Uranium

BERLIN -- Iran has answered more questions about the history of its nuclear program but is restricting access to its nuclear work and expanding its enrichment of uranium in defiance of the Security Council, a United Nations watchdog agency reported yesterday. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has not provided "full transparency" about its current activities and now has nearly 3,000 operating centrifuges - the number required to produce enough enriched uranium in one year for a nuclear weapon.

TOKYO -- Under pressure from plant management, nuclear plant workers skipped critical safety steps in order to increase the production of uranium fuel, resulting in an accident that ranks as the worst in this country's atomic energy history, according to a Japanese news report yesterday.The report, carried by Asahi Shimbun, the country's most influential newspaper, and attributed to police investigators, contradicts assertions by officials of JCO Co., a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. and the operator of the plant, that they had not encouraged the use of production shortcuts.

1937: Insulin controls diabetes1938: Dupont markets nylon1938: Minimum wage law passed1939: Uranium atoms split

In the NationUranium bullets fired at controversial facilityMIAMI -- U.S. Marines mistakenly fired uranium bullets at a Navy facility in Puerto Rico that has been the subject of protests over maneuvers that killed a civilian and wounded four other people, U.S. officials said yesterday.The Puerto Rican Independence Party, which has been leading protests against the U.S. Navy on the island of Vieques off Puerto Rico's east coast, alleged last week that the U.S. military had fired the prohibited rounds.

UNITED NATIONS -- International nuclear inspectors are worried that 132 pounds of highly enriched uranium at the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Science, 10 miles from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, may be used improperly or may be hit by an errant NATO missile.David Kyd, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors nuclear activities around the world, said Friday that his agency's main concerns were the "physical security of the material" and the possibility of "radiological risk" should a bomb hit the plant.

In their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Bethesda-based U.S. Enrichment Corp. changed hands at $14.25 each, unchanged from the initial offering price.In the privatization of U.S. Enrichment, the government gains $1.9 billion from selling the Cold War symbol, which was developed in the 1950s to produce uranium for nuclear weapons and, later, reactor fuel for Navy submarines and ships.Now, its plants in Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio, convert uranium into fuel for nuclear reactors to produce electricity for utilities in 14 countries.

Two national consumer groups yesterday accused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of concealing significant safety problems at a government-owned, Bethesda-based uranium producer in July, just as the company was about to issue its first public stock offering.Public Citizen and the Union of Concerned Scientists, consumer groups that focus on nuclear issues, both released internal NRC reports that identify numerous safety violations at two uranium facilities in Kentucky and Ohio by United States Enrichment Corp.

It has been a bizarre transformation for UNC Inc., a decade-long struggle by the one-time uranium company to reshape itself.Now, after years of unimpressive earnings, the Annapolis-based company (known until 1984 as United Nuclear Corp.) finally seems poised to take off, its recent purchase of Garrett Aviation Services propelling it to the forefront of the aviation services industry."It is finally happening. They're very definitely on the right track at this point," said Paul H. Nisbet, analyst with JSA Research Inc., a Newport, R.I., investment research firm.

BEIJING -- Yesterday's first formal meeting between Jim Sasser, the newly installed U. S. ambassador to China, and Chinese President Jiang Zemin was polite enough. "Huanying," said President Jiang -- Welcome. "Xiexie," replied the new ambassador -- Thank you.But beneath those niceties lay an undercurrent of confrontation that culminated this week with reports that China has massed 150,000 troops near the Strait of Taiwan because the island-province has been talking about independence.And Ambassador Sasser would know that this and other points of conflict with China over the last several months are not entirely under President Jiang's control.

Lebanese man is suspect in blaze that killed 10LUEBECK, Germany -- Police said yesterday that they had detained a 21-year-old Lebanese man as a suspect in Thursday's fire that killed 10 immigrants at a shelter for asylum-seekers. They said the suspect lived there.A local newspaper said the man and two of his brothers had been taken into custody Friday. The brothers were released.Bahrain threatens to use armed forces to stop riotsMANAMA, BahrainMANAMA, Bahrain -- Bahrain's defense ministry warned yesterday that the armed forces were ready to step in to quell the year-old riots that reflect tensions between the country's Sunni Muslim rulers and its Shiite Muslim population.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - -Iran's political crisis is likely to prevent it from making any swift move to ratchet up its nuclear program, said analysts and officials, potentially giving President Barack Obama and Western allies more time to grapple with the issue. Yet the ongoing chaos over the disputed re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad further muddles the question of just who calls the shots in Tehran, and what a possible deal with the Islamic Republic would mean. The Obama administration, concerned that Tehran is seeking to amass the materials needed to manufacture nuclear weapons, set an informal deadline of September for Iran to respond positively to an offer to discuss the matter rather than risk new economic sanctions.

Racial blood pressure disparity kills 8,000 ATLANTA: The lives of nearly 8,000 black Americans could be saved each year if doctors could bring their average blood pressure down to the average level of whites, a new study indicates. The study, released yesterday in the Annals of Family Medicine, is being called the first to calculate the racial disparities in lives lost to blood pressure control. "We expected it to be big, but it was even larger than we anticipated," said lead author Dr. Kevin Fiscella of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry.

USEC INC. Shares of the Bethesda-based company, the lone U.S. producer of enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power plants, tumbled $2.43 to $6.82. Analysts said cost overruns at a new plant may reduce earnings.

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors. And Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections.

BERLIN -- Iran has answered more questions about the history of its nuclear program but is restricting access to its nuclear work and expanding its enrichment of uranium in defiance of the Security Council, a United Nations watchdog agency reported yesterday. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has not provided "full transparency" about its current activities and now has nearly 3,000 operating centrifuges - the number required to produce enough enriched uranium in one year for a nuclear weapon.

"Had I known that this evil mountain, this alive mountain, would do what it did, I would never have sent the miners in here." -- Robert Murray There is something elemental, in the Judgment Day sense, about that hollowed-out mountain in Utah shrugging and shifting as if closing its wounds. Coal mine owner Robert Murray called the mountain "alive" and "evil": Indeed, its groaning gestures claimed the lives of nine men. But the mountain at Crandall Canyon was as much a victim as the miners of the relentless quest to extract every possible resource from the earth.

WASHINGTON -- Seventy years after the United States invented uranium enrichment, the sole U.S. company in the business is struggling to survive, while nuclear power experts worry that its failure would leave the Russians dominant in the market for fuel processing. USEC Inc. of Bethesda has liquidated some of its valuable uranium inventories to stay afloat, as its income has declined because of changing market conditions. But it also has maintained a high dividend, bought back its own stock and spent lavishly on severance payments after frequent purges in the executive suite.

WASHINGTON -- The director general of the U.N. nuclear inspection agency warned Tehran and Washington for the first time yesterday that their yearlong stalemate over Iran's nuclear activities was turning into a "brewing confrontation" that he said "urgently needs to be defused." In his statement to the member countries of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei stopped just short of saying that the confrontation could become a military conflict, though his aides said that was clearly the implication.

VIENNA -- Iran has accelerated its program to enrich uranium and defied a U.N. Security Council deadline to suspend nuclear activities before Tehran is capable of producing fuel for nuclear weapons, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said here yesterday. The report by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Iran recently began installing the first of 3,000 gas centrifuges in a heavily fortified, underground chamber at Natanz and that it plans to "bring them gradually into operation by May 2007."

ISFAHAN, Iran -- Iran opened one of its nuclear sites to several local and international reporters and a delegation of foreign ambassadors yesterday in an effort to show the transparency of its program before a U.N. Security Council deadline this month. Delegations from the Non-Aligned Movement, Group of 77 and League of Arab States, along with nearly 100 reporters, arrived at the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility in central Iran. The delegation included representatives from the U.N. nuclear agency from Algeria, Cuba, Egypt and Malaysia.