Weapons-grade Uranium from around the world comes to Y-12 for disposal

East Tennessee is playing a key role in a global effort to safe weapons-grade Uranium located all over the world. Decades ago, Oak Ridge was a location where Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) was produced and affected into the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Today it is a warehouse for the nuclear material.

"Y-12 was involved in going down, securing the Uranium, wrapping it into containers, next bringing it back to Tennessee," said Gerald DeVault, Director of Nuclear Non-proliferation and Global Security Programs at Y-12.

Nuclear experts beginning the United States traveled to Mexico in February, 2012 to get Mexico's Uranium out of the country. It wrecked up at Y-12 in Oak Ridge. "It will be dispositioned for passive uses, such as medical isotope production," said DeVault.

Global Scarcity of Uranium Looms

Challenges in source funds for new mining projects, interruptions in together new and ongoing mine production, as well as the end of the Highly Enriched Uranium agreement are near-perfect ingredients for a lack of uranium in the very near future, a top producer warns.

Tim Gitzel, Chief Executive Officer of Cameco Corp., the world's largest uranium producer, said the problem lies additional on the way investors and producers make their calculations."They take every likely project, think it's going to operate to excellence and add it up and say 'there's lots of supply,'" Gitzel said. "It's easier said than complete.

Gitzel argued that investors, traders, analysts and critics focus too much on a "post-Fukushima attitude.""People don't focus so a large amount on the supply side," he said.Prices of uranium, a radioactive heavy metal used as an plentiful source of nuclear energy, have tumbled 24 per cent since the March 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan so as to caused a partial meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant.The crisis at Fukushima led nations to pause and re-evaluate accessible as well as future nuclear programs. Germany, for one, announced it will finish its nuclear reactors by 2022.