RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Looking to make itI'll be buying at 14 if we hit that level. Which I doubt but if we do...
P.S - I'm reading a neat book right now of the history of Uranium. I'd recommend it as it's an interesting read on the history of Uranium exploration, mining and refinement.
The Mightiest Rock: Tom Zoellner’s “Uranium”
Tom Zoellner investigates the history and future of uranium.
By Jenny Shank, 3-30-09
Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World
by Tom Zoellner
Viking, 337 pages, $26.95
In his new book 
Uranium, Tom Zoellner follows the trail of an element that was considered useless until less than a century ago, when scientists discovered how to unleash its power, and is now one of the most coveted and feared substances in the world. In the course of telling the story of uranium, Zoellner travels across the globe, visiting mining operations in the Congo, the Czech Republic, and the American West, and investigating how this rock has influenced people’s behavior in Japan, Australia, the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere. The result is a detailed, alternately entertaining and frightening account of how uranium has affected the world to date, and how it is shaping the future.
Zoellner writes that he became interested in researching uranium when he was camping at Temple Mountain mesa in Utah and discovered mine entrances there: “The valley floor had that ragged and hard-used look common to many other pieces of wilderness in the American West that had been rich in gold or silver in the nineteenth century. A braiding of trails was etched into the dirt, and the slabs of an abandoned stone cabin and shattered lengths of metal pipe were down there, too, now almost obscured in the dust. The place had been devoured quickly and then spat out, with a midden of antique garbage left behind.” He discovered that during World War II, uranium for nuclear weapons had been mined there.
Zoellner, who grew up in Arizona, seems attracted to rocks of rare power—his last book was The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire. He writes that Tucson is “ringed with Titan II missiles” and that one of the warheads was kept twenty miles north of his high school. The city was said to be “number seven on the Soviet target list” putting him and his family in line for potential nuclear annihilation, but he chose not to think about this much because “to dwell on the idea for very long was like looking at the sun.”
But over the course of Uranium, Zoellner does dwell on the idea, taking the reader back to the beginnings of humanity’s contact with and interest in uranium, which first turned up in quantity as the byproduct of a medieval silver mining operation at St. Joachimsthal, in the current Czech Republic. The research of Marie and Pierre Curie, along with other scientists, proved that uranium had more potentially useful properties than had previously been thought, though the ancient name for it, the “bad-luck rock,” proved prophetic. The discovery of the neutron in 1932 paved the way for the uranium experimentation that followed, reaching a frenzied pace during World War II.
The fact that the nuclear arms race came to the American Southwest through the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and bomb tests around the region is well known, but Zoellner finds a way to make this old story interesting again in part by focusing on the journalist William L. Laurence, who was simultaneously a New York Times reporter and a “paid author of press releases for the U.S. government,” embedded with the Manhattan Project. Laurence writes of the bomb test on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, that “it was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements, fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great forebodings.” In Laurence’s obsession with and enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, he seems to have gone almost mad, contemplating the destruction of Nagasaki with what Zoellner describes as “a certain amount of mad joy.” Laurence writes, “There’s the feeling of a human being, a mere mortal, a newspaper man by profession, suddenly has the knowledge which has been given to him, a sense—you might say—of divinity.”
The accounts of the destruction the atomic bombs caused in Japan remain shocking, no matter how many times you read about them. But uranium has harmed far more people than just those who were targeted by Fat Man and Little Boy. Once the secrets of the Manhattan project were revealed, ushering in “the atomic age,” the entire world clamored for uranium, and Zoellner details the horrific conditions that miners of uranium faced, from mines in the Congo under cruel Belgian rule, to forced labor in Soviet territory, to the horrible diseases that befell Navajos mining for uranium on their land. Zoellner explains clearly how a badly forged memo that suggested Iraq was buying uranium from Niger led to the United State’s current war with Iraq, and how the hundreds of warheads left behind from the collapse of the Soviet Union pose the most significant risk that a nuclear weapon could end up in the hands of a terrorist.
One of Zoellner’s best chapters, “Apocalypse,” examines how “a remarkable number of the world’s religions” believe that “the world will end in fire,” and that the end of times will look a lot like the conditions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs fell.
But for all the grim and disastrous consequences that man’s interaction with uranium have caused so far, people still can’t help but look at it with a kind of hope, and Zoellner concludes with a chapter about global desires that nuclear power will become the answer to providing affordable, clean energy in the future. Zoellner’s Uranium is a cogent, fascinating investigation of one powerful rock that offers a clear explanation of the current state of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, readable for even those who would prefer not to dwell on the matter.
TCI