Yellow Cake Uranium In Iraq?

Factual Questions
1

General Questions is as good a place as any for this.

I had heard second hand that some municipal workers in Amsterdam found, amidst piles of scrap metal, a small pile of what has been confirmed to be some “Yellow Cake” Uranium. It was on a ship that previously was in Iraq.

So, curious about this finding, I log onto Google and type in “Yellow Cake Iraq” to try and find the source. One of the first links to come up is this:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0624-09.htm

It’s an article from June that describes Greenpeace returning a canister containing some of this Uranium to the US military, in Iraq. This boggled me. I had never heard this story before. It seems fairly important.

So, has anyone else seem this story?

Is it for real?

2

I don’t know about the Amsterdam story, but the story about the looting of Tuwaitha was all over the board at the time. Yes, it was for real.

3

Here’s a link to the Amsterdam story:

Given the timing of this, i.e. nearly a year after the invasion, it seems likely that the stuff came from the looted Tuwaitha plant.

4

About Saddam’s bomb-making activities? WE now know that:
-Saddam had a well-funded bomb-making group
-He had invested considerable funds into mass=spectrographic enrichment of uranium (calutrons), and laser-assisted separation
-no records of uranium purchases were kept
This is all outlined in a book by an Iraqi nuclear physicist, who wrote a book ("SADDAM’s BOMB MAKER). This man (forget his name) got asylum in the USA. Once enriched, the very small quantity of U-235 (needed to make a fission bomb) could be hidden anywhere-a few safe-deposit boxes in a bank vault would suffice.
Interestingly, Saddam took a close personal interest in his atomic bomb project…the book relates how when the laser-enrichment project failed, Saddam had the leader(who was a palestinian-born physicist) hacked to death by his goons.

5

So, seriously, what am I missing here?

Even if the Amsterdam article is bogus, the other article confirms that piles of Yellow Cake Uranium have been found in Iraq, by Greenpeace nonetheless. Wouldn’t this be classified as a WMD?

6

Well here’s a description of what yellowcake is:

It’s the extracted ore from uranium mines. In order to use the yellowcake in reactors, or bombs, it’s necessary to purify it further, convert it into uranium hexafluoride, and run it through an isotope enrichment process. Iraq had a civilian nuclear power project up until 81, when Israel expressed it’s doubts about the peaceful uses of atomic energy by bombing the reactor. No doubt some of the yellowcake dates from that period. -Yellowcake is not something you dump into the Euphrates when you no longer have a use for it.
However, without an enrichment facility, the mass specs, lasers, or centrifuges Chicago Faucet mentioned, yellowcake is good only for looking at and fantasizing, or for making a bright yellow glaze for dinnerware.
Yellow cake is raw uranium, not a weapon of mass destruction, or even something that could be made into a weapon of mass destruction without, conservatively, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Iraq never had this infrastructure. They were working on it, but there are perfectly valid reasons for even peaceful nations to want to refine their own uranium. Brazil for example recently completed building an uranium enrichment facility. The IAEA is of course interested in the plant, but no one is accusing the Brazilians of possessing WMD’s.

7

What you’re missing is that the presence of the yellowcake wasn’t secret. As Squink said, it was left over from the nuclear plant that Iraq had in the 1970s. It was kept sealed under high security, and regularly inspected by the IAEA.

However, even though the US knew about the yellowcake, it took no steps whatsoever to secure the site when the invasion began. The guards all left and the place got looted.