least for what grisly example became of the last guy who took so little care. Still, as you note, it's remarkable to think of the density of the material - a soccer ball's worth that masses about as much as me.
- euroderf 5y agoI recall 60 Minutes had a story about theft of uranium from a convoy in Pennsylvania, with suspicion of Israeli involvement. This story was back in the 70s. I'm sorry, my memory fails me about any further details. It might or might not be related to this posting.