Bloomberg:
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is sitting on enough uranium cake to make a nuclear bomb as it waits for prices of the commodity to rebound, according to traders and nuclear experts.
Wealth Minerals Ltd. - Newsletters - Lehman Brothers Uranium ...
Bankrupt Lehman Bros. sitting on uranium stockpile
Lehman sitting on $20 bn uranium cake - Money Matters - livemint.com
Lehman Brothers' Nuclear Stockpile - The Daily Beast
Yahoo! Message Boards - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. - Lehman has ...
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If most people were caught with that yellow uranium, they would be arrested.
mmm... Yellow cake.
A sensible investment. I, too, am a fan of lemon-meringue.
Are you kidding me? Well, it raises questions, doesn't it? How much heroin does it have? How many uzis? Does it own contracts to women sold into white slavery?
The Right will, even in the face of this and all the rest, continue to argue for no regulations. Why? Capitalism is, for them, not a business model but a religion -- sacrosanct and pretty much beyond the law.
So what's unlawful about trading commodities like Uranium Oxide? Just because you were not aware of the market until yesterday does not make it an unlawful of even exciting line of business.
Where in the banks carter does it say it can traffic in nuclear material?
Maybe Geithner and Obama can broker a deal with Iran. They seem to be in the market for some yellow cake...
So that's where bush-cheney's yellow cake has been all the time.
You might want to try and goole that. Canada acepted 550metric tons of yellow cake from Iraq last year...
Really seems to me that a private entity shouldn't be able to be selling vast quantities of radioactive materials on the open market to the highest bidder. Just a thought....
Don't need to make a nuclear bomb, all you really need is to spread the radioactive uranium around and you have a dirty bomb capable of poisoning hundreds or thousands of pepole.
You can spread as much of this stuff around as you like, it won't kill anyone. At least not any more than lead dust or mercury vapors would. And trust me, distributing a large amount of mercury over a city block is much easier than distributing Uranium dust.
But if you really want to poison masses of people, you wouldn't use any heavy metal. There are far better agricultural poisons out there that everybody can get their hands on easily.
:-)
Well, it's not particularly radioactive... Uranium is not that rare, and it takes a vast amount of energy and work to separate out U235 from it. Just plain uranium has a number of uses besides making bombs.
The N.R.A. should be Thrilled! This is the ultimate "right to bear arms" Lehman Bros. da bomb!!
I love "yellow cake" with vanilla icing...
Is this the Nigerian yellow cake? Where are the aluminum tubes?
Google "precision aluminum tubing".
:-)
The yellow cake Uranium was left in Niger (because Sadaam Hussein COULDN'T get his hands on it as he wanted-- despite Wilson's claims to the contrary), and as a result, their soil was contaminated by it so Niger had a severe famine in 2005.... Wilson lied and Niger peoples died! (Both he and his wife SHOULD have been 'outed', tried for TREASON, convicted, and sentenced to death for their crimes against the USA!
The state of the US education system is really failing... this one is just one more proof.
I assume this "matured commodity contract" was a euphemism for a NYMEX Uranium Future. Lehman was so incompetent that they did not off-set their position and ended up being "delivered into". Where is this radioactive stuff being stored ? Is it secure ? What would prevent Al Qaeda from opening a futures account, buying NYMEX Uranium futures and taking delivery of Uranium for nuclear weapons construction or dirty bombs ? Does anyone at Homeland Security or elsewhere in the security apparatus monitor this ? Based on their past performance, I tend to doubt it.
"Where is this radioactive stuff being stored"
Well, for one thing it's not even that radioactive. As an alpha emitter Uranium does not produce radiation that can penetrate the human skin. You could hold it in your hand (not advisable because of chemical toxicity - uranium is a heavy metal and like lead it can cause heavy metal poisoning) and not suffer more than a minor suntan from it. Put some gloves on and it's basically harmless as long as you don't breath in the dust.
Uranium oxide is perfectly safe. One can't make a bomb out of it without the CIA knowing. The typical facility to enrich Uranium to bomb quality is the size of dozens of football fields and is fed by a large power plant. It's not something you can do at home or in a cave.
And if it's a future contract, chances are that the material is actually still at the bottom of the mine pit or it's a heap sitting somewhere at the mine's processing facility. No big deal.
Thank you my friend. I happily stand corrected. That was certainly an education !!
Uranium is used for a lot of things, not just bombs. Its largest use is in military bullets and missiles. Not for bomb uses, but because its much denser than lead, so it can do a lot more damage. Iraq, and other countries like the old Bosnia and Yugoslavia will make the geiger counters do back flips.
Oh, and some large passenger and cargo aircraft use depleted uranium for counter weights in the bellys. These huge blocks slide on a track to counter balance the loads of passengers and cargo.
Its in medical equipment and much much more. Nukes are a small part of its use.
Robert Openheimer never thought of Wall St when he told Gen Groves that you can't keep a law of nature secret. Gen Groves was obsessed with keep the USA's atomic bomb technology secret.
Wall St couldn't build an atomic bomb even if they hired a team of Pakistani, North Korean or Israel expets to do it for them. The Wall St mind is a wonder to behold.
BS that is not uranium. That is pharmaceutical grade cocaine photographed through a yellow lens. LOL.
Wonder what and how much other "stuff" is being held to drive prices up.
Either now or in the past.....
Uranium prices are very low and falling because there is tons of it and not a whole lot of demand.
http://www.uxc.com/review/uxc_Prices.aspx
Get used to it... this stuff is a commodity and about the price of Cobalt, right now. It's cheaper than Tantalum, a metal used to make capacitors in virtually all of your electronic gadgets. No big deal.
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Bloomberg | Linda Sandler, Yuriy Humber and Christopher Scinta | 04/14/09