Now They Tell Me
Apparently I was living uncomfortably close to weapons-grade U-235 during my decade in Rochester, New York. CNN reports that Kodak confirms it had weapons-grade uranium in underground lab.
Kodak had a scanner that used 3½ pounds of U-235 refined to over 90% purity in a bunker at Kodak park on State Street. Experts tell us it wasn’t enough to construct a bomb, and people weren’t really in any danger because Kodak had security [pardon me while I roll on the floor laughing, due to having personal knowledge of the quality of people hired for Kodak security.]
So, it is OK for an American corporation to keep weapons-grade uranium inside a city, but Iran must be bombed for having uranium refined to 20% … Does that seem a bit inconsistent to anyone else?
Given what I was doing in the military before I got out and went to Rochester, I would have really liked to have known about living next to that crap. What you don’t know can kill you.
4 comments
That one had me doing a double-take also. But it made sense in retrospect, if you know anything at all about the classified work that Kodak did for the government back in the day. Well, I forget, us civilians aren’t supposed to know about that, but all it takes is following the technological threads to figure out they had to end at Kodak’s door because back in the day Kodak was the only American company that had that kind of expertise in imaging technology.
My suspicion is that the weapons-grade uranium was the least of what Kodak had down there in that basement. If someone had wanted to build a dirty bomb, Kodak had the fixin’s for it. But nowadays we have digital technology for all that stuff, and digital is a dime a dozen… so Kodak is bankrupt, and Intel is a money machine. So it goes.
I can’t work out why Kodak had this stuff. Perhaps George Eastman had developed a long term plan for world domination…
Our local community college had some plutonium (not weapons grade) for study back in the day. Realizing it no longer was needed, and was a large enough an amount to be of concern so not good to have around, my husband tried to find out the process for getting rid of it. After lengthy discussions with local and state officials, he realized nobody knew how to deal with it. as they kept on suggesting somebody (anybody!) else. Los Alamos finally sent someone out to collect it.
I understand that it was used in neutrino scanning of new materials to check on their properties, and was probably useful for testing things that were subject to the radiation encountered on satellites, but Kodak owned a lot of property that wasn’t in the city limits of Rochester.
With Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Xerox, et al. in Rochester, there was a lot of research on everything optical. Some of the materials used in producing film was not exactly benign, although it rarely exploded like some of the early film stock. My concern was that public safety people in Monroe County didn’t know about a potential radioactive hazard, and weren’t prepared to deal with it if there was a problem. It is the sort of thing that fire and police officials want to know about before something happens. They at least want to know who to call to deal with it.
You make the same valid point, Ellroon – who is responsible for it, and what do you do with it when it no longer serves any purpose?
Actually, Jams, George Eastman’s last big project to make health care affordable for everyone in Monroe County by forcing the health insurance people and health care providers to control costs. It was a rare person in the county who wasn’t covered, and a rare job that didn’t throw in a Blue Cross – Blue Shield plan for even part-time workers. Sadly, no one ever expanded what he did, and it has collapsed after his passing, and the passing of most of the large corporations that called Rochester home, Kodak just being the last.
The real shame, Badtux, is that Kodak owns some of the earliest and most basic patents for digital imaging technology, but the corporate decision makers didn’t want to invest any money in anything that was a threat to their cash-cow film business. Xerox ignored everything that their Palo Alto Research Center was doing because it wasn’t important to their copier business. These are the people everyone is supposed to respect because they are ‘the job creators’?!