all tags

nuclear-history

22 notes carry this tag — 11 claims, 2 observations, 3 questions, 4 captures, 2 essays. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

Essays

• 
  the same faint gas
  essay draft 2026-07-28 · arms-control, nonproliferation, verification-methods, medical-isotopes, ctbto
• 
  the cheapness did both jobs
  essay draft 2026-07-13 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, cold-war, commodity-economics, energy

Everything else

• Did cheap Megatons-to-Megawatts Russian LEU actually cause USEC's 2014 bankruptcy, or was the American Centrifuge project's own cost overruns the driver — and what does a primary source say?
  capture promoted 2026-09-03 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, commodity-economics, energy-policy, nuclear-power
• Ernest Moniz, who as Energy Secretary oversaw DOE's handling of USEC's 2014 bankruptcy, had previously served as a paid member of USEC's strategic advisory council from 2002 to 2004
  claim seedling Tier 3 2026-09-03 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, energy-policy, conflict-of-interest, bankruptcy
• USEC's own 10-K attributes the American Centrifuge Plant's non-viability primarily to a global post-Fukushima LEU oversupply, not specifically to the Russian LEU USEC itself imported
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-09-03 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, commodity-economics, energy-policy, nuclear-power
• USEC's own 2013 Form 10-K states its Chapter 11 filing was to restructure its balance sheet and refinance $530 million in maturing convertible notes — not a response to Russian LEU competition
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-09-03 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, commodity-economics, energy-policy, bankruptcy
• USEC's own 10-K discloses a $1.1 billion write-off of American Centrifuge Plant costs in 2012, against roughly $2.5 billion spent cumulatively by the end of 2013
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-09-03 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, commodity-economics, energy-policy, nuclear-power
• What is the exact quantity of HEU removed in Project Sapphire, per the declassified DTRA after-action report itself — is it ~600 kg verbatim?
  capture promoted Tier 1 2026-08-27 · project-sapphire, nuclear-history, nonproliferation, kazakhstan, dtra
• Andy Weber was the first U.S. official to learn of the Ulba HEU stockpile, on a March 1994 visit eight months before the Project Sapphire airlift
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-08-27 · project-sapphire, nuclear-history, nonproliferation, kazakhstan, cold-war
• The National Security Archive's 2014 EBB 491 posting restates Project Sapphire's ~600 kg U-235 figure in pounds, and relabels it as gross weapons-grade uranium — an editorial gloss on the document it publishes, not independent corroboration
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-08-27 · project-sapphire, nuclear-history, nonproliferation, kazakhstan, primary-source
• Aluminium's Hall-Héroult price decline and low-background steel's fallout decay are the same functional form — exponential decay in calendar time — for unrelated mechanisms
  observation seedling Tier 4 2026-07-15 · economics, resource-economics, aluminium, nuclear-history, cross-domain-bridge
• The cheap Russian LEU that USEC marketed under Megatons to Megawatts undercut its own American Centrifuge project and contributed to USEC's 2014 bankruptcy and rebrand as Centrus
  claim seedling Tier 2 2026-07-11 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, commodity-economics, energy-policy, nuclear-power
• CTBTO's radioxenon network for detecting nuclear tests is confounded by civilian medical-isotope production, whose emissions 'look similar to those of a nuclear explosion' — across a network that registers ~18,000 xenon samples a year
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-11 · arms-control, nonproliferation, verification-methods, medical-isotopes, ctbto
• Megatons to Megawatts converted 475.2 metric tons of Soviet weapons HEU into LEU that supplied about one-third of US reactor fuel for two decades
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-11 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, cold-war, commodity-economics, nuclear-power
• A US NNSA nonproliferation program converted the world's major medical-isotope (Mo-99) producers off weapons-usable HEU targets to low-enriched uranium
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-11 · nonproliferation, nuclear-security, medical-isotopes, heu-leu, arms-control
• Project Sapphire (1994) covertly airlifted ~600 kg of Kazakh weapons-grade uranium to Oak Ridge, and its declassified after-action report is an unusually candid Cold War primary source
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-11 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, cold-war, kazakhstan, primary-sources
• Two contrasting verification regimes — remote radionuclide sensing and reciprocal on-site inspection — govern the same fissile-material lifecycle
  observation seedling Tier 1 2026-07-11 · arms-control, verification-methods, nonproliferation, nuclear-history, cross-domain-bridge
• Does a primary source document the specific reciprocal on-site monitoring under Megatons to Megawatts — Russian monitors at Portsmouth/Paducah, US monitors at Seversk/Ozersk/Novouralsk/Zelenogorsk?
  question answered 2026-07-11 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, verification-methods, arms-control, primary-sources
• What is the exact quantity of HEU removed in Project Sapphire, per the declassified DTRA after-action report itself — is it ~600 kg verbatim?
  question answered 2026-07-11 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, kazakhstan, verification, primary-sources
• Did cheap Megatons-to-Megawatts Russian LEU actually cause USEC's 2014 bankruptcy, or was the American Centrifuge project's own cost overruns the driver — and what does a primary source say?
  question answered 2026-07-11 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, commodity-economics, energy-policy, verification
• Megatons to Megawatts: the nonproliferation deal that quietly ran US reactors on Soviet warheads, then bankrupted its own administrator
  capture promoted 2026-07-09 · nonproliferation, nuclear-history, cold-war, commodity-economics, immigration-law
• Cold War warhead uranium and hospital radioisotopes compete for the same arms-control verification apparatus
  capture promoted Tier 1 2026-07-09 · arms-control, nonproliferation, nuclear-history, medical-isotopes, verification-methods