Look, if anyone who lives in a country bordering seawater really, really, really, really wants Uranium or Thorium, they can refine it from seawater, which happens to contain about three billion tons of the Uranium and probably much more Thorium. Early in the nuclear era, when Uranium was still thought to be a rare element (which it actually is not) the Japanese explored doing exactly that: Obtaining it from seawater. The main problem with obtaining Uranium from seawater is plain dumb economics. Uranium mined from ores typically costs less than $20 a kilo whereas Uranium obtained from seawater costs about $200-300/kg.
I'm sure that Dick Cheney and Colin Powell are grateful for this hysteria about Uranium trafficking, but Iran, like most large countries on the surface of the planet has significant Uranium reserves like it or not:
"Iran Mining Uranium, Greatly Expanding Nuclear Facilities
Paul Kerr
In a televised speech, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami announced February 9 that Iran has started mining uranium near the city of Yazd and is developing the facilities necessary for a complete nuclear fuel cycle. Khatami’s speech, in which he argued that Iran needs to be able to control the entire nuclear fuel cycle in order to generate electricity, rekindled fears that Iran may be trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Khatami enumerated the steps Iran is taking to develop a complete fuel cycle. He stated that a facility to produce uranium oxide—or “yellow cake”—is under construction in the same province as the uranium reserves..."
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2003_03/iran_mar03.aspThis business of "yellow cake" that you and Colin Powell find so magical is a rather old business. Way back in 1951, the US Atomic Energy Commission commissioned two authors, Joseph Katz of the Argonne National Laboratory and Eugene Rabinowitz of the University of Illinois to publish a 595 page tract entitled appropriately enough "The Chemistry of Uranium." The book may still be available from Dover Books, which I am told never takes items in its catalogs out of print. In any case, I happen to be holding my own copy of this work from my home library. There is a whole chapter on the subject of Uranium oxides, which was old news more than half a century ago.
Your point is? Maybe you have some magical formula whereby nuclear technology can be put back in the bottle?
It happens that the only feasible technology for the elimination of nuclear weapons involves the complete destruction of highly fissionable materials, in particular, isotopically pure, or nearly isotopically pure Plutonium-239. For technical reasons having to do with the neutron poisoning properties of fission products, it is not possible to completely fission all of the Plutonium of this nature in nuclear reactors. One can, however, create a mixture of Plutonium isotopes with such problematic isotopic composition to make all but the most advanced nuclear weapons engineer completely insane with the difficulty of the problem. For this reason, with the intelligent use of commercial nuclear technology, greatly reduce the risks of nuclear war. It is however, physically impossible to render the eliminate all possible means of creating a nuclear weapon without destroying all of the Uranium and Thorium on the planet. This last option, in turn is only possible if one builds lots of nuclear reactors and uses them. In that case nuclear war will become impossible in about 3000 years, with the somewhat dubious side effect of rendering the planet free of the vast majority of it's radioactivity.
Therefore we see that the opponents of nuclear power are not only completely indifferent to the maiming and killing of millions each year world wide in service to the unsustainable and criminal fossil fuels industry, but that they are also standing in the way of the only technology that can effectively create a means of nuclear disarmament, that being nuclear power plants.
Crying and gasping every time a misleading Colin Powell like piece of bloviating media crap with the word "Uranium" in it will NOT do anything about the probability or possibility of nuclear war. I would and do argue that in fact this sort of thing helps POTENTIATE the risk of nuclear war, by furthering the potential of tin horn shit-for-brains dictator school dropouts of the Bush-Powell-Cheney ilk to pull the wool over the eyes of an increasingly credulous public.
People who think, and I would have to include such political luminaries as Bill Clinton and Al Gore in this subset of human beings, recognize the link between nuclear disarmament and nuclear energy. This is why Bill and Al quietly (so as not to disturb the paranoid) worked closely with the Russians to fund studies of the physics problems of fissioning Plutonium in pressurized water reactors. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have brains. I note that this rather wise investment in peace and prosperity, this "beating of swords into plowshares" has been defunded by the less than inspiring repukes. In spite of the confusion of our national "leaders" and their nuke paranoid apologists and cheer leading for a dunderhead approach to nuclear information, the Russians have nonetheless proceeded with the development of a nuclear disarmament potential of commercial nuclear power. They are currently working to run a Radowsky type plutonium fissioning partially Thorium fueled Pressurized Water Reactor. This should be up and running by 2006.
I'd like to close with a link to a picture of these beautiful "nuclear weapons" which contain 4 grams Uranium each. Think of it, if the Isrealis buy out the world's collection of Fiestaware we're all doomed.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm
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