Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium.
At the height of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program, which nearly succeeded in building a bomb in 1991, Tuwaitha incorporated research reactors, uranium mining and enrichment facilities, chemical engineering plants and an explosives fabrication center to build the device that detonates a nuclear core.
The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.
The part of uranium that's fissile - when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two - is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.
There are better alternatives... Australia should be exporting its solar technology, not its uranium.
I don't know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they're capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn't scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there's no telling what might have ensued.
Connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward. No life without tectonic activity, without volcanic activity. And we know very well that geothermal energy is mostly produced by decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium.
They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.
With a fourth generation of nuclear power, you can have a technology that will burn more than 99 percent of the energy in the fuel. It would mean that you don't need to mine uranium for the next thousand years.
Arizona, our beautiful state, was built on mining. Copper is huge here, and now uranium. And then we have the federal government coming in, writing all these rules and regulations and telling us that we can't do this and we can't do that. We need concise, clear answers.
