With the price of metals such as copper and lead soaring to record highs, metal theft in Britain has reached epic proportions. Church roofs, heating pipes, railings, and bronze statues are among the items pilfered by thieves and sold to scrap metal dealers.In other news, a bomb blast in the Somali city of Baidoa killed at least twelve people. The Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack.
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4 comments:
Regarding the Fukushima item, BWRs do not and cannot use weapon-grade uranium (90% U-235 enriched). They use low-enriched uranium fuel (3-5% U-235) or MOX fuel which has similar proportions of fissile material. The proportion of fissile material in spent fuel is even lower, so claims about 460t of nearly weapon-grade uranium are bogus. On top of this, the author drags in 'thermonuclear' by the ears, presumably for the scare effect, when no thermonuclear fuel (deuteride lithium) is around, gives incorrect figures (critical mass of both U-235 and Pu-239 is much larger than 10 pounds)... The situation at Fukushima is bad enough without such scaremongering, and shoddy scaremongering at that!
Re: stealing of copper and lead:
This started happening in the central valley of CA when the EPA turned the water off to some of the most productive farmland in the world. They did this under the premise that the "snail darter" a bait fish that lives in the canals was now endangered.
Having driven through the area 15 years ago and seen the miles and miles of productive fruit and nut trees and comparing them to recent photos of totally dead fields it just makes me sick.
Rather than rounding up some snail darters and putting them in a protected habitat, the EPA decided to lay waste to thousands of acres of farmland leaving the owners and workers without a job. Unemployment in the area has been estimated at 60% and the housing market has entirely collapsed.
It is absolutely no wonder that the copper and other metals are being stolen from street lights and abandoned homes.
Victor David Hanson has documented this thoroughly.
My only hope is that we will get a new administration and they will stop the insanity. Even then, it will take over five years for the agriculture industry to recover.
Phyllis Schlafly has an interesting piece posted today regarding many of our charter schools and the acquisition of them by a Turkish Muslim who is using them to indoctrinate American children. They actually have long waiting lists for some of them. They are run by foreigners. While we need to provide alternatives to the corrupt and inadequate public school system, we need to treat this issue very carefully. http://townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/2012/04/10/phyllis_schlafly
Copper is not "soaring to record highs". This is a common misconception broadcast by the media. Its price may have increased, but when you consider its absolute level, the only conclusion you can draw is that it is dirt cheap.
Last time I checked, copper was 7 euros per kilo. That's much cheaper than many common household goods : meat, paint, washing powder, electronic products...
And that's the legitimate price. Not the probably deeply discounted price at which thieves have to sell obviously stolen goods to shady dealers.
When the media blame copper theft on its "record price", it suggests that the thieves are not really responsible for their acts. All this precious copper left outside, and you wonder it gets stolen ?
What the tide of copper and metal theft sweeping the West really shows is the tremendous increase in the number of criminally-minded people.
And not all of them are "dowtrodden Gypsies" or "poor people". In France, two thieves stealing vast quantities of copper from the national railway's premises have just been caught. They are railway workers, and are therefore enjoying (very likely) lifetime employment courtesy of the French taxpayer.
The scrap metal dealer who had bought the stuff had been shown an official permit from the national railway company.
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