They just keep it in a box?!?!

Density matters

They would likely need another 400kg or more of shielding (water, cement, lead), but like I have heard, it could literally just be sitting in an apartment somewhere waiting for a new home.

Heavy stuff!

It's probably in the form of tanks of hexafluoride gas (that can be centrifuged) so it might take several trucks.

While this is true, it's not going to be in a single block, and the enclosures to carry it safely will be many times larger than the uranium.

Everything you need to know to make enriched Uranium. This is why the only solution is the type of agreement Obama reached with Iran. They had agreed to not enrich beyond 3.5% and to allow international inspection teams to verify this. Trump screwed it up. youtu.be/ysST2opQQpM

"Trump screwed it up" That should be etched on his tomb stone!

Nope. "He lied and he lied, now he lies here".

He could have both

Based on physics and element properties this is true. However, you wouldn't want 400 kg of highly enriched uranium to be stuffed in 2-3 shoeboxes. It would be broken up into many separate lead containers since only 5-10kg can make a small nuclear bomb.

If you do it like on the image you'll face a critical problem (pun intended) But yes it's around 2 cubic feet volume.

I counted 22 Trucks box trucks 2 days before tRump said he was deciding in 2 weeks! They moved it in 5 trucks maybe 10 Rest decoys! Bet every Lb was moved!

If this is uranium-235, it would technically fit in a small truck.... Briefly. 400 kg is well above critical mass.

"Whats heavier: a pound of feathers or a pound of lead" Usually only trips up literal children

The discussion about whether the strikes destroyed the enriched uranium is odd. As pointed out it is easily moveable and not readily 'destroyed'. The centrifuges enriching U can be destroyed. They can be rebuilt. This is 1940s technology. All that could ever be achieved was setting back the program.

Helpful illustration!

There’s a coverup going on.

So could be this guy?

Worldwide Hated for sure

I am carrying at least 400kg of regrets in my head, so they wouldn't even need a truck.

Yes, and perhaps that "line of trucks" that was staged at the site in advance of the attack was to move *everything possible* out of that facility, like centrifuges, connecting piping, control systems, etc. And if that's the case, it would mean it was a bombing of an empty hole in the ground

I believe the trucks were actually carrying dirt they used to block, and therefore hopefully protect the entrances.

Hmmm...what does that imply Grasshopper?

Maybe that all the other trucks at the site were used to disperse their lab equipment?

That is if Iran actually has 90-100% pure HEU, which is questionable.

Hey, Yasif. Just toss this in the back of your Corolla, will you ? 👍🏽

Looked like plenty of trucks to get it done.

And it probably did. Iran plays l'orange.

It'll still be in the form of uranium hexafluoride gas. So that's one hell of a pressure inside that little box!

uranium hexafluoride is a solid at room temperature.

I imagine the dozen or more big rigs were for the centrifuges and related equipment.

umm you need to tell CNN who keep showing the satellite images of many, many trucks when they ask 'What About the Uranium'

Duh !! There it is. On the truck.

😂☝️

Is that the guy in charge of the cubes?

Standing where he is, the guy is already dead from radiation sickness and his skin is beginning to bubble.

So it’s incredibly heavy for its small size?

Yes

*smash cut to panicky Iranian scientist leaning out of car with specially reinforced engine, shock absorbers* "so let me get this straight, Mahmoud. You want me to drive as fast as I can but safely away from the labs with these samples." "We'll be right behind with the centrifuges."

It would fit in a bicycle basket, a really strong bicycle but still.

But only the Iranian type, the israeli type is cute and small and light :3

All those trucks lined up at the site were just full of masons pouring concrete. Yeah right!

No bomb expert -- but at some point criticality becomes an issue. Must keep "lumps" of HEU small enough and separated enough such that criticality not a problem.

I wouldn’t pack it too compact to be honest 😉

Just the one time 😇

But according to our fearless leader, it was obliterated. So I'm not worried.

Try explaining that to el trumpo.

Dirty bombs take so little

A clown attacks the media because they dare to ask about trucks recorded showing up at Fordo days before the US bombing to remove uranium. How dare he try to twist this into a referendum on supporting troops. No president has dishonored the military more.

That water cube is far too big. Water is 1000kg per cubic meter, so a 400kg cube would be 74cm high - well below waist height. About the same as a 1 year old child, or a tennis racket. Shorter than a baseball bat or an AR-15

This was “light water”.

Makes sense. "Heavy water" uses deuterium, the hydrogen isotope with an extra neutron; I guess light water uses hydrogen atoms with fewer neutrons 🙂

It’s aerated with helium to make it lighter!

It’s not a good idea to pack it into a shoebox though. www-ns.iaea.org/downloads/ie...

It could ONLY fit on a single truck Disinformation is the new Murka apparently #IsHeDeadYet

It's unlikely to be a single piece.

Yes I know The image shown in the post is what I was referring to however

May not be right. During the concentration process, it’s uranium hexafluoride gas. (That’s what gets spun in centrifuges.) The gas is probably stored in pressure tanks. Heavier and bulky, but still would fit easily on one large truck.

Weight ?

I'm just wondering why you'd need a whole truck to transport two to three shoeboxes

Because those shoeboxes weigh almost a thousand pounds?

Still would fit a small van I think

Only weighs about 2 pounds too!

Israel started bombing on June 13th. On June 19th, Trump announced he would take 2 weeks to consider US involvement in Iran. The pic below is a convoy of trucks leaving 1 of Iran's nuclear facilities on June 19th. Trump opened his big mouth and Iran listened; moving the enriched Uranium out.

The shoe box would not contain the isotope (gas).

The transportable volume has to include the containment vessels, whose volume will substantiall exceed hat of the uranium.

That’s an extraordinary and important illustration. Thank you.

It's also v.wrong. 400 kg of water is 400 litres. A one metre cube of water is 1000 litres. So 400 is less than half that. If Iran has 9 nuclear bombs worth of enriched Uranium, putting it all in one box would exceed critical mass and make a bloody big bang! The man is also dead from radiation.

Uranium is not terribly radioactive as it has a very long half life. It's also an alpha emitter so the particles cannot go through more than a few feet of air and are stopped by a sheet of paper. No you would not want to put a critical mass of it together but that just means a few extra packages.

Ok Bpt = 56.5⁰ so yes solid. But would it warm up en masse? I'm not sure that a long half life correlates with low radiactivity🤔 But as an alpha-emitter it could safely be kept in a paper bag and undetectable from outside (which is why they took so long to diagnose Litvenenko from Po-210 poisoning)

Long half-life = low radioactivity. Half life of U235 is 700 million years. Radioactivity is only given off when the isotope decays and it is happening very slowly.

Way more than C-14 then! So when I was injected with Tc-99 (t1/2 = 6hr) I must have been really glowing, albeit briefly? 💡 Ah, got it. Radioactivity will depend not only upon half life, but also number of particles emitted per atom decaying ?

It must have been just a tiny bit. Something like that would have to be made in a reactor as it doesn't last long. Ditto on the polonium the Russians use as a poison. Type of particle is usually important too although not when ingested.

Reactors make Mo-99 and deliver to hospitals. It decays into Tc-99 which the hospitals extract and use. It still makes technetium scans a really high tech (😂, sorry, there isn't another word) procedure.

Exp. If you get 10 days notice from Vad. And you have a Signal Account?

You'd really have to keep your back straight lifting that in to the truck...

Shit, it could easily fit into a backpack.

It’s 400kgs. That’s around 900lbs. Regardless of size that would have to be a pretty impressive backpack.

In regards to the description of the size (fitting in 2-3 shoe boxes), it would fit into a backpack or duffle bag.

Maybe, but who could carry a 900 lb backpack? Plus the size and weight of the container to prevent the radiation from killing people?

And there were 12 trucks So….. Lots

So the threat of bombing forced this out of the guarded facility and location and presumably ownership is now unknown?

800 pounds of uranium occupies about .68 cubic feet of space

The steering might be a bit ineffective with 400kg hanging over the back of rear wheels. The average ICE is between 300/500 pounds say 140/226kg. I guess the flasks will be at most 100kg each.

The reason is the density. As it gets more enriched, it becomes heavier and denser.

No. The most abundant isotope is U238, enriched uranium has a higher proportion of the lighter U235 isotope so is actually slightly less dense than the unenriched material.

People really shouldn't use AI for these. For that cube of water to weigh 400kg the person would have to be about four feet tall.

And thats why you always gotta put scale bars on your figures

That's why you don't use AI to do calculations or scaled charts.

H2O weighs nearly 30kg/ ft3

400kg of enriched uranium is well above critical mass and would need to be transported in several smaller pieces surrounded by lead for neutron damping

For those who want to calculate for themselves: 1 cubic cm of HEU is 18.9gm. This means 400kg is about 21,164 cubic cm (400/0.0189). That's about 21 Liters (1,000 ccm = 1 Liter). A typical shoe box is about 30x20x10 cm, i.e. 6 Liters. So 400kg of HEU fits in a bit more than 3 shoe boxes.

Also, to nitpick: The water cube he's showing is more like 1m x 1m x 1m which is a ton. 1,000 kg. Not 400 kg by any stretch. I warned: Nitpicking.

There's no way that guy could lift 400kg.

This should be shared on the news and in print

That diagram is way off. A 400 kg water cube is 400^(1/3)=7.37 decimetres high. That's 737 millimetres per edge, which is 29 inches. For uranium, divide volume by 19. So cube edges must be divided by 19^(1/3)=2.668. So uranium cube edges are 27.6 cm =10.87 inches. But such a cube would get very hot!

Most people don't realize how heavy water is.

So we used 191,000 kilos of tax payers money (explosives) to obliterate 400 kilos of Iranian uranium and we didn’t get the job done. And that’s not counting the cost of B2 bomber transportation.

The actual explosive component was about 25,000 kg. But yes.

www.pbs.org/newshour/amp...

How much shielding would be required to contain the radiation? Methinks that would add considerable weight and bulk.

It probably has bulky packaging however uranium is barely radioactive as it has a very long half-life. Plus it is primarily an alpha emitter and alpha particles cannot go through a sheet of paper.

I've been looking into how UF6 is stored, recently. Natural ratio and depleted UF6 is stored in steel cylinders called 48Y, where 48 is the diameter in inches and 'Y' is a designator for the different models; 48Y is the most common, but there are also 48A, 48X, 48HX, etc with different standards.

While 48Y cylinders can be used for Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) hexafluoride @5% purity, preferred is the 30B container, a smaller cylinder of 30" diameter:

For High Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) of 10% and 20% purity (suitable for some research reactors and modular reactors), variations on the 30B are in development, the 30B-10 and 30B-20:

30Bs and even 30B-20s would not be suitable for 60% HEU transport and storage, even filling them only part-way, because of the greatly-increased radioactivity. And there is, as yet, no agreed standard in the industry, there being no use for 60% HEU except for weapons. /…

Oak Ridge used 8B cylinders (8" diameter) during WWII and the early days of the Cold War, but it looks like they needed careful arrangement of spacing and moderating materials for storage and transport.

5A or 5B cylinders look like the thing to use today. I can't find any info on them except for this diagram. Back of envelope math says they would be roughly 40 kg empty, and would hold roughly 5 litres or 40 kg of UF6. So transport of the 400 kg of UF6 at Fordow would take 10 × 5A cylinders.

Correction: 25 kg of UF6, requiring 16 cylinders for 400 kg.

I'm not sure the rubes will understand this.

I understand this. It's showing us what a 400 kg man looks like.

🤦‍♀️

soooo like, fuck MAGA all day long, but Uranium like this would more likely be in a 200-litre drum in a 20ft shipping crate, not a couple of shoe boxes... world-nuclear.org/information-...

Except you cannot carry it all in one shoe box else it would have a run-away reaction.

That’s six shoe boxes, and I should know because I have far more shoes than that, though on closet racks, not in boxes )”(let them breathe)!

I dont think people understand how small 14lbs of plutonium is. It could easily fit between these two half-spheres of beryllium

And a bad day was had by all..

Or, to put it in terms people can picture, 4 Donald Trumps. So maybe it could fit in an "all computer" Tesla.

I was a soldier sent to find WMDs once upon a time. Yeah, "Once Upon a Time" like a fairy tale This is F propaganda & you are mf garbage

Thank you Idan for that comparison now take that logic and replace the caption for a normal person's brain being the larger and the Frump's being the smaller. His is the most explosive and moved at will, we are in more danger with him loose in the world...

Just for context, the scale is wrong. One cubic meter if water ( a little over a cubic yard) which is smaller than the cube pictured, weighs 1000 kg or one metric tonne. The gist is right though, 400 kg of uranium is not a lot. But it travels better spread out

Hey, stop body shaming small people!

Thanks, good to know this information.

reallly hat to quibble on this one...but you'd need a larger truck. 400kg is usually in a 200-litre drum and paked into a 6-meter shipping crate. That's about 20ft square. world-nuclear.org/information-...

Looked like pretty large trucks in the aerial photo. I think they still have most of it.

My first attempt was tragically flawed, but I'm nothing if not resilient. 14.13 cu ft is not that big. Unless that person is teeny tiny.

[traces perspective lines] That cube of water (ρ=997kg/m³) looks to be about 1.1m a side, about 1327kg. A 400kg cube of water would be about 73.75cm a side. (The cube of magically non-critical uranium ρ=19100kg/m³ would be 27.564cm a side) Perhaps the man is only about 130cm high. 😀

Honest question: Is 60% considered 'highly enriched'? It's a long way from weapons-grade.

Not that long. bsky.app/profile/nucl...

Purification is a steep slope. As purification of precious metals or any other purification process. The early stages, i.e. getting to 60% is relatively easy. Increasing degrees of purity become increasingly more challenging, time-consuming, and expensive.

Well that’s the exact opposite of what the actual expert in the field said but you do you I guess.

Are you getting your information from RFKJ?

James Acton - quoted above - is Co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, according to his profile.

It defies the laws of physics to believe that the final stages of refinement are easier than the preliminary stages. Basic chemistry/physics. Go back to school.

"It’s actually easier to go from an enrichment of 60% to 90% than it is to get to that initial 60%. That’s because there’s less and less uranium-238 to get rid of." science.anu.edu.au/news-events/...

Enriching 1 ton of uranium to 60% takes 1 127 SWU (Separation Work Units, proportional to centrifuge-hours) while enriching it to 90% takes an additional 25 SWU. www.urenco.com/swu-calculator

Quiet! You’re disrupting the genocidal zionist Islamophobic narrative!

Quiet! The genocidal zionist Islamophobic alarmist narrative is interfering with Dear Leader's Omnipotence narrative! Trump's personally ordered (and conceived) raid reduced the purity of the Uranium down to 6%. Even if it was moved. DEAR LEADER IS NEVER ERRANT!!!

A lot of misinformation here. The uranium is currently uranium hexafluoride. Uranium hexafluoride is a solid at room temp so not that hard to handle but it does sublimate. Density is 5X water. Still not a lot of space. It is not very radioactive at all so does not require a lot of shielding.

Who’s the hot comparison guy?

Asking the important questions.

That’s Marty Banana For Scale.

Mamdani. Obviously a terrorist sympathizer.

Or… maybe they have more

I read that a gas form of uranium is used in the centrifuges, so if it would still be that form, it could well be in a bulky storage vessel.

No, it's processed further back to a solid form.

Yes, ultimately on the path to a bomb it’s again converted to a solid, but is it known that that was done? What’s the likelihood in this case? ChatGPT says it’s not so easy to do. Any expert here to weigh in?

Who needs trucks? Would fit in a "made in America" Ford Ecosport.

Now explain how much destruction that amount can do. Not a scientist here. Equating it to water doesn’t help me.

Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima had about 64kg of enriched Uranium, and exploded with a force of 15 kilotons of TNT. www.reuters.com/graphics/WW2...

I read it (Little Boy) was only enriched to about 20%. The percentage of enrichment just means you need more or less of it to create a bomb.

I'm not a scientist so I can't get too into the weeds of it. But its my understanding you need U-235 to create a "Little Boy". Enriching is sorta like distilling your separating out the "good stuff" from the stuff that's not ideal. Higher the % higher the concentration/proof.

Like booze you need a certain proof before it becomes flammable. Alcohol is flammable but if you have too many impurities it won't catch. I think Little Boy was around 80%. The smaller percentage was what was needed to go super critical and set off the chain reaction based on how that bomb worked

I hate when I read something, then can’t remember where… they specifically talked about Little Boy…

Can’t you look on the magnifying glass below and type it in, that’s usually how I find things.? Or else I take a photo of it so I can remember who said it.

Thanks, but what I read wasn’t on here!

1/ Did a little more digging. It maybe because the inefficiencies of the "Gun Type" mechanism used in Little Boy. The bomb blew itself apart before all the material had a chance to undergo fission. As opposed to Fat Man which was a little more efficient.

2/ It used a core of Plutonium surrounded by explosives that was meant to create a perfect sphere of pressure, causing an implosion. Nukes since then have become much more complex and efficient. Check out the video I posted earlier. It's long but Ryan goes through EVERYTHING.

@donnadeka.bsky.social you can check this article too. Final enrichment for the Manhattan project for U-235 reached upwards to 90% www.nps.gov/mapr/learn/u...

Thanks for the info. I’ve watched movies about Los Alamos and Oppie. A few documentaries, as well. But that’s the extent of my “education” in this area.

Sure thing happy to help how I can!

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critica...

So they have approximately enough to make the equivalent of 4 little boy bombs? That’s enough to virtually destroy most of Israel, which isn’t that big, no?

Wasn't trying to seem cavalier about it. But having the material is not the same as having a bomb. Which no one should have. Also Isreal is estimated to have 90 warheads "bombs" themselves. www.icanw.org/nuclear_arse...

This is a pretty good and informative video, on the hows of a nuclear bomb m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzmk...

It is 880lbs so it would have to be a truck. Not sure an ordinary car could carry it and it would probably take a forklift to move.

Might need more than that when you add in the containment and critical mass limitations. But it could easily be broken up into a couple dozen "jars" riding in the back seats of small cars that look like a plant worker heading home for the day, and all meat up for lunch at the safe house.

Hey @muellershewrote.com... How much HEU can be carried before it burns a hole in the back of the trunk?

But the truck wouldn’t need to look like anything unusual.

True. Pickup with one, maybe two boxes in the back. Load would look small but not unusual.

It’s a gas at this point, it’s sure as shot doesn’t look like that 😂

Uranium fluoride (UF6) used for the enrichment. It is corrosive and reactive. On top of the radiations. It has 1/4 the density of the metallic form so would take more space, plus the containers, waterproof and corrosion-resistant.

Yes - that is the correct assessment. A midi Truck Full with Special Gas Tanks (Like Oxygen diver Tanks) should be sufficient.

Uranium hexafluoride weighs 5X as much as water. It's still not taking up a lot of space. Also a solid at room temperature so likely doesn't need much more than some inert HDPE packaging.

And I do not know if we are talking about 400 kg of U metal, under the form of UF6, (around 600 kg). A volume 6x that of the 400 kg of the metal form.

They bombed Iran to distract from the Minnesota hit job.

Is the man on that image about 0.8 meters high? If not then the scale of the cube of water is really wrong.

ha ha! also, who else is unfamiliar with the "cube of water" standard of measurement? Just me?

How dare you criticize our military!

“I don’t always drink beer. But when I do, it’s always on the job.”

When he said that he wouldn't drink on the job, any one of those Senators should have reminded him that his job is 24/7 /365.

That statement alone should have been disqualifying.

I don't think you'd want to put all 400kg 0f 65% enriched U in one big hunk. That's a quick recipe for a really messy dirty bomb, as a spontaneous chain fission reaction would be likely. But the point is correct; 100 4kg chunks in little lead (Pb) boxes would fit tidily and safely in one truck.

Smartypants! 😆

And what about the hexaflouride gas? 😂

Yes it exists currently as uranium hexafluoride, however uranium hexafluoride is a solid at room temperature.

Yes but it’s still stored in a gas pressure vessel in all likelihood - it will solidify inside if it’s cold enough true.

Probably as the material sublimates but the "pressure vessel" would only need to be able to hold a pressure of 2 pounds per square inch. A beer bottle can hold 45 psi.

Yes obviously they could scrape out the super toxic, super valuable, super hard to make stuff in to a seperate room temperature storage. But it doesn’t seem very likely does it

The stuff is stored at room temperature under very low pressure. Since the material does not generate much pressure at room temperature, the storage containers do not need to be very strong so they are not adding a lot of weight or bulk. that's the point here. Glass tube below with UF6.

Yes they could put it in something like that. By losing a percentage of it. It’s just hard to imagine they did.

I'm not saying they did. I'm just saying the material can be safely stored in a manner that does not require an excessively high pressure rating. Meaning that the weight and bulk of the storage containers is not pushing it to an excessive level. Meaning it could easily be transported in a car.

Yeah but given they have a convoy of trucks that looked a lot like those for transporting the big pressure tanks I’m gonna bet it’s in them 😂

Any vessel transfer will involve loss. It’s highly likely to be the the same devices it goes in and out of the centrifuge in

Something like this

Probably not as that would be critical mass and would end you. That is depleted uranium hexafluoride long term storage.

Maybe Iran should paint it gold and offer it as a gift to Trump. He'd proudly display it in the Oval.

400kg less than 900 lbs which would not even require extraordinary suspension Even encased in a lead box the payload of an average consumer pickup is well over 6,000 lbs

6k is more like the towing capacity of a common pickup but 900lbs you could put in the back. I sure wouldn’t want to be driving it with that behind my head tho 😂

What kind of water is that? Kind of renders the illustration idiotic

You're correct. 400 kg of water is equivalent to approximately 106 gallons, or a little over 14 cubic feet, which is a cube about 28 inches to the side.

😳

You wouldn’t move it in one container in one vehicle: 1) That’s dumb to do from an OpSec standpoint, and 2) Criticality concerns.

That graphic is wrong. That person pictured would be excessively short, around one meter (39in) tall. The sizes portayed are too large. 400kg of water is a cube 71cm (28in) on a side 400kg of Uranium is a cube 27cm (11in) on a side.

yep, they put it under the mattress somewhere, long ago.

Eh, it’s HF6 (uranium hexafluoride, a gas, not a solid), it’ll be in a gas container of some sort- usually the size of an oil drum (likely a 30B, can handle ~2,200 kg of HF6). That’ll be an outer secure container that acts as a vault likely in a custom shipping container. Small, but not that small.

Uranium is almost as dense as Donald Trump

Dumbfuckheadium is the technical term I belive . “People come up to me with tears in their eyes saying no other President, in fact no other human is a dense as you . “

I wonder if he gets uranium confused with Iranian. Anyway…it’s just so dumb to pretend a whole lot of stuff wasn’t moved. Going to be really awkward when Israel contradicts him.

Who went critical decades ago and his hometown paper NYT ignored it.

That is not true. Yes, uranium is very dense so it won't be large amount. However, you couldn't simply place 400kg in a single container as it would go critical.

Me and the boys loading our uranium in the truck we rented from Home Depot

Welcome to Uhaul, would you like to rent a moving truck? Excellent! First question: Will you be moving Nazis or Uranium in this vehicle?

“Or?”

i can only hope to dream that both Nazis and 400kg of Uranium were in the same box truck

Geometry matters a LOT. I recall an accident in Japan (Tokaimura, 1999) where a Uranium solution that should be kept in a large shallow tray was poured into a bucket for easier transport, and this made all the difference in criticality. The diagram is for scale, actual shape is surely different.

Look under the Ayatollas keffiyeh…

Are you saying our brave men aren’t warriors?

If that’s 400 kg of water that is a very, very short man, like 2 foot tall.

It would weigh almost 900 pounds, but it wouldn’t take up much space.

You can’t bring your cube of uranium and your cube of water with you to summer camp, Malcolm

And there’d be radioactive contamination of the atmosphere detected by neighboring countries

I would recommend not putting al 400 Kg of 60% Enriched Uranium all in one box that size.

Yep. It's densely packed.