nuclear-news

Chile’s highly enriched uranium and the earthquake

Bomb Chasers: How a Potential Nuke Was Rescued from the Chile Quake – TIME By Eben Harrell Apr. 08, 2010 “….The Chilean earthquake carried the power of 10,000 Hiroshima bombs. It severed power and communication lines, closed highways, sparked looting and led the country’s President to declare a state of emergency. Within minutes of the quake, Bieniawski had gathered the NNSA officials in a hotel lobby, where the group spent the next four hours trying to make contact with two sites — a military base and research reactor — where the uranium had been stored.

Unable to reach one of the sites by phone, the head of the Chilean nuclear agency, Fernando Lopez-Lizana, eventually had to drive there himself.
After Lopez-Lizana reported that the uranium was accounted for, the NNSA team had to shift it through a crisis zone to a port on high alert for tsunamis. And their cargo was unstable. HEU must be stored and shipped in certain geometrical configurations — long, flat sheets, for instance — so that it does not spontaneously start a nuclear chain reaction, spewing out heat and radioactive by-products. When it has been used in a nuclear reactor, as some of the Chilean HEU had been, it becomes radioactive….

Bomb Chasers: How a Potential Nuke Was Rescued from the Chile Quake – TIME

April 9, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, SOUTH AMERICA