Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu
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Their "experts" consisted of people from the National Resources Defense Council, backed by documents from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
One of the claims was that a lightly-shielded (1/16" of lead) block of HEU the size of a soda can, in a tractor-trailer rig, could be smuggled undetected past the RPMs installed at the Mexican border.
Is this true? In the story they seemed to assert that HEU would be as easy to smuggle into the US as depleted uranium.
Anyone with knowledge of the sensitivity of gamma spectrometers want to go further?
I would think they could detect it.
Interestingly, a soda-can-sized container of weapons-grade uranium isn't enough to build a bomb.