Tim Worstall

It is all obvious or trivial except…

 

 

Entries Tagged as 'nuclear'

Umm, Depleted Uranium is, Umm, Depleted, You Know?

March 30th, 2008 · 10 Comments

Via, we get this.
Absolutely stunning stuff.

Now if 64 kg of uranium can poison seventy thousand people. How many people will two thousand tons kill? The numbers are staggering, that’s more than twenty eight thousand Hiroshima’s. Forty percent of the Gulf War veterans are on “Gulf War Syndrome” disability from uranium poisoning. Seventy Three thousand of […]

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Tags: nuclear

Eh?

March 28th, 2008 · 6 Comments

Colombia’s government has claimed that Leftist rebels were plotting to make a "dirty" radiological bomb after security agents seized 60 lb of low-grade depleted uranium.

Maybe they were plotting to do that: but it wouldn’t work very well. Depleted uranium is chemically, but not radiologically, dangerous.
Then again, it would set off  a screaming panic which is […]

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Tags: nuclear

Nuclear Shipping

March 10th, 2008 · 5 Comments

Well, maybe this isn’t all that bright an idea.

An ageing car ferry will ship hundreds of pounds of bomb-grade plutonium from Britain to France this week with just a handful of armed guards to protect it from terrorists.
The ship, a former roll-on-roll-off ferry which has not been identified for security reasons, will take the cargo […]

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Tags: nuclear

Polly Discovers Economics!

January 11th, 2008 · 5 Comments

The most serious objection is not safety but "nuclear blight", the probability that government and energy firms’ cash, engineers and project management capacity is swept up in this great nuclear South Sea bubble and nothing is left for other renewables.

Halleluljah! Polly has actually managed to grasp an economic concept. And she’s even grasped the correct […]

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Tags: nuclear · Economics

Most Absurd Anti-Nuclear Argument of the Day

January 11th, 2008 · 6 Comments

Step forward David Thorpe:

The ore is crushed and then stacked on a heap leach pad with a capacity of 30m tonnes, 2.2 square kilometres in area, where it is leached with a sodium carbonate/bicarbonate solution. This leachate will be able to spread into the environment. After leaching, the spent ore is placed on unprotected waste […]

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Tags: nuclear

That Uranium Seizure

November 30th, 2007 · 7 Comments

You what?

Tests proved the powder-like substance to be 98.6 per cent uranium 235, a highly fissile isotope, indicating that it was highly processed and intended for use in a bomb.

That’s a bit of a surprise. I wasn’t aware that anyone ever processed material up to that isotopic purity. I would guess (and it is very […]

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Tags: nuclear