On Friday, I was really scared to read in the LA Times
Iran has enough fuel for a nuclear bomb, report says
Iran has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb... about 2,227 pounds of low-enriched, or reactor-grade, nuclear fuel by late January. Physicists estimate that producing the 55 pounds or so of highly enriched, or weapons-grade, uranium needed for an atomic warhead requires 2,205 to 3,748 pounds of low-enriched uranium.
Actually, it requires a heckuva lot more than that. Going from 2205 pounds of 4% enriched uranium to the high enrichment that's needed is by far the hardest thing about making an atomic bomb. Everything else is fairly straightforward.
An undergraduate can design a working Bomb.
And uranium is common. In fact, I once sold some people 25% of the U-235 fuel they'd need to build a Nuclear Bomb. They were strangers-- but they payed me very well.
When I bought my first house, the home inspector found a bit of a problem. The radon levels were 20 pCuries/Liter, which is way over the EPA's recommended safety limit of 4.0 pCuries/Liter. So, we asked the seller to put in a radon mitigation system, which he did. Fortunately, that fixed the problem.
How much radon did I have in my basement? Well, let's say the whole basement had an area of 500 square feet and a height of 8 feet. That's 4000 cubic feet, which (rounding to keep the math easy) is about 100,000 liters.
So 20 picoCuries/liter times 100,000 liters means I had about 2 microCuries of radon gas in my house.
Since a single curie is about the activity of one gram of Radium, that means I probably had about 2 micrograms of radium under my basement. It was slowly decaying into radon gas, which bubbled up into my basement.
The house was on a 1 acre lot, meaning the basement only took up 1% of the lot. So if we assume the radium was distributed uniformly under my property, it works out to about 200 micrograms of radium underneath my whole lot.
The radium almost certainly came from buried uranium (perhaps in granite). Because 1 metric ton of pitchblende yields 100 micrograms of radium, I probably had about 2 metric tons of pitchblende (uranium ore) underneath my property.
Now, roughly 0.7% of pitchblende is Uranium-235-- the stuff that gave the Hiroshima Bomb its bang-- and I owned 14 kg of it.
Critical mass for U-235 is 52kg. So I own-- or rather used to own-- roughly one quarter of the U-235 Iran (or anyone else) would need to make a nuclear bomb.
You see-- I sold my U-235 fuel.
I sold the mineral rights when I sold the rest of my property (including my house) when I moved out of the area. The family who bought it from us seemed very nice, but I'm not really sure, because I only met them a couple of times. I never did a background check on them; for all I know they could have been spies-- maybe Iranian spies.
Just to be clear, I sold people who could have been Iranian agents 25% of the U-235 fuel they'd need to make an atomic bomb.
(Again, its really hard to enrich uranium like the stuff under my former property (or the 4% pure uranium that Iran now has) into ultra-pure material needed to make nuclear weapons. It takes billions of dollars and decades of effort. In fact, enriching uranium is what makes building nuclear weapons hard.)
But while I'm busy helping potential Iranians-- I'd like to pass on to whomever reads this some nuclear weapons designs that I have obtained.
If the LA Times sees this, perhaps they will write a really scary article with a lede something like
A previously unknown American-- believed to be acting alone, and motivated by financial gain-- supplied possible Iranian agents with 25% of the Uranium 235 fuel they'd need to make a nuclear bomb, and gave them plans on how to design working nuclear weapons.
Even if the LA Times won't print this, I'd bet that a statement like that could make it through the Washington Post's multi-layered editing and fact-checking process.
Widespread ignorance about basic science is a terrible thing-- especially on the front pages of prestigious papers.