Weapons Grade Plutonium from Austria Has Arrived in the US.

[NNadir]

It's a brief article: Cooperative effort secures plutonium removal

An excerpt:

A shipment of plutonium accumulated from inspection samples collected in support of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) safeguards mission has been removed from the agency's laboratory in Austria to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the USA.

The plutonium, which represents the accumulated residue from about 15 years' worth of samples, was removed from the IAEA's Office of Safeguards Analytical Services (SGAS) Nuclear Material Laboratory in Seibersdorf, Austria, by the US Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Reducing the amount of excess nuclear material at the Siebersdorf laboratory ensures that the IAEA can maintain its flexibility to support nuclear verification and monitoring activities critical to global non-proliferation objectives, NNSA said.

Technical experts from ORNL and Savannah River National Laboratory worked with a team from the IAEA for several years to complete the activities required for the safe and secure transportation of the material to the USA...

...NNSA's Office of Nuclear Material Removal works with partner nations and international institutions around the world to identify excess nuclear material and implement permanent solutions to consolidate, remove, and/or dispose of these inventories. To date, it has removed or confirmed the disposition of nearly 7,270 kilograms of weapons-usable nuclear material, permanently reducing the risk of a terrorist or other malevolent actor acquiring highly enriched uranium or plutonium for use in an improvised nuclear device.

There's no word on whether international agencies are making efforts to secure weapons grade petroleum that has been used both in terrorist and malevolent actor settings.

It does appear that dangerous fossil fuels have been diverted to weapons of mass destruction and are, in fact, killing people in Ukraine right now at the behest of a malevolent actor named Vladmir Putin, the malevolence having been funded by selling dangerous fossil fuels to prominent European nations that phased out nuclear energy under the theory that nuclear energy is "too dangerous."

[John ONeill]

1. 'The Curve of Binding Energy'

'The Curve of Binding Energy' is a book you may have read, by John A MacPhee. A prolific author, on subjects as diverse as the Swiss volunteer army, the massive infrastructure put in by the Corps of Engineers to try to tame the lower Mississippi, and a cross section of the US's geology. 'The Curve of Binding Energy' was written about Ted Taylor, who moved from brilliant bomb designer at Los Alamos to the Jeremiah of Plutonium. At a time when some were proposing a 'Plutonium Economy', Taylor claimed that large quantites of plutonium, even reactor grade, would inevitably lead to terrorist use of fission. His tour of the Twin Towers, with estimates of what a suitcase bomb could do to it, is eerily prescient for 1994, except of course that it was fossil fuel terrorism, as always, that did the damage.

[NNadir]

2. I really don't have much patience with the "nuclear terrorism" nonsense.

The putative "suitcase bomb" relies on very, very, very, very expensive actinides with extremely low critical masses and very high gamma radiation; we're talking Am-242m for example, which can only be isolated on thin films in very expensive low yield processes involving very advanced reactor physics..

It's the kind of garbage that's worthy of journalists but not an extinct set of communicators; they were called "reporters."

This fantasy has taken place in the presence of vast amounts of dangerous fossil fuel terrorism, and as is always the case, the people who spin vast fantasies about what in their fervid imaginations could happen show extreme indifference to what is happening and what has happened.

As it happens we have rather large inventories of plutonium, but they haven't killed as many people as diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate, nor jet fuel.

I wrote a post on this topic many a few years back on another website: On Plutonium, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Peace

For the record, the US tested a nuclear weapon with reactor grade plutonium, and the North Koreans did as well - because they were technically incapable of producing relatively clean Pu-239. I'm quite sure that the US did the machining remotely, using very high tech facilities, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the North Koreans let people be killed in the effort.