Fox News manufactures weapons-grade uranium?

A red flag went down when I read this Fox News revamp of an AP story about 8kg of missing uranium in China:

Authorities said that 17 pounds of weapons-grade uranium disappeared and that a verdict in the trial of four men accused of trying to sell the radioactive material will be delayed until it is found, state media reported Friday.

That's a big loss of face, so much so that I'd have to believe that China had developed a free press in order to believe that an official said "weapons-grade", as well as more government transparency in order to try such thieves publicly. As it turns out, the state media claim was worded differently:

Jiang Chaoqiang, director of the Guangzhou No 12 People's Hospital, told China Daily: "The radioactive substance uranium does not explode when it is in its raw state, but it is very harmful to people's health."

That's "raw" as in "unrefined". On the other hand, "weapons-grade" is typically 90%+ U-235. Unrefined uranium is mostly U-238, which isn't useful for bombs. It has to be refined to be "reactor grade". I turned to MSNBC for some actual numbers about uranium:

Uranium enriched to between 3.5 percent and 5 percent is used to make fuel for reactors to generate electricity. It becomes suitable for use in nuclear weapons when enriched to more than 90 percent.

There's a big difference between 5% and 90%. Assuming that the uranium was indeed being illegally sold from a mine as purported by state media, I'd expect it to be reactor grade at worst; weapons-grade refining would almost certainly be performed at government-controlled facilities in China and under tight scrutiny. A paltry 8kg is far from critical mass, weapons grade or no, but it could make for a hefty dirty bomb payload.

There's another odd aspect to the case, people allegedly falling sick.

More than 20 people had fallen sick after being exposed to the radioactive material, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said, citing an official involved in the investigation.

It also appears that the "weapons-grade" claim originates from democratic opposition (single source), not a state mouthpiece.

Regardless of whether the uranium is reactor-grade or weapons-grade, the people stealing it were apparently ignorant of how to guard against radiation if some accounts are to be believed. It's not hard to shield even enriched uranium, given this example:

Had the 15-pound uranium cylinder been weapon-grade highly enriched uranium instead of depleted uranium (which is not suitable for nuclear weapons), the dose rate at the surface of the highly enriched uranium would have been more than 100 times higher. However, nearly all of this increase would be due to alpha radiation, which can be shielded with a sheet of paper. Meanwhile, the beta-ray dose rate would be about the same or lower and the gamma-ray dose would be ten or more times higher. At the surface of the shielded container the dose rate would be be about one to ten times higher. The dose rate of the highly enriched uranium cylinder could be easily reduced to that of the shielded depleted uranium container (i.e., 0.5 mrad/hr) by adding an additional 1/8 inch of lead (one-third of a centimeter) around the cylinder. This would add only about 6.6 pounds (3 kilograms) to the mass of the lead shielding.

If people did come down with radiation sickness, then this wasn't a knowledgable outfit trying to fence uranium.

An Australian newspaper carries an additional claim:

Police have recovered only 35 grams of uranium from the four men. They claimed a fifth partner, Zhang Xinfang, had disappeared with the bulk of the uranium and had since become seriously ill, presumably from exposure to the radioactivity.

I can't tell if that's a cover story agreed on by the thieves or not, but I wouldn't put a lot of trust in them. For all I know, they might face swift execution if the uranium is found in toto.

When climate, technology, and greed collide

Regarding the recent Chinese coal mine flooding disaster, Bruce Sterling writes:

There's not a coal mine in the world that could avert nine inches of sudden Greenhouse rain. Those miners were digging their own graves.

It seems from later reports that there was in fact a simple way to avoid disaster, though not flooding. Just stop working.

After unusually heavy rains lashed the area around the small city of Xintai, 370 miles southeast of Beijing, last week, at least two other mines stopped production Friday, hours before the Wen River smashed through the dike ...
Wang Dequan, a government official in the city of Tai'an, which oversees Xintai, said, "Smaller mines stopped work during heavy rains because they lack the safety equipment that larger mines like the Huayuan mine have."

Undue trust in technology may even have been key in leading to this disaster.

Early indoctrination

In the spirit of DoubleQuotes, take the children's show "Tomorrow's Pioneers":

The show, along with paramilitary-style summer camps for Gazan boys, reveal a key element in Hamas's long-term strategy.
Like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, the group takes a patient approach to tapping religious conviction to build political support. It is the movement's youth focus, critics say, that sets it apart from Hamas's rival, Fatah, which controls the West Bank and enjoys US and Israeli support.
The basic unit of the Hamas organization isn't cells or political committees – it's families. The organization has shown that by introducing children early enough to Hamas's hard-line Islamic thinking, it can recruit lifelong supporters.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0820/p01s03-wome.html

Contrast with a report from the movie Jesus Camp:

Pastor Becky Fischer, effervescent and focused, recruits for Kids on Fire, a Pentecostal summer camp in Devils Lake, N.D. There campers pray to a cardboard standup of George W. Bush, weep and speak in tongues, writhe on the floor clutching little fetus dolls and perform Cultural Revolution-style musical numbers in camouflage face paint.
Think of it as boot camp for the future army of God. Fischer cheerfully admits to borrowing techniques used by other extreme religious factions (Islamic fundamentalism is a particular favorite) in her jihad against abortion, liberals and godless secularism. Counselors at Kids on Fire do not use war as a metaphor, but a sincere and formidable call to arms aimed at "taking America back for Christ."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/29/DDGH8LDU6M1.DTL

Who is making cameras for China?

Recently, there was a piece in The New York Times on Chinese plans to track people in Shenzhen.

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity...
When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.

So who might be providing those 20,000 cameras and the software behind them? A bit of digging around revealed that NEC already has cameras in Shenzhen.

On July 19, electronics giant NEC announced it has developed the world’s first automated border control system that uses facial recognition technology capable of identifying people inside their automobiles. The system is already in operation at checkpoints on the Hong Kong - Shenzhen border.
Built around NEC’s NeoFace biometric face recognition system, as well as NEC’s electronic passport technology, the system is designed to boost the speed and efficiency of Hong Kong Immigration Department operations by allowing residents with microchipped national ID cards to remain in their vehicles while automated cameras verify their identities. Hong Kong residents aged 11 or over are required by law to carry a national ID card (HKID), and the recently issued “smart” IDs are embedded with chips that contain biometric and personal data.

This seems to line up with China Public Security Technology, Inc.'s press release from May 1.

China Public Security Technology, Inc., (OTC Bulletin Board: CPBY.OB - News; "China Public Security" or "the Company"), a leading provider of large-scale high-tech public security information technology and a Geographic Information Systems ("GIS") software service operator in China, today announced that it has completed performance of its contract for automation of the Sha Tau Kok Station of Exit and Entry Frontier Inspection in Shenzhen City, China.

Admittedly, they're not the only possible game for facial recognition in town, and suppliers could change.

Not a prelude to a military strike on Iran

The official rumor is that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps may soon be designated a terrorist organization.

White House and State Department officials declined to confirm the reports, saying it is not appropriate to discuss actions that may be under consideration.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, senior U.S. officials say there still is an internal debate whether to target the entire Iranian corps or only its al-Quds wing.

Note State Department involvement. The goal is sanctions. For example, the US Treasury could be brought to bear. It is within their mandate to (among other things):

• Freeze the assets of terrorists, drug kingpins, and their support networks
• Cut off corrupt foreign jurisdictions and financial institutions from the U.S. financial system
• Promote the international adoption and implementation of counter-terrorist financing and anti-money laundering standards
• Trace and repatriate assets looted by corrupt foreign officials ...

Furthermore, the US administration has quietly found that sanctions are having some effect at pressuring the Iranian regime, though not yet enough to force a change in policy. According to a July report in The Economist:

Two months ago [Iranian President Ahmadinejad] astonished the central bank by ordering banks to slash interest rates below the rate of inflation. Some Iranian economists think this was a favour to the Revolutionary Guards, who have borrowed heavily to expand their commercial activities since his election...
Iran, in short, has some serious economic troubles. Might a few well-aimed kicks persuade the regime to give up its nuclear plans? In themselves, the two sanctions resolutions passed so far by the Security Council do not amount to much: they mainly ban trade in some nuclear and military equipment...
So are sanctions “working”? The punishment so far, and the fear of more to come, has scared off foreign investors and pushed up the risk, cost and inconvenience of doing business in Iran...
Nonetheless, it is not clear that sanctions are even close to imposing the sort of pain needed to alter the government's nuclear behaviour.

From this balancing act, it appears that the US administration is trying to focus financial pressure on Iran's military-industrial complex while limiting the inevitable collateral damage to the remainder of their economy. Squeezing Iran too hard might provoke retaliation. It's also worth noting with regard to military posture that the USA recently reduced their naval presence in the region from escalated levels. From August 1:

The U.S. Navy, scaling back its force in the Gulf, said on Wednesday it had sent a fresh aircraft carrier to the region to replace two carriers deployed there since early this year amid tension with Iran.