Watch George Lucas photobomb documentary about nuclear waste!

Look!  A wild George Lucas sighting!

"Nuclear Waste: Fission Products & Transuranics from Thorium & Uranium" is sincerely fascinating in its own right.  A short documentary about the valuable materials often left in used-up fuel rods from nuclear reactors and how they might be extracted.  Very interesting if you're at all into nuclear engineering and chemistry in general.

But let's face it: most people are going to want to see the creator of Star Wars stumbling into view on a Chicago street as research scientist Bruce Hoglund explains pyroprocessing (using molten salt and electrochemistry to pull out the desired substances).

You can choose to watch it all, OR you can fast-forward (I recommend moving it to 13:00 to get the full effect):

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Iraqi uranium: It was never a threat

Three times today I've been sent or otherwise directed to the following from Investor's Business Daily...

"Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq? No? Why should you? It doesn’t fit the media's neat story line that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003. It's a little known fact that, after invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. found massive amounts of uranium yellowcake, the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel, at a facility in Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad. In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel --- thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region. This has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, as the AP reported, this marks a 'significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy.' Seems to us this should be big news. After all, much of the early opposition to the war in Iraq involved claims that President Bush 'lied' about weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam posed little if any nuclear threat to the U.S. This more or less proves Saddam in 2003 had a program on hold for building WMD and that he planned to boot it up again soon... Saddam acquired most of his uranium before 1991, but still had it in 2003, when invading U.S. troops found the stuff... That means Saddam held onto it for more than a decade. Why? He hoped to wait out U.N. sanctions on Iraq and start his WMD program anew. This would seem to vindicate Bush's decision to invade."

No, it does not.

This type of uranium was never weapons grade, and was under constant seal and supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. For the most part it was leftover from Iraq's foray into nuclear power (which didn't get far) but some of it was also medical waste.

Had Saddam tried to touch the stuff to make a nuclear weapons program out of it, it would have raised red flags bigtime and everyone would have been parked on his front lawn to demand that he stop.

If Saddam seriously wanted a nuclear weapons program, he should have never invaded Kuwait. But that's another story...

Uranium by itself is not fuel for a nuclear warhead. It takes a lot of processing to make it useful as a weapon. And I don't know if Iraq had either the technical means or the expertise to have even begun to attempt such a thing.

I've spoken with a lot of people in the field of nuclear engineering in the past few days and each of them has shared similar sentiments.

I've already shared this with one friend today. As I told her then, I'm not trying to "pick an argument" with anyone. But those are pretty much the facts of the matter. And it's better to educate people about what uranium can and can't do on its own, rather than give in to fear and worse: political convenience.

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