Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Bits and Pieces - March 31, 2010

Hillary Clinton is really giving Canada a hard time lately. This is a pretty strong stand. I'm wondering when the anti-abortion faction(s) are going to pick it up.

One of the complications of uranium enrichment. The technetium-99, IIRC, is from uranium that has been through a reactor once or more and returned for enrichment. Since enrichment is a separation process, it concentrates impurities as well as the uranium-235. This article describes how impurities were dealt with at Oak Ridge's gaseous diffusion plant. Centrifuge plants, like Iran's, will have to deal with them too.

This article and this one raise some concerns on the basis of one phrase in the totally inadequate fact sheet on New START. Ellen Tauscher ducked questions about it at her press conference. I found that phrase strange, too, but I'm waiting to see more before I comment on it.

Was Putin's bluster on the arms control negotiations for domestic consumption only?

More on that court decision on patenting DNA.

1 comment:

Ian said...

Yep, the Harper gov't deserves all the criticism it can get on this one.

The Conservative position is politically untenable in Canada (far too unpopular to fly) so Harper used his usual method of trying to introduce the policy by stealth. I'm glad he got caught.