The Cellar - The 'What the fuck!' thread

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Originally Posted by BigV

Now that would be the mother of all doodads.

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The world's most dangerous yard sale. (Dept. of Energy sells nuclear materials to private citizen)
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In June 1993, Johansen received a bid solicitation from E G & G Idaho Inc., one of three contractors that run the Idaho lab. His curiosity was piqued by the fact that the items for sale were stored at the warehouse complex across the street from his used car lot. The inventory list didn't make clear exactly what the components were, but he noted that several were listed as "VES," which he knew from previous auctions meant vessels, probably stainless steel. These, Johansen reasoned, might have some resale value to a chemical company.

Potential bidders were invited to inspect the material, and at the appointed hour Johansen and a few other local businessmen were ushered into Building 16. Several aspects of the scene immediately attracted notice. Outside was a sign that read "No Trespassing ... by authority of section 229 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954." Just inside the door were two armed guards. And inside the warehouse itself stood what struck Johansen as a "massive" collection of steel slabs and cylinders.

The warehouse manager, Jim Roker, told the businessmen that they were looking at parts of a scrapped plant for reprocessing nuclear fuel. According to Johansen, Roker said, "I can't believe they're selling this stuff." (Roker denies making the latter comment, but says someone else might have.) But the plant, formally known as the Fuel Processing Restoration Project (FPR), was not going to be built--the Bush administration had canceled the project in 1992--and the Energy Department's Idaho branch had tired of paying rent on the hardware.

Designed in the early eighties during the sky's-the-limit period of defense spending, the FPR was intended to replace an older reprocessor at the Idaho lab that gobbled up spent fuel from the nuclear Navy and various government reactors and spat out uranium-235, a highly enriched fuel. The uranium was then shipped to the Energy Department's lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it was refabricated into fuel for a reactor that produced plutonium and tritium for nuclear warheads. But highly enriched uranium can itself be used to make a nuclear bomb. Uranium-235 is not as potent as plutonium. That stuff (justifiably) caused much international panic this past summer when German law enforcement officials arrested various individuals attempting to smuggle out samples widely suspected to have originated from Russia's lax nuclear research facilities.
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