*Ø* Blogmanac | It really is the pits
"(Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) In the [USA] Energy Department’s crowded spectrum of technically challenged, hazardous, usually superfluous, but always costly nuclear projects—in the region where the blinking infrared of bureaucratic dysfunction meets the luminous green of pork-barrel politics—the partisans of new nukes detect a ray of hope.
"This glimmer is called the Modern Pit Facility (MPF), the administration’s euphemism for a brand new $4 billion factory where new plutonium cores ('pits') will be fabricated for those 'weapons of mass destruction' the president is always lecturing other nations about.
"The MPF would be able to produce 250–900 pits per year. Just to set the scale, the midpoint of this annual range would equal or exceed China’s entire nuclear arsenal. Energy says the United States must have the agility to: 'rapidly change from production of one pit type to another; simultaneously produce multiple pit types;' and 'produce pits of a new design in a timely manner.' But such bomb-making abilities don’t just knock the moral-political props out from under efforts to stem bomb programs in North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan. They’re a felonious frontal assault on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty itself."
Source
[Thanks Celestial Shamanka for sending this beauty in.]
"(Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) In the [USA] Energy Department’s crowded spectrum of technically challenged, hazardous, usually superfluous, but always costly nuclear projects—in the region where the blinking infrared of bureaucratic dysfunction meets the luminous green of pork-barrel politics—the partisans of new nukes detect a ray of hope.
"This glimmer is called the Modern Pit Facility (MPF), the administration’s euphemism for a brand new $4 billion factory where new plutonium cores ('pits') will be fabricated for those 'weapons of mass destruction' the president is always lecturing other nations about.
"The MPF would be able to produce 250–900 pits per year. Just to set the scale, the midpoint of this annual range would equal or exceed China’s entire nuclear arsenal. Energy says the United States must have the agility to: 'rapidly change from production of one pit type to another; simultaneously produce multiple pit types;' and 'produce pits of a new design in a timely manner.' But such bomb-making abilities don’t just knock the moral-political props out from under efforts to stem bomb programs in North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan. They’re a felonious frontal assault on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty itself."
Source
[Thanks Celestial Shamanka for sending this beauty in.]
Pip Wilson posted item above at 11:29 PM | Permalink
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