The Icing on the Yellowcake

It was brought to my attention this morning that some people have recently been using last month’s Iraqi government sale of Yellowcake uranium to a Canadian company as vindication for starting everyone’s favorite Middle East quagmire that’s totally going less awful now that most of the integrated neighborhoods in Iraq have been violently purged of one group or another.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves here… lets have a look at this story when the AP first ran it. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the important part:

Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam’s nuclear efforts.

Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

9 thoughts on “The Icing on the Yellowcake”

  1. With all the DU "extreme delivery efforts" that went on the Iraqis can certainly produce another few barrels of yellowcake.

    Anyway why did it take um…. 5 years to finally shift the material?

  2. I doubt it will make a difference to the True Believers. I’ve already seen forum postings that boil down to “AHA!!! WE TOLD YOU SO!!!!”

  3. You want yellow cake, then head to midwest of USA and old uranium mining sites, where it is still visible and in the open.
    If anyone takes the trouble to follow link you would see mention of it being a prcess of breaking down the ore into a more concewntrated form and nothing more.
    Radioactive yes, but in only very concentrated amounts, such as using unclean old storage barrels to store drnking water and most of the danger being only long term usage.
    Much made of it in reference to Iraq and even in Iran but it takes the centrfuges just to make it capable of energy use and tonnes to make it inot one weapons grade low yield weapon.Many countrys have concentrated weapons grade and yellow cake raw material sotckpiled from just their nuke plants; countries such as Uk, France and Japan.

  4. For you nuke freaks here is a tidbit, there is more potential nuclear energy contained within coal to be extracted than by any means of the best technolgical burning of coal gasification methods.
    Why the continuing use of burning coal and accepting its pollution when the means to extract cleaner energy by processing it for nuclear means?
    You have to aks your politcal leaders and their partners the coal mining industry.

    1. Because it’s cheap and easy to burn, and because a hell of a lot of Americans are afraid to do anything new or unusual.

      Lester Ness
      Kunming
      China

  5. I remember reading about the yellowcake already in Iraq at the time the Niger forgeries were getting so much attention. (Probably on antiwar.com) Back then, the point that was completely being ignored by the mainstream media was: Why would the Iraqi government bother to buy yellowcake from Niger when they already had it?

    Of course, now that the fact can be spun differently…

  6. “Aha we told you so!” Yeah and these people will also continue to miss the real question which was “Was he a threat?” Nevermind the fact that you just can’t make accusations towards sovereign governmments without any proof whatsoever.

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