Why Read Blogs?

OK, I didn't post about this at the time, but Whiskey Bar did, citing the WaPo as the source:

A provision tucked into the 1,724-page energy bill that Congress is poised to enact today would ease export restrictions on bomb-grade uranium, a lucrative victory for a Canadian medical manufacturer and its well-wired Washington lobbyists.

The Burr Amendment -- named for its sponsor, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) -- would reverse a 13-year-old U.S. policy banning exports of weapons-grade uranium unless the recipients agree to start converting their reactors to use less-dangerous uranium . . .

The amendment is just one of dozens of obscure special-interest provisions included in the energy bill, which the House passed yesterday and the Senate is expected to pass today.

I learned a lot of things from that article -- not counting the almost unbelievable corruption and stupidity of your average Dixiepublican, which I already knew about.

I learned that weapons-grade uranium is the nuclear feedstock, so to speak, for a number of medical isotopes.

I learned that the companies that make those isotopes operate their own private reactors, using uranium purchased from the U.S. government.

And I learned that those reactors are not, repeat not, subject to the same security restrictions as government-owned megadeath factories:

By contrast, Nordion already has enough highly enriched uranium to make one or two Hiroshima-size bombs, and its factories do not have to meet the same security standards as Energy Department facilities.

Nordion is the Canadian company that purchased the export loophole in the energy bill -- which, under the circumstances, we might reasonably call the "Arm Osama Amendment."

Now I bow to no man in my love for my would-be adopted homeland and her proud commercial traditions, but the idea that a medical company in the Great White North has enough weapons-grade uranium to recreate the Manhattan Project is frankly terrifying. Think about it: the McKenzie brothers with nukes.

Well, the energy bill is law--Dubya signed the giveaway bill yesterday...and only now does "the newspaper of record," or, in Billmon's words, Pravda on the Hudson take note:

The new energy law weakens limits on exports of highly enriched uranium, a change opposed by people who fear the spread of nuclear weapons and by the top nonproliferation official at the Energy Department.

Feeling safer?

For the life of me, I can't figure out HOW Team Bush can, in any way whatsoever, be considered "strong" on terror...9/11? Asleep at the wheel. Osama bin Laden? Let him walk scot free out the back door. War in Iraq? Might as well be Al Qaeda's recruiter. And now this...

Oh, and by the way, the amendment to the bill, which set all this in motion, is called the Burr Amendment, named after the North Carolina senator who attached it...maybe he should consider the following:

Examples of radioactive material in the public domain
Greensboro, North Carolina (1998)
19 tubes of cesium is missing from a hospital and is never recovered. Unprotected contact with the tubes could have caused serious injury or even death.