Free Republic

Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It? To save lives and reduce costs, there would be tremendous advantage if science had a way to stop a devastating hurricane like Sandy. And scientists have thought of it before. One idea that rears its head almost every hurricane season recently is the notion of bombing a hurricane into submission. The theory goes that the energy released by a nuclear bomb detonated just above and ahead of the eye of a storm would heat the cooler air there, disrupting the storm's convection current. Unfortunately, this idea, which has been around in some...

RADIOACTIVE gases escaped after an accident at Australia's only nuclear reactor, days after Prime Minister John Howard announced his inquiry into nuclear power. Secret emails made public by the Labor Party today show that last Thursday various gases, including krypton, escaped into the atmosphere at the Lucas Heights reactor in southern Sydney. One staff member was forced to wash off contamination from the leak, and had to undergo a full body examination to ensure he was safe from radiation exposure. The Government has played down the incident, but Labor deputy leader Jenny Macklin accused it of deliberately trying to hide...

WASHINGTON : The U.S. has given weapons-grade uranium to 43 countries including Pakistan since the 1950s under the Atoms for Peace programme and is making little effort to get them back, a government department reported. The Department of Energy said in a report that among the countries which have refused to return the material are Pakistan , Iran , Israel , Mexico , Jamaica and South Africa . The reasons for declining vary. Some of the bomb-grade uranium is in use at research universities and institutions that do not want to give it up. Jon Wolfsthal, who ran the recovery...

WASHINGTON, March 6 — As the United States presses Iran and other countries to shut down their nuclear weapons development programs, government auditors have disclosed that the United States is making little effort to recover large quantities of weapons-grade uranium — enough to make roughly 1,000 nuclear bombs — that the government dispersed to 43 countries over the last several decades. Among the countries that received the highly enriched uranium, generally with the expectation that it would be returned, were Iran and Pakistan. The chief nuclear weapons expert in Pakistan recently made the stunning disclosure that his network had secretly...

U.S. Data Gave Iraq Key to Making Nuclear Bomb After hunting for days, the Iraqi physicist finally checked a long-locked attic room. There he spotted a box, coated with decades of dust, and opened it. Sure enough, it was full of reams of data - American data - on how to make a nuclear bomb. "In it were the Manhattan Project books and reports," Imad Khadduri recalls, referring to the U.S. program that produced America's first atomic weapons during World War II. With that and other U.S. material, Khadduri and his colleagues in 1987 painstakingly began collecting patent designs for...