Uranium One explained

[Canuck_2]

For those who listen to the fake news about the partial sale of a Canadian company and the false accusations of who was involved I will link to this story which describes what happened and what it could mean.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-bogus-clinton-uranium-one-deal-conspiracy-1.4383957

"We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 per cent of the uranium in our country," he said in February. "You know what uranium is, right? It's this thing called nuclear weapons."

Wrong in so many ways, Graham says.

Uranium for reactors, not nuclear fuel

To begin with, the uranium was for commercial use in reactors. In fact, Graham says, "the United States has no way to turn uranium into nuclear fuel for weapons."

What's more, Clinton was, by all accounts, never directly involved in the foreign transfer of that company while she was secretary of state. 

.....

"The decision-making in these cases is delegated to somebody else at a lower level, not the cabinet secretary."

And Graham notes that Trump's "20 per cent" estimate refers to domestic production capacity, not the American supply of produced uranium.

The distinction has been lost on some conservative pundits. On Fox News, host Tucker Carlson questioned whether it was wise to "give" Russia 20 per cent "of our uranium supplies."

Compared to uranium-mining powerhouses worldwide, though, the U.S. is a small-time player. Prominent nuclear policy analyst Frank Von Hippel, a former assistant national security director in the Clinton administration, says the U.S. represents less than three per cent of global uranium production. By comparison, he estimates Canada accounts for more than 15 per cent.

"So this whole thing," Von Hippel says, "it's just a political tempest in the teapot, as far as I'm concerned. It has nothing to do with national security. It's a completely bogus issue."

......

Even if the Russians wanted to do something with the relatively small amounts of U.S.-produced uranium, they wouldn't be able to export any of it outside the U.S., anyway. That's because they don't have an export licence from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Asked why, in that case, Rosatom would want a controlling stake of Uranium One, Von Hippel pointed to the firm's mining rights in Kazakhstan, the world's top uranium producer, as well as in Canada.

[r3020]

The exports went through Canada. Yellow cake. Hillary and Bill got rich. Mueller watched.

[bruce MN]

Citation?

[r3020]

Yet NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.

NRC officials said they could not disclose the total amount of uranium that Uranium One exported because the information is proprietary. They did, however, say that the shipments only lasted from 2012 to 2014 and that they are unaware of any exports since then.

NRC officials told The Hill that Uranium One exports flowed from Wyoming to Canada and on to Europe between 2012 and 2014, and the approval involved a process with multiple agencies.

Rather than give Rosatom a direct export license — which would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal — the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Ky.-based trucking firm called RSB Logistics Services Inc. to simply add Uranium One to the list of clients whose uranium it could move to Canada.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/358339-uranium-one-deal-led-to-some-exports-to-europe-me...

[bruce MN]

To Europe?  Approved by the NRC?

OK.  God only knows where it goes when the Greeks and Italians get hold of it.  Sicilians, maybe. 

All i I can think of when I hear “yellow cake” is Ahmed Chalibi and Richard Perle.  

Do do you know what the NRC does?

[r3020]

They got something for their money.

snip-

It has been previously reported that Bill Clinton accepted $500,000 in Russian speaking fees in 2010 and collected millions more in donations for his foundation from parties with a stake in the Uranium One deal, transactions that both the Clintons and the Obama administration denied had any influence on the approval. 

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/355937-fbi-informant-blocked-from-telling-congress-about...

[hardnox]

Questions of what is actual fissionable material, the location of global reserves etc .unlikely to get much interest from people who adamantly deny climate change.

[BA Deere]

https://ieer.org/resource/factsheets/plutonium-factsheet/  

Physical, Nuclear, and Chemical Properties of Plutonium

Plutonium-239 is one of the two fissile materials used for the production of nuclear weapons and in some nuclear reactors as a source of energy. The other fissile material is uranium-235. Plutonium-239 is virtually nonexistent in nature. It is made by bombarding uranium-238 with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. Uranium-238 is present in quantity in most reactor fuel; hence plutonium-239 is continuously made in these reactors. Since plutonium-239 can itself be split by neutrons to release energy, plutonium-239 provides a portion of the energy generation in a nuclear reactor.