Uranium

PARIS - Pekka Haavisto made startling discoveries on a recent mission to Kosovo to assess the effect of uranium-tipped weapons hurtled on the province during NATO's 78-day bombing war against Yugoslavia in 1999. "We found some radiation in the middle of villages where children were playing," said Haavisto, a former environment minister of Finland who headed the United Nations inquiry in Kosovo. "We were surprised to find this a year and a half later. People had collected ammunition shards as souvenirs, and there were cows grazing in contaminated areas, which means the contaminated dust can get into the milk."

The United States is quietly starting to convert some of its military nuclear stockpiles left over from the Cold War into fuel for civilian nuclear reactors.With little fanfare, the process began June 6 at a plant in Piketon, Ohio, run by U.S. Enrichment Corp., a government-owned company based in Bethesda, Md.The company is turning 13.2 tons of highly enriched uranium into reactor fuel.The amount is a tiny fraction of the nuclear stockpile. But the conversion, begun by the Clinton administration, is meant to encourage other countries, particularly Russia, to engage in similar kinds of disarmament.

PARIS -- Defying its European partners and the United States, Iran plans to reopen its vast uranium enrichment complex to resume nuclear activities that it suspended 14 months ago, officials involved in negotiations with Iran said yesterday. Iran told the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency last week that it was planning to restart nuclear research and development, without specifying what activities it would resume or where. But in messages and letters to the agency in recent days, Iran said it planned to reopen the enrichment facility, in Natanz in central Iran, and perhaps an unspecified number of other sites, said the officials.

Sir Rudolph Peierls, whose work on nuclear fission contributed to the development of the atomic bomb, died Tuesday in Oxford, England. He was 88.At the University of Birmingham in Britain, the German-born Peierls and Austrian-born Otto Frisch in 1940 calculated that a bomb was possible if the isotope uranium-235 could be separated from dominant uranium-238.The "Frisch-Peierls Memorandum" set in motion the British atomic effort and stimulated America's Manhattan Project that led to the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, N.M., in July 1945.

Iraq's small stock of highly enriched reactor fuel has not been diverted to build a nuclear weapon, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported yesterday. The announcement, which followed a technical examination of the Iraqi uranium by international experts, seemed likely to quash speculation that Baghdad might have built a nuclear explosive device using the reactor fuel.The fuel, 27.6 pounds of 93-percent-pure uranium 235, was salvaged from Iraq's Osirak research reactor in 1981 after an Israeli air raid destroyed the reactor.

VIENNA, Austria - Iran, increasingly isolated even by former allies, was formally rebuked by the International Atomic Energy Agency yesterday in a resolution that criticized it for a lack of cooperation in disclosing the details of its nuclear program. The resolution, sponsored by Britain, France and Germany and fine-tuned in the last few days, accuses Iran of not being open about where it obtained blueprints and parts for advanced centrifuges, which can produce weapons-grade uranium. It passed unanimously after the country's usual defenders, including Russia and China, distanced themselves from Iran.

BEIJING - The United States pushed North Korea yesterday to abandon both its plutonium- and uranium-based nuclear weapons programs, and South Korea proposed a three-stage solution to the standoff on the first day of a new round of six-way international talks. For more than a year, North Korea has held the world at bay through its threats to develop nuclear weapons, and there was no expectation of an immediate breakthrough at the talks. But compared with some of the chilly rhetoric previously offered - particularly by North Korea - the tone of this meeting seemed more promising at the opening.

Plutonium and highly enriched uranium are being guarded reasonably well in the U.S. But in the former Soviet Union, where the political and economic situation is unstable and organized crime has skyrocketed, the risk of theft or diversion is high. . . [W]orkers at the nuclear storage and research facilities are paid infrequently or not at all. The temptation to accept bribes or to sell weapons-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium is great.This warning, published two months ago in Chemical and Engineering News magazine, is coming to ominous fruition as an international "nuclear Mafia" tries to peddle the stuff of atomic bombs.

God's Universe Owen Gingerich Belknap/Harvard University Press / 140 pages / $16.95 A lump of uranium seems an unpromising place to look for God. But in this lethal material Owen Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard University, detects a signature of divine action in the world. In his slim and elegant new book, God's Universe, Gingerich finds that indeed everywhere he looks he can discern the hand of a benevolent Creator - all without compromising his adherence to a rigorous methodological scientific naturalism.

WASHINGTON - A new classified intelligence report presented to the White House last week detailed for the first time the extent to which Pakistan's Khan Research Laboratories provided North Korea with the equipment and technology it needed to produce uranium-based nuclear weapons, according to American and Asian officials who have been briefed on its conclusions. The assessment, by the CIA, confirms the Bush administration's fears about the accelerated nature of North Korea's secret uranium weapons program, which intelligence officials believe could produce a weapon as early as next year.