Safe Recovery of Nuclear Materials
In 2008, the NNSA, in cooperation with Russia and other agencies, helped transport 341 pounds of enriched uranium in 13 radiation proof casks weighing 17,000 lb (7,700 kg) apiece from Budapest to Siberia. In late September 2008 the casks were secretly loaded onto trucks at the Budapest facility and then taken to the city's train station, where it was transported onto a special train for an eight-hour trip to the port of Koper in Slovenia on the Adriatic Sea.
The shipments then moved through the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, up the Atlantic and into the English Channel, the North and Norwegian seas and then on to Murmansk. From there the shipment was loaded on a train for the long trip to Siberia.
This operation was conducted by American and Russian officials to ensure the safe disposal of the radioactive uranium that is highly enriched and weapons-grade. The Hungarian reactor is now being converted to use low-enriched uranium that cannot be used in a weapon and will not be a potential terrorist target.
Read more about this topic: National Nuclear Security Administration
Famous quotes containing the words safe, recovery, nuclear and/or materials:
“My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday’s washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest—a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Could it not be that just at the moment masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, women are beginning to rise in response to the Mother’s call to save her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution? Can our revolution mean anything else than the reversion of social and economic control to Her representatives among Womankind, and the resumption of Her worship on the face of the Earth? Do we dare demand less?”
—Jane Alpert (b. 1947)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)