The Pink Flamingo :: Saddam's Yellow Cake

Have you heard the little tid bit that something like 500 tons of Yellow Cake has been transported out of Iraq to Montreal?

Now what?

Is it possible Valerie Plame lied?

Who's telling the truth now?

Why the heck did it take so long to get this story into a little bit of the news?

Is anyone going to notice?

h/t Wizbang

Yellowcake is defined as:

"...Yellowcakes (also called urania) are uranium concentrates obtained from leach solutions. They represent an intermediate step in the processing of uranium ores. Yellowcake concentrates are prepared by various extraction and refining methods, depending on the types of ores. Typically yellowcakes are obtained through the milling and chemical processing of uranium ore forming a coarse powder which is insoluble in water and contains about 80% uranium oxide and which melts at approximately 2878°C.

The ore is first crushed to a fine powder by passing raw uranium ore through crushers and grinders to produce "pulped" ore. This is further processed with concentrated acid, alkaline, or peroxide solutions to leach out the uranium. Yellowcake is what remains after drying and filtering. The yellowcake produced by most modern mills is actually brown or black, not yellow; the name comes from the colour and texture of the concentrates produced by early mining operations.

Initially, the compounds formed in yellowcakes were not identified; in 1970, the U.S. Bureau of Mines still referred to yellowcakes as the final precipitate formed in the milling process and considered it to be ammonium diuranate or sodium diuranate. The compositions were variable and depended upon the leachant and subsequent precipitating conditions. Among the compounds identified in yellowcakes include: uranyl hydroxide, uranyl sulfate, sodium para-uranate, and uranyl peroxide, along with various uranium oxides. Modern yellowcake typically contains 70 to 90 percent triuranium octoxide (U3O8) by weight. (Other uranium oxides, such as uranium dioxide (UO2) and uranium trioxide (UO3), exist)

Yellowcake is used in the preparation of fuel for nuclear reactors, where it is processed into purified UO2 for use in fuel rods for PHWR and other systems using unenriched uranium. It may also be enriched, by being converted to uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6), by isotope separation through gaseous diffusion or in a gas centrifuge to produce enriched uranium suitable for use in weapons and reactors.
Yellowcake is produced by all countries in which uranium is mined...."

American Thinker

"...This is where the yellow cake story became a club that the CIA could bash the Administration over the head with. Never mind that Saddam already had 500 tons of the stuff on hand just waiting for the world to turn its back so that it could be used to jump start his nuclear program. And since the intelligence regarding Saddam's further efforts to purchase uranium was partially discredited, the President's opponents at the agency thought they saw an opening. Already under fire for missing the 9/11 plot thus making that tragedy the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, the hyper sensitivity of the CIA to criticism would now manifest itself into an attack on its more vocal critics in the Administration.

One of the most underreported aspects of this scandal has been the hostility by a faction in the CIA toward the White House during the period following the discovery that weapons of mass destruction were not to be found in Iraq. This kind of bureaucratic infighting is usually too arcane a subject for most people to pay much attention to. However, in this case, there appears to be a measure of partisan politics on the part of CIA personnel thrown into the mix in addition to the very human impulse to shift blame for failure.

The Wall Street Journal commented on this conflict in an editorial on September 29 following a selective leak of a CIA report predicting post—war instability in Iraq. Not only was the leak a brazen attempt by the CIA to embarass the administration, but the fact that it came two days before the first debate between the President and Senator Kerry was evidence that this faction in the CIA was determined to affect the election....Was Valerie Plame a part of this faction? In his column naming her as a CIA employee, Robert Novak describes her as an 'operative on weapons of mass destruction.' Since most of the leaks coming from the CIA faction at war with the White House involved the analysis of the WMD threat from Iraq, it's tempting to connect the dots and say that Plame was part of a group that wished to, at the very least, prove that the CIA was not as wrong about WMD in Iraq as some in the Administration were saying. At worst, Mrs. Wilson may have been a party to an effort to influence an election by trying to embarass the President.

And by connecting the dots between Mrs. Wilson and other agency rebels who sought to take down the President, doesn't this open up a whole slew of questions about Mr. Wilson? The former ambassador has been portraying himself as a whistleblower. What if he was an errand boy instead? Wilson, by virtue of his former employment at the State Department could be the perfect front man for a propoganda campaign by his wife's employer to shift blame for the WMD fiasco from the agency's incompetence to the neoconservative hawks and their rush to war.

Another question raised by this effort of the CIA to discredit the President is about the complaint filed with the Justice Department by the agency when Mrs. Wilson's "cover" was blown..."