the FAKE-GOLD STANDARD
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spectre
Oct 19, 2012, 2:41:03 PM10/19/12
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http://spectrevision.net/2012/09/28/the-fake-gold-standard/
FILLED with TUNGSTEN? (or DEPLETED URANIUM?)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/tungsten-filled-10-oz-gold-bar-found-middle-manhattans-jewelry-district
Tungsten-Filled 10 Oz Gold Bar Found In The Middle Of Manhattan's
Jewelry District
by Tyler Durden / 09/18/2012
It is one thing for tungsten-filled gold bars to appear in the UK, or
inGermany: after all out of sight, and across the Atlantic, certainly
must mean out of mind, and out of the safe. However, when a 10 ounce
999.9 gold bar bearing the stamp of the reputable Swiss Produits
Artistiques Métaux Précieux (PAMP, with owner MTP) and a serial number
(serial#038892, likely rehypothecated in at least 10 gold ETFs across
the world but that's a different story), mysteriously emerges in the
heart of the world's jewerly district located on 47th street in
Manhattan, things get real quick. Moments ago, Myfoxny reported that a
10-ounce gold bar costing nearly $18,000 turned out to be a
counterfeit. The discovery was made by the dealer Ibrahim Fadl, who
bought the PAMP bar in question from a merchant who has sold him real
gold before. "But he heard counterfeit gold bars were going around, so
he drilled into several of his gold bars worth $100,000 and saw gray
tungsten -- not gold. The bar was filled with tungsten, which weighs
nearly the same as gold but costs just over a dollar an ounce."
What makes so devious is a real gold bar is purchased with the serial
numbers and papers, then it is hollowed out, the gold is sold, the
tungsten is put in, then the bar is closed up. That is a sophisticated
operation. MTB, the Swiss manufacturer of the gold bars, said
customers should only buy from a reputable merchant. The problem, he
admits, is Ibrahim Fadl is a very reputable merchant. Raymond Nessim,
CEO Manfra, Tordell & Brookes, said he has reported the situation to
the FBI and Secret Service. The Secret Service, which deals with
counterfeits, said it is investigating.
And cue panic on the realization that virtually any gold bar in the
world, not just those in Europe and Australia, which have already had
close encounters with Tungsten substitutes, but also New York may be
hollowed out and have a real worth of a few dollars max. Which, sadly,
is fitting considering our main story from last night was the
realization that an unknown amount of Chinese iron ore had either
never existed or had simply vaporized, and was no longer serving as
the secured collateral to various liabilities circulating in the
electronic ether. After all, only the most naive out there could
conceive of gold being sacrosanct when every other asset class is
being diluted to infinity by a regime that has long since run out of
money. As for gold-based transactions on West 47th street: look for
that market to grind to a halt at least for as long as it takes for
this scandal to be forgotten too. The only open question remaining
will be how much of the gold located 90 feet below Liberty 33 is in
the same Tungstenized format. For what it's worth: it is unlikely we
will ever find out.
ONGOING
http://www.gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
Tungsten-Filled 1 Kilo Gold Bar Found In The UK
by Tyler Durden on 03/24/2012
The last time a story of Tungsten-filled gold appeared on the scene
was just two years ago, and involved a 500 gram bar of gold full of
tungsten, at the W.C. Heraeus foundry, the world's largest metal
refiner and fabricator. It also became known that said "gold" bar
originated from an unnamed bank. It is now time to rekindle the
Tungsten Spirits with a report from ABC Bullion of Australia, which
provides photographic evidence of a new gold bar that has been drilled
out and filled with tungsten rods, this time not in Germany but in an
unnamed city in the UK, where it was intercepted by a scrap metals
dealer, and was supplied with its original certificate. The reason the
bar attracted attention is that it was 2 grams underweight. Upon
cropping it was uncovered that about 30-40% of the bar weight was
tungsten. So two documented incidents in two years: isolated? Or
indication of the same phenomonenon of precious metal debasement that
marked the declining phase of the Roman empire. Only then it was
relatively public for anyone who cared to find out on their own. Now,
with the bulk of popular physical gold held in top secret, private
warehouses around the world, where it allegedly backs the balance
sheets of the world's central banks, yet nobody can confirm its
existence, nor audit the actual gold content, it is understandable why
increasingly more are wondering: just how much gold is there? And
alongside that - while gold, (or is it GLD?), can be rehypothecated,
can one do the same with tungsten?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FvM_4B7Pkc
From ABC Bullion:
ABC Bullion received the following email from one of our trusted
suppliers this week. Attached are photographs of a legitimate Metalor
1000gm Au bar that has been drilled out and filled with Tungsten (W).
This bar was purchased by staff of a scrap dealer in xxxxx, UK
yesterday. The bar appeared to be perfect other than the fact that it
was 2gms underweight. It was checked by hand-held xrf and showed
99.98% Au. Being Tungsten, it would not be ferro-magnetic. The bar was
supplied with the original certificate. The owner of the business that
purchased the bar only became suspicious when he realized the weight
discrepancy and had the bar cropped. He estimates between 30-40% of
the weight of the bar to be Tungsten. This is very worrying and
reinforces the lengths that people are willing to go to profit from
the current high metal prices. Please be careful.
MEANWHILE : 80% of WORLD's GOLD DOESN'T EXIST
http://www.wealthwire.com/news/metals/3397
80% of the Gold the World Owns Doesn't Exist
by Mark O'Byrne / June 22nd, 2012
Chris Powell, Secretary and Treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Action
Committee told Bernie Lo on CNBC Asia overnight that central banks are
continuing to manipulate the gold market as they are interested in
supporting government bonds and the dollar and keeping interest rates
low. Powell warns about “paper gold” and says that we “try to persuade
investors that if they are purchasing gold, they had better get real
gold – metal. They should not get “paper gold” and keep it within the
banking system.” He says that “there is huge naked short position in
gold” and estimates that perhaps “75% to 80% of the gold that the
world thinks it owns does not exist and is just a claim on a bullion
bank that is underwritten basically by the central banks.”
Bernie Lo asks what is the “end result”? With regard to price Powell
said that he does not make predictions but he wonders “what the value
or the price of gold will be if the world ever discovers that 80% of
the gold that it thinks it owns – does not exist. There may not be
enough zeros in the world to put behind the gold price then.” Powell
said that buyers should own gold in “your hand”or in allocated format
outside of the banking system. He concluded by saying that
surreptitious intervention in the gold market can continue as long as
gold buyers do not own real physical bullion. We do not endorse GATA’s
opinions however some of their evidence and many of their arguments
are persuasive. We have yet to see any analyst or commentator address
the substantive issues they have raised and debunk or refute their
allegations. Free markets need freedom of speech and a plurality of
opinion. Group think and cosy consensus got us into today’s the
financial and economic mess. Therefore, open, frank and rational
debate about all aspects of the precious metal and other markets and
our current monetary system is important. Being fully informed of all
of the facts and fundamentals driving markets are essential in order
to protect and grow wealth.
SPACE GOLD
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7397200
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7363/full/nature10399.html
http://io9.com/5838101/all-our-gold-was-brought-here-by-asteroids
All our gold was brought here by asteroids
by Alasdair Wilkins / Sep 7, 2011
This may sound strange, but there's simply too much gold. That is,
there shouldn't be gold here at the Earth's crust - it all should have
been sucked deep into the core long ago. For that, we can thank
asteroids. Gold is one of the precious metals, along with platinum,
silver, palladium, iridium, and a bunch of others. While these metals
do have a few industrial uses, they're mostly valuable simply because
they're rare and they happen to make for pretty jewelry. (That may be
a slight oversimplification.) The strange thing isn't that these
metals are rare, but that there are any of these metals at all. The
reason for this is that the precious metals tend to be attracted to
iron. Over the lifetime of our planet, the naturally occurring
precious metals should have been sucked towards places with high
concentrations of iron. That means all the way down to the planet's
molten iron core. And while it isn't exactly impossible that some of
these metals would simply be left behind, that could only account for
about a ten-thousandth of all the existing precious metals.
Now researchers at the University of Bristol might have found a
solution. They ran some high-precision tests on rocks found in
Greenland. These rocks date back about four billion years and are the
remnants of asteroids. The nature of the tungsten isotopes found
within these rocks support the idea that asteroids carried a second
round of precious metals to Earth billions of years ago, long after
the original metals had been subsumed into the core. So then, it
wasn't just gold that people spent lifetimes chasing after - it was
space gold. It's also an interesting reminder of how Earth is never
truly isolated from the rest of the universe. Of course, that idea is
hardly in dispute - it's looking increasingly likely that asteroids
also brought water and the building blocks of life to Earth - but this
is a unique case in which ancient asteroids helped shape our recent
history. After all, without this space gold, what the hell would be
the point of playing Yukon Trail? I'm sure there are other historical
factors to consider, but really, that strikes me as the most
important.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oURCIDfhDQ
HOW to MAKE CONVINCING FAKE-GOLD BARS
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-03/how-make-convincing-fake-gold-bars#
by Theo Gray / 03.14.2008
"On Wednesday, the BBC reported that millions of dollars in gold at
the central bank of Ethiopia has turned out to be fake: What were
supposed to be bars of solid gold turned out to be nothing more than
gold-plated steel. They tried to sell the stuff to South Africa and it
was sent back when the South Africans noticed this little problem.
This is an amazing story for two reasons. First, that an institution
like a central bank could get ripped off this way, and second that the
people responsible used such a lousy excuse for fake gold. I consider
myself something of an expert on fake gold (I'm not really, I just
think I am) ever since I was asked to give advice on the subject to
the author Damien Lewis for his recent thriller, Cobra Gold. I worked
out in detail for him how you could make really convincing fake gold,
and ended up as a minor character in the novel, where I am known as
"Goldfinger Gus".
The problem with making good-quality fake gold is that gold is
remarkably dense. It's almost twice the density of lead, and two-and-a-
half times more dense than steel. You don't usually notice this
because small gold rings and the like don't weigh enough to make it
obvious, but if you've ever held a larger bar of gold, it's absolutely
unmistakable: The stuff is very, very heavy. The standard gold bar for
bank-to-bank trade, known as a "London good delivery bar" weighs 400
troy ounces (over thirty-three pounds), yet is no bigger than a
paperback novel. A bar of steel the same size would weigh only
thirteen and a half pounds. According to the news, the authorities
have arrested pretty much everyone involved, from the people who sold
the bank the gold, to bank officials, to the chemists responsible for
testing and approving it on receipt.
The problem is, anyone who so much as picked up one of these bars
should have known immediately that they were fake, no fancy test
required. The weight alone is an instant dead giveaway. Even a
forklift operator lifting a palette full of them should have noticed
that his machine wasn't working hard enough. I think they must have
been swapped out while in storage: Someone walked in each day with a
new fake gold bar and walked out with a real one. If they were fake on
arrival then everyone who handled them in any way must have either had
no experience with gold or been in on the scam. Now, for me the more
interesting question is, how do you make a fake gold bar that at least
passes the pick-it-up test? The problem is that there are very few
metals that are as dense as gold, and with only two exceptions they
all cost as much or more than gold. The first exception is depleted
uranium, which is cheap if you're a government, but hard for
individuals to get. It's also radioactive, which could be a bit of an
issue.
The second exception is a real winner: tungsten. Tungsten is vastly
cheaper than gold (maybe $30 dollars a pound compared to $12,000 a
pound for gold right now). And remarkably, it has exactly the same
density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are
that it's the wrong color, and that it's much, much harder than gold.
(Very pure gold is quite soft, you can dent it with a fingernail.) A
top-of-the-line fake gold bar should match the color, surface
hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly.
To do this, you could could start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch
smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-
inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right
in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it
would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right
amount, and though I don't know this for sure, I think it would also
pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16" layer of pure gold being
enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You'd pretty
much have to drill it to find out it's fake. (Unless, of course,
central bank gold inspectors are wise to this trick and have developed
a test for it: Something involving speed of sound say, or more
powerful x-rays, or perhaps neutron activation analysis. If bars like
this are actually a common problem, you certainly could devise a
quick, non-destructive test for them, and for all I know, they have.
Except, apparently, in Ethiopia.)
Such a top-quality fake London good delivery bar would cost about
$50,000 to produce because it's got a lot of real gold in it, but
you'd still make a nice profit considering that a real one is worth
closer to $400,000. A lower budget version could be made by using the
same under-sized tungsten slug but casting lead-antimony alloy around
it (to match the hardness, sound, and feel of gold), then
electroplating on a heavy coating of gold. Such a bar would still feel
and sound right and be only very slightly underweight, while costing
less than $500 to produce in quantity. It would not pass x-ray
fluorescence, and whether it passes a chemical test would depend on
how thick the electroplating is. This is the solution I recommended
for Cobra Gold, because they only needed their fake gold to pass a
field inspection, which is to say, someone picking it up and knowing
what gold should feel like when you lift it. You may quibble for other
aspects of the plot if you like, but I think the fake gold would have
worked. And let me tell you, it's a sad day for criminal masterminds
when my fictional fake gold, designed only to trick a terrorist cell,
is so much better than the real fake gold used to rip off a real
government bank for millions of real dollars."
DIY
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2005-05/make-everything-golden
Make Everything Golden
Using sheets so thin they're measured in atoms
by Theodore Gray / 05.03.2005
Dept.: Gray Matter
Element: Gold
Project: Gilding
Cost: $60
Time: One hour
Malleable things can be hammered thinner without breaking; ductile
things can be stretched thinner without snapping. Every material has
its limit, but with gold, that limit is just a few hundred atoms
thick. Gold is the most malleable and the most ductile of all metals.
A cube of it about 21/2 inches on edge could be beaten out to cover an
entire football field (at a cost of roughly $68,000, plus beating
fees). Gold this thin is called gold leaf, and the ancient art of
applying it for decoration is called gilding.
How thin is gold leaf? Using my steel rolling mill, I can make gold
foil about one thousandth of an inch thick, similar to aluminum foil.
Thin, sure, but gold leaf is nearly 500 times as thin as that. Only
then does it become affordable enough and flexible enough to be used
almost like paint to cover finely detailed carvings or anything else
you want to be shiny for years to come. To make gold leaf, start with
gold foil, interleave a few dozen squares of it with layers of special
vellum (so the foil sheets don´t stick to one another), and beat the
heck out of the stack with a 16-pound hammer for many hours, turning
the squares into larger squares of thinner foil. Then cut the sheets
in quarters, restack them, and pound them out again. The malleability
of gold is what allows the sheets to just keep getting thinner and
thinner without splitting. (OK, I admit, I tried and failed at this.
Just haven´t got the arm for it. Or the proper vellum, or the family
secrets handed down over generations. Making gold leaf is, like other
ancient arts, not quite the garage project it might seem.)
Gilding, on the other hand, is not a particularly difficult skill. To
gild a home-run baseball, I used commercially prepared gold leaf from
an art-supply store. The process is simple: Paint the object with a
sticky liquid called gold size, lay the sheets of gold leaf on, and
rub them in. The catch is the part where you try to pick up the leaf.
Don´t even think about using your fingers-this stuff is more like a
soap bubble than a sheet of metal and will start wrapping around your
fingers and then tear the instant you try to unwrap it. Brushes known
as gilders´ tips, made of red-squirrel hair (none of that gray-
squirrel crap, mind you) are used to pick up the sheets by static
electricity. It takes a delicate touch, but at $2 per four-inch-by-
four-inch sheet, you´re motivated to learn fast.
Gold leaf instantly welds to itself. Overlapping layers fuse together
invisibly when rubbed in, so even if you´re sloppy, the end result
will look smooth. It´s OK to touch it with your fingers at this point
because the gold size will hold it in place. Gilded objects survive
from 5,000 years ago (think King Tut´s mask), proving that gold is
impervious to air, water, alkalis and most acids, no matter how thin
it is.
1. Mini rolling mill squeezes one gram of gold into foil, which is
still about 500 times as thick as gold leaf.
2. Gold leaf held to a squirrel-hair brush by static electricity,
ready to be applied.
http://www.nbe.gov.et/
http://www.geology.gov.et/
GOLD-PLATED STEEL
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7294665.stm
Fake fears over Ethiopia's gold
by Elizabeth Blunt / 13 March 2008
The price of real gold is currently soaring
Ethiopia's national bank has been told to inspect all the gold in its
vaults to determine its authenticity. It follows the discovery that
some of the "gold" it had bought for millions of dollars was gold-
plated steel. The first hint that something was wrong reportedly came
when the Ethiopian central bank exported a consignment of gold bars to
South Africa. The South Africans sent them back, complaining that they
had been sold gilded steel. An investigation revealed that the bank
had bought a consignment of fake gold from a supplier, who is now
under
arrest.
Other arrests followed, including business associates of the main
accused; national bank officials; and chemists from the Geological
Survey of Ethiopia, whose job it is to assay the bank's purchases of
gold and certify that they are real. But what has clearly now got the
government even more worried is that another different batch of gold
in the bank's vaults has also been found to be fake, and this time it
was gold which had been there for several years, after being seized
from smugglers trying to take it to Djibouti.
Mining
The Ethiopian parliament's budget and finance committee ordered the
inspection of all gold in the national bank's vaults. A report from
the auditor-general on the affair is expected to be presented to
parliament during its current session. Gold is mined in Ethiopia in
considerable quantities, and a trader selling gold to the central bank
has to have it tested and certified by the Geological Survey. Whether
the bank bought fake gold in the first place, or whether real gold
from the vaults has been swapped for gilded steel, the fraud has cost
the bank many millions of dollars, and it must have involved collusion
on a considerable scale.
RADIOACTIVE GOLD
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/metals14.htm
Gold May Have Too Much Glow
by Joby Warrick / August 14, 1999
It was one of the most secretive missions at a factory that was all
about secrecy: Nuclear warheads, retired from service and destined for
the junkyard, were trucked at night to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion
Plant to be dismantled, hacked into unrecognizable pieces and buried.
Workers used hammers and acetylene torches to strip away bits of gold
and other metals from the warheads' corrosion-proof plating and
circuitry. Useless parts were dumped into trenches. But the gold -
some of it still radioactive - was tossed into a smelter and molded
into shiny ingots.
Exactly what happened next is one of the most intriguing questions to
arise from a workers' lawsuit against the former operators of the U.S.-
owned uranium plant in western Kentucky. Three employees contend that
the plant failed for years to properly screen gold and other metals
for radioactivity. Some metals, they say, may have been highly
radioactive when they left Paducah, bound perhaps for private markets.
The claim - based partly on circumstantial evidence - is now being
investigated by Department of Energy officials who are also probing
the workers' accounts of plutonium contamination and alleged illegal
dumping of radioactive waste at the uranium plant. "It is my belief
that these recycled metals were injected into commerce in a
contaminated form," Ronald Fowler, a radiation safety technician at
the plant, states in court documents that were unsealed this week by
the Justice Department.
The investigation comes amid heightened scrutiny of government efforts
to recycle valuable metals piling up at more than 16 factories that
are part of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. In the past week,
congressional leaders, industry officials and scores of environmental
groups have called on the Clinton administration to reconsider a
controversial Department of Energy program to recycle scrap metal from
nuclear weapons facilities into products that could end up in
household goods or even children's braces.
Opponents' concerns soared this week with revelations, first reported
in The Washington Post, that plutonium and other highly radioactive
metals slipped into the Paducah plant over a 23-year period in
shipments of contaminated uranium. The plutonium accumulated over
decades in nickel-plated pipes where uranium was processed into fuel
for bombs, government documents show. Smaller amounts of tainted
uranium went to sister plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Portsmouth,
Ohio, the records show.
Scrap nickel from those plants is now the primary target of the Energy
Department's metal recycling program, which would be run jointly by
the federal government, the state of Tennessee and a private
contractor, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL). "If DOE denied or
didn't know plutonium was present at Paducah, why should we trust them
to release waste from identical production plants into products
ranging from intrauterine devices to hip replacements?" asked Wenonah
Hauter of the watchdog group Public Citizen, one of 185 organizations
to sign a letter to Vice President Gore Thursday demanding a halt to
the program.
Recovering gold and other valuable metals from retired nuclear weapons
had been a little-known mission of the government's uranium enrichment
plants over the past five decades. At Paducah, the process began in
the 1950s and was conducted under extraordinary security, with heavily
armed guards escorting warheads into the plant under cover of
darkness. Garland "Bud" Jenkins, one of three Paducah workers involved
in the lawsuit filed under seal in June, says he worked for several
years in Paducah's metals program recovering gold, lead, aluminum and
nickel from nuclear weapons and production equipment. "We melted the
gold flakes in a furnace to create gold bars," Jenkins said in court
documents. "The gold was never surveyed radiologically prior to its
release, to my knowledge."
Jenkins also says he never saw tests performed on nickel and aluminum
ingots that were hauled out of the plant in trucks. In later years,
when plant managers did begin screening the metals, many were found to
be contaminated, he said. Hundreds of nickel ingots are still stored
at the plant, too tainted to go anywhere, he said. A plant report
included in the lawsuit filings may shed light on the degree of
contamination in the gold. In a radiological survey of the plant last
year, technicians discovered gold flakes inside an old ingot mold used
for gold recovery. The fish scale-sized flakes were tested and found
to emit radiation at a rate of 500 millirems an hour, the report said.
By comparison, the average person receives between 200 and 300
millirems each year from all sources, including X-rays, radon gas and
cosmic radiation from space. "If you had a wedding ring made out of
those flakes you'd be getting twice as much radiation in an hour as
most people get in a year," said Joseph R. Egan, a lawyer representing
the employees.
Fowler, the radiation safety technician, said he filed a report on the
discovery of the radioactive gold in December but received no response
from the plant's management. Nothing further was done to investigate
"the possibility that [the plant] may have contaminated the nation's
gold supply" at Fort Knox, he said. Plant officials shed little light
on the process. U.S. Enrichment Corp., the plant's current operator,
says gold recovery at Paducah was the responsibility of the Energy
Department. Department officials, in a response to written questions
from The Post, acknowledged that gold was recovered from nuclear
weapons at Paducah. But, "since these actions occurred many years ago,
information regarding their past dispositions is not readily
available," the statement said.
In a letter to Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.)., department officials
strongly defended their efforts to salvage nickel and other valuable
metals that have been piling up at nuclear complex sites for years.
"Let me assure you that the safety of the public and workers and
compliance with state and federal regulations are of paramount
importance," said Undersecretary of Energy T.J. Glauthier. Glauthier
said BNFL's license requires that "any metals released for
unrestricted use will not pose a risk to human health or the
environment."
The recycling program, announced in 1996 by Gore as part of his
"reinventing government" initiative, was touted at the time as a "win-
win" deal for the environment, industry and taxpayers. BNFL, which was
awarded the recycling contract in a noncompetitive bid, has already
begun recycling some of the 100,000 tons of radioactively contaminated
metal that were once part of the defunct K-25 complex at Oak Ridge,
the world's first full-scale uranium enrichment plant. Eventually the
program expanded to Paducah and other facilities.
Purifying nickel is technically difficult because the radioactive
contamination extends below the surface of the metal. According to
department officials, BNFL was awarded the contract because it has
developed a unique technology that can safely remove nearly all of the
contaminants. But opponents say the technology has never been proven
on such a large scale. Moreover, they note, there are no federal
standards for releasing contaminated metal into the marketplace.
Previous attempts to set such standards in the early 1990s were
abandoned because of public opposition.
And, opponents add, the lack of restrictions on the recycled metal
leaves the public in the dark about which products may have come from
contaminated scrap. Even if radioactivity levels are low, consumers
are entitled to an informed choice when buying materials that might be
used by children, activists said. "The DOE has admitted they can't
protect the safety of their workers and misled them," said Robert
Wages, executive vice president of the Paper, Allied-Industrial,
Chemical & Energy Workers International Union. "Now DOE wants to dump
radioactive metals into everything from baby rattles to zippers . . .
and tell us not to worry."
Because there are no federal standards, the Energy Department's
recycling program relies on the state of Tennessee to set guidelines
and regulate the process. In June, a federal judge sharply criticized
the arrangement, saying the DOE had effectively thwarted public debate
of an issue in which "the potential for environmental harm is great."
But U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler rejected an attempt by labor
and environmental groups to halt the recycling program, citing a law
that prohibits courts from delaying federal cleanup of contaminated
sites. Still, in unusually blunt language, the judge accused the
Energy Department of "startling and worrisome" behavior in its alleged
attempts to avoid federal oversight and public review. "There has been
no opportunity at all for public scrutiny or input on such a matter of
such grave importance," Kessler wrote in her opinion. "The lack of
public scrutiny is only compounded by the fact that the recycling
process which BNFL intends to use is entirely experimental at this
stage."
DEBASEMENT
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/charting-non-linearity-hyperinflation-and-predicting-americas-future-courtesy-ancient-histor:
from Paul Mylchreest
Let’s consider the run-up to Rome’s hyperinflation. I think this
comment from jaysromanhistory.com “Good Money, Bad Money, and Runaway
Inflation” resonates with what’s happening in the US today:
“Severus Alexander (AD 222-235) tried to reform by going back to the
denarius but, once started, this path of runaway inflation and
financial irresponsibility on the part of the imperial government
proved impossible to control.”
It also seems that the hyperinflation was preceded by some kind of
banking crisis, which is an interesting parallel. From “Demise and
Fall of the Augustan Monetary System” by Koenraad Verboven:
“Papyri show it was common for private individuals to deposit money at
a bank and to make and accept payments through bankers.Bankers in the
west disappear from view around the middle of the 3rd c… A famous
papyrus from Oxyrhynchus from 260 CE shows exchange bankers closing in
order to avoid having to change the ‘imperial money’. The strategos
ordered the exchange bankers to reopen and accept all genuine coins
and warned businessmen to do the same. In 266 CE we find for the first
time transactions being expressed in ‘ptolemaeic’ or ‘old silver’ as
opposed to ‘new silver’.”
The chart shows how inflation remained relatively subdued until a
tipping point was reached in the late- 260s A.D Monetary systems can
absorb substantial abuse before there is a dramatic impact on the
price level. For example, the debasement of the coinage was already
accelerating in the early part of the third century A.D., before
plunging in the latter part. Indeed, the chart below (apologies for
the quality) only shows the trend up to 253 AD. By around 290 AD, the
coins were only dipped in silver to give them a coating (<0.5%).
STILL ONE of the BEST CONSPIRACY THEORIES EVER : NO GOLD in FORT KNOX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Knox_Bullion_Depository
"A popular and recurring conspiracy theory, as alleged by Edward
Durrell, Norman Dodd, Tom Valentine, Peter Beter and others, claims
that the vault is mostly empty and that most of the gold in Fort Knox
was removed to London in the late 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.
[3] In response, on September 23, 1974, Senator Walter Huddleston of
Kentucky, twelve congressmen, and about 100 members of the news media
toured the vault and opened various cells and doors, each filled with
gold. Radio reporter Bill Evans, when asked if it seemed like the gold
might have been moved in just for the visit, replied that "all I can
say is that I saw gold there" and that it seemed like it was always
there.[4] Additionally, audits of the gold by the General Accounting
Office (in cooperation with the United States Mint and the United
States Customs Service in 1974 and the Treasury Department) from
1975-1981 found no discrepancies between the reported and actual
amounts of gold at the Depository.[5] However, the audit has been
described as a peculiar process because it was only a partial audit
done over an extended period of time.[6] The report states only 21
percent of the gold bars were audited as of 1981 (the audit report's
issue date) and that the audit has "covered more than 212.7 million
fine troy ounces of gold" which "represents over 80 percent of the
total amount of United States-owned gold of 264.1 million fine troy
ounces."[5] A small amount of gold is removed for regularly scheduled
audits to ensure the purity matches official records.[1] The theory
continues to persist, however. Of this alleged scandal, the ex-general
counsel of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, Peter Beter,
commented: "The Watergate scandal was child's play compared with the
covered-up Fort Knox Gold Scandal".[7]"
"INTERESTING SCIENCE FICTION"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Beter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rockefeller
http://www.peterdavidbeter.com/docs/all/dbal56.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyIoskufs9E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPslTZAqZPc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tge4UfbWPCY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXqEh_61c6Q
FILLED with TUNGSTEN? (or DEPLETED URANIUM?)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/tungsten-filled-10-oz-gold-bar-found-middle-manhattans-jewelry-district
Tungsten-Filled 10 Oz Gold Bar Found In The Middle Of Manhattan's
Jewelry District
by Tyler Durden / 09/18/2012
It is one thing for tungsten-filled gold bars to appear in the UK, or
inGermany: after all out of sight, and across the Atlantic, certainly
must mean out of mind, and out of the safe. However, when a 10 ounce
999.9 gold bar bearing the stamp of the reputable Swiss Produits
Artistiques Métaux Précieux (PAMP, with owner MTP) and a serial number
(serial#038892, likely rehypothecated in at least 10 gold ETFs across
the world but that's a different story), mysteriously emerges in the
heart of the world's jewerly district located on 47th street in
Manhattan, things get real quick. Moments ago, Myfoxny reported that a
10-ounce gold bar costing nearly $18,000 turned out to be a
counterfeit. The discovery was made by the dealer Ibrahim Fadl, who
bought the PAMP bar in question from a merchant who has sold him real
gold before. "But he heard counterfeit gold bars were going around, so
he drilled into several of his gold bars worth $100,000 and saw gray
tungsten -- not gold. The bar was filled with tungsten, which weighs
nearly the same as gold but costs just over a dollar an ounce."
What makes so devious is a real gold bar is purchased with the serial
numbers and papers, then it is hollowed out, the gold is sold, the
tungsten is put in, then the bar is closed up. That is a sophisticated
operation. MTB, the Swiss manufacturer of the gold bars, said
customers should only buy from a reputable merchant. The problem, he
admits, is Ibrahim Fadl is a very reputable merchant. Raymond Nessim,
CEO Manfra, Tordell & Brookes, said he has reported the situation to
the FBI and Secret Service. The Secret Service, which deals with
counterfeits, said it is investigating.
And cue panic on the realization that virtually any gold bar in the
world, not just those in Europe and Australia, which have already had
close encounters with Tungsten substitutes, but also New York may be
hollowed out and have a real worth of a few dollars max. Which, sadly,
is fitting considering our main story from last night was the
realization that an unknown amount of Chinese iron ore had either
never existed or had simply vaporized, and was no longer serving as
the secured collateral to various liabilities circulating in the
electronic ether. After all, only the most naive out there could
conceive of gold being sacrosanct when every other asset class is
being diluted to infinity by a regime that has long since run out of
money. As for gold-based transactions on West 47th street: look for
that market to grind to a halt at least for as long as it takes for
this scandal to be forgotten too. The only open question remaining
will be how much of the gold located 90 feet below Liberty 33 is in
the same Tungstenized format. For what it's worth: it is unlikely we
will ever find out.
ONGOING
http://www.gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
Tungsten-Filled 1 Kilo Gold Bar Found In The UK
by Tyler Durden on 03/24/2012
The last time a story of Tungsten-filled gold appeared on the scene
was just two years ago, and involved a 500 gram bar of gold full of
tungsten, at the W.C. Heraeus foundry, the world's largest metal
refiner and fabricator. It also became known that said "gold" bar
originated from an unnamed bank. It is now time to rekindle the
Tungsten Spirits with a report from ABC Bullion of Australia, which
provides photographic evidence of a new gold bar that has been drilled
out and filled with tungsten rods, this time not in Germany but in an
unnamed city in the UK, where it was intercepted by a scrap metals
dealer, and was supplied with its original certificate. The reason the
bar attracted attention is that it was 2 grams underweight. Upon
cropping it was uncovered that about 30-40% of the bar weight was
tungsten. So two documented incidents in two years: isolated? Or
indication of the same phenomonenon of precious metal debasement that
marked the declining phase of the Roman empire. Only then it was
relatively public for anyone who cared to find out on their own. Now,
with the bulk of popular physical gold held in top secret, private
warehouses around the world, where it allegedly backs the balance
sheets of the world's central banks, yet nobody can confirm its
existence, nor audit the actual gold content, it is understandable why
increasingly more are wondering: just how much gold is there? And
alongside that - while gold, (or is it GLD?), can be rehypothecated,
can one do the same with tungsten?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FvM_4B7Pkc
From ABC Bullion:
ABC Bullion received the following email from one of our trusted
suppliers this week. Attached are photographs of a legitimate Metalor
1000gm Au bar that has been drilled out and filled with Tungsten (W).
This bar was purchased by staff of a scrap dealer in xxxxx, UK
yesterday. The bar appeared to be perfect other than the fact that it
was 2gms underweight. It was checked by hand-held xrf and showed
99.98% Au. Being Tungsten, it would not be ferro-magnetic. The bar was
supplied with the original certificate. The owner of the business that
purchased the bar only became suspicious when he realized the weight
discrepancy and had the bar cropped. He estimates between 30-40% of
the weight of the bar to be Tungsten. This is very worrying and
reinforces the lengths that people are willing to go to profit from
the current high metal prices. Please be careful.
MEANWHILE : 80% of WORLD's GOLD DOESN'T EXIST
http://www.wealthwire.com/news/metals/3397
80% of the Gold the World Owns Doesn't Exist
by Mark O'Byrne / June 22nd, 2012
Chris Powell, Secretary and Treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Action
Committee told Bernie Lo on CNBC Asia overnight that central banks are
continuing to manipulate the gold market as they are interested in
supporting government bonds and the dollar and keeping interest rates
low. Powell warns about “paper gold” and says that we “try to persuade
investors that if they are purchasing gold, they had better get real
gold – metal. They should not get “paper gold” and keep it within the
banking system.” He says that “there is huge naked short position in
gold” and estimates that perhaps “75% to 80% of the gold that the
world thinks it owns does not exist and is just a claim on a bullion
bank that is underwritten basically by the central banks.”
Bernie Lo asks what is the “end result”? With regard to price Powell
said that he does not make predictions but he wonders “what the value
or the price of gold will be if the world ever discovers that 80% of
the gold that it thinks it owns – does not exist. There may not be
enough zeros in the world to put behind the gold price then.” Powell
said that buyers should own gold in “your hand”or in allocated format
outside of the banking system. He concluded by saying that
surreptitious intervention in the gold market can continue as long as
gold buyers do not own real physical bullion. We do not endorse GATA’s
opinions however some of their evidence and many of their arguments
are persuasive. We have yet to see any analyst or commentator address
the substantive issues they have raised and debunk or refute their
allegations. Free markets need freedom of speech and a plurality of
opinion. Group think and cosy consensus got us into today’s the
financial and economic mess. Therefore, open, frank and rational
debate about all aspects of the precious metal and other markets and
our current monetary system is important. Being fully informed of all
of the facts and fundamentals driving markets are essential in order
to protect and grow wealth.
SPACE GOLD
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7397200
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7363/full/nature10399.html
http://io9.com/5838101/all-our-gold-was-brought-here-by-asteroids
All our gold was brought here by asteroids
by Alasdair Wilkins / Sep 7, 2011
This may sound strange, but there's simply too much gold. That is,
there shouldn't be gold here at the Earth's crust - it all should have
been sucked deep into the core long ago. For that, we can thank
asteroids. Gold is one of the precious metals, along with platinum,
silver, palladium, iridium, and a bunch of others. While these metals
do have a few industrial uses, they're mostly valuable simply because
they're rare and they happen to make for pretty jewelry. (That may be
a slight oversimplification.) The strange thing isn't that these
metals are rare, but that there are any of these metals at all. The
reason for this is that the precious metals tend to be attracted to
iron. Over the lifetime of our planet, the naturally occurring
precious metals should have been sucked towards places with high
concentrations of iron. That means all the way down to the planet's
molten iron core. And while it isn't exactly impossible that some of
these metals would simply be left behind, that could only account for
about a ten-thousandth of all the existing precious metals.
Now researchers at the University of Bristol might have found a
solution. They ran some high-precision tests on rocks found in
Greenland. These rocks date back about four billion years and are the
remnants of asteroids. The nature of the tungsten isotopes found
within these rocks support the idea that asteroids carried a second
round of precious metals to Earth billions of years ago, long after
the original metals had been subsumed into the core. So then, it
wasn't just gold that people spent lifetimes chasing after - it was
space gold. It's also an interesting reminder of how Earth is never
truly isolated from the rest of the universe. Of course, that idea is
hardly in dispute - it's looking increasingly likely that asteroids
also brought water and the building blocks of life to Earth - but this
is a unique case in which ancient asteroids helped shape our recent
history. After all, without this space gold, what the hell would be
the point of playing Yukon Trail? I'm sure there are other historical
factors to consider, but really, that strikes me as the most
important.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oURCIDfhDQ
HOW to MAKE CONVINCING FAKE-GOLD BARS
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-03/how-make-convincing-fake-gold-bars#
by Theo Gray / 03.14.2008
"On Wednesday, the BBC reported that millions of dollars in gold at
the central bank of Ethiopia has turned out to be fake: What were
supposed to be bars of solid gold turned out to be nothing more than
gold-plated steel. They tried to sell the stuff to South Africa and it
was sent back when the South Africans noticed this little problem.
This is an amazing story for two reasons. First, that an institution
like a central bank could get ripped off this way, and second that the
people responsible used such a lousy excuse for fake gold. I consider
myself something of an expert on fake gold (I'm not really, I just
think I am) ever since I was asked to give advice on the subject to
the author Damien Lewis for his recent thriller, Cobra Gold. I worked
out in detail for him how you could make really convincing fake gold,
and ended up as a minor character in the novel, where I am known as
"Goldfinger Gus".
The problem with making good-quality fake gold is that gold is
remarkably dense. It's almost twice the density of lead, and two-and-a-
half times more dense than steel. You don't usually notice this
because small gold rings and the like don't weigh enough to make it
obvious, but if you've ever held a larger bar of gold, it's absolutely
unmistakable: The stuff is very, very heavy. The standard gold bar for
bank-to-bank trade, known as a "London good delivery bar" weighs 400
troy ounces (over thirty-three pounds), yet is no bigger than a
paperback novel. A bar of steel the same size would weigh only
thirteen and a half pounds. According to the news, the authorities
have arrested pretty much everyone involved, from the people who sold
the bank the gold, to bank officials, to the chemists responsible for
testing and approving it on receipt.
The problem is, anyone who so much as picked up one of these bars
should have known immediately that they were fake, no fancy test
required. The weight alone is an instant dead giveaway. Even a
forklift operator lifting a palette full of them should have noticed
that his machine wasn't working hard enough. I think they must have
been swapped out while in storage: Someone walked in each day with a
new fake gold bar and walked out with a real one. If they were fake on
arrival then everyone who handled them in any way must have either had
no experience with gold or been in on the scam. Now, for me the more
interesting question is, how do you make a fake gold bar that at least
passes the pick-it-up test? The problem is that there are very few
metals that are as dense as gold, and with only two exceptions they
all cost as much or more than gold. The first exception is depleted
uranium, which is cheap if you're a government, but hard for
individuals to get. It's also radioactive, which could be a bit of an
issue.
The second exception is a real winner: tungsten. Tungsten is vastly
cheaper than gold (maybe $30 dollars a pound compared to $12,000 a
pound for gold right now). And remarkably, it has exactly the same
density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are
that it's the wrong color, and that it's much, much harder than gold.
(Very pure gold is quite soft, you can dent it with a fingernail.) A
top-of-the-line fake gold bar should match the color, surface
hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly.
To do this, you could could start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch
smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-
inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right
in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it
would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right
amount, and though I don't know this for sure, I think it would also
pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16" layer of pure gold being
enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You'd pretty
much have to drill it to find out it's fake. (Unless, of course,
central bank gold inspectors are wise to this trick and have developed
a test for it: Something involving speed of sound say, or more
powerful x-rays, or perhaps neutron activation analysis. If bars like
this are actually a common problem, you certainly could devise a
quick, non-destructive test for them, and for all I know, they have.
Except, apparently, in Ethiopia.)
Such a top-quality fake London good delivery bar would cost about
$50,000 to produce because it's got a lot of real gold in it, but
you'd still make a nice profit considering that a real one is worth
closer to $400,000. A lower budget version could be made by using the
same under-sized tungsten slug but casting lead-antimony alloy around
it (to match the hardness, sound, and feel of gold), then
electroplating on a heavy coating of gold. Such a bar would still feel
and sound right and be only very slightly underweight, while costing
less than $500 to produce in quantity. It would not pass x-ray
fluorescence, and whether it passes a chemical test would depend on
how thick the electroplating is. This is the solution I recommended
for Cobra Gold, because they only needed their fake gold to pass a
field inspection, which is to say, someone picking it up and knowing
what gold should feel like when you lift it. You may quibble for other
aspects of the plot if you like, but I think the fake gold would have
worked. And let me tell you, it's a sad day for criminal masterminds
when my fictional fake gold, designed only to trick a terrorist cell,
is so much better than the real fake gold used to rip off a real
government bank for millions of real dollars."
DIY
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2005-05/make-everything-golden
Make Everything Golden
Using sheets so thin they're measured in atoms
by Theodore Gray / 05.03.2005
Dept.: Gray Matter
Element: Gold
Project: Gilding
Cost: $60
Time: One hour
Malleable things can be hammered thinner without breaking; ductile
things can be stretched thinner without snapping. Every material has
its limit, but with gold, that limit is just a few hundred atoms
thick. Gold is the most malleable and the most ductile of all metals.
A cube of it about 21/2 inches on edge could be beaten out to cover an
entire football field (at a cost of roughly $68,000, plus beating
fees). Gold this thin is called gold leaf, and the ancient art of
applying it for decoration is called gilding.
How thin is gold leaf? Using my steel rolling mill, I can make gold
foil about one thousandth of an inch thick, similar to aluminum foil.
Thin, sure, but gold leaf is nearly 500 times as thin as that. Only
then does it become affordable enough and flexible enough to be used
almost like paint to cover finely detailed carvings or anything else
you want to be shiny for years to come. To make gold leaf, start with
gold foil, interleave a few dozen squares of it with layers of special
vellum (so the foil sheets don´t stick to one another), and beat the
heck out of the stack with a 16-pound hammer for many hours, turning
the squares into larger squares of thinner foil. Then cut the sheets
in quarters, restack them, and pound them out again. The malleability
of gold is what allows the sheets to just keep getting thinner and
thinner without splitting. (OK, I admit, I tried and failed at this.
Just haven´t got the arm for it. Or the proper vellum, or the family
secrets handed down over generations. Making gold leaf is, like other
ancient arts, not quite the garage project it might seem.)
Gilding, on the other hand, is not a particularly difficult skill. To
gild a home-run baseball, I used commercially prepared gold leaf from
an art-supply store. The process is simple: Paint the object with a
sticky liquid called gold size, lay the sheets of gold leaf on, and
rub them in. The catch is the part where you try to pick up the leaf.
Don´t even think about using your fingers-this stuff is more like a
soap bubble than a sheet of metal and will start wrapping around your
fingers and then tear the instant you try to unwrap it. Brushes known
as gilders´ tips, made of red-squirrel hair (none of that gray-
squirrel crap, mind you) are used to pick up the sheets by static
electricity. It takes a delicate touch, but at $2 per four-inch-by-
four-inch sheet, you´re motivated to learn fast.
Gold leaf instantly welds to itself. Overlapping layers fuse together
invisibly when rubbed in, so even if you´re sloppy, the end result
will look smooth. It´s OK to touch it with your fingers at this point
because the gold size will hold it in place. Gilded objects survive
from 5,000 years ago (think King Tut´s mask), proving that gold is
impervious to air, water, alkalis and most acids, no matter how thin
it is.
1. Mini rolling mill squeezes one gram of gold into foil, which is
still about 500 times as thick as gold leaf.
2. Gold leaf held to a squirrel-hair brush by static electricity,
ready to be applied.
http://www.nbe.gov.et/
http://www.geology.gov.et/
GOLD-PLATED STEEL
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7294665.stm
Fake fears over Ethiopia's gold
by Elizabeth Blunt / 13 March 2008
The price of real gold is currently soaring
Ethiopia's national bank has been told to inspect all the gold in its
vaults to determine its authenticity. It follows the discovery that
some of the "gold" it had bought for millions of dollars was gold-
plated steel. The first hint that something was wrong reportedly came
when the Ethiopian central bank exported a consignment of gold bars to
South Africa. The South Africans sent them back, complaining that they
had been sold gilded steel. An investigation revealed that the bank
had bought a consignment of fake gold from a supplier, who is now
under
arrest.
Other arrests followed, including business associates of the main
accused; national bank officials; and chemists from the Geological
Survey of Ethiopia, whose job it is to assay the bank's purchases of
gold and certify that they are real. But what has clearly now got the
government even more worried is that another different batch of gold
in the bank's vaults has also been found to be fake, and this time it
was gold which had been there for several years, after being seized
from smugglers trying to take it to Djibouti.
Mining
The Ethiopian parliament's budget and finance committee ordered the
inspection of all gold in the national bank's vaults. A report from
the auditor-general on the affair is expected to be presented to
parliament during its current session. Gold is mined in Ethiopia in
considerable quantities, and a trader selling gold to the central bank
has to have it tested and certified by the Geological Survey. Whether
the bank bought fake gold in the first place, or whether real gold
from the vaults has been swapped for gilded steel, the fraud has cost
the bank many millions of dollars, and it must have involved collusion
on a considerable scale.
RADIOACTIVE GOLD
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/metals14.htm
Gold May Have Too Much Glow
by Joby Warrick / August 14, 1999
It was one of the most secretive missions at a factory that was all
about secrecy: Nuclear warheads, retired from service and destined for
the junkyard, were trucked at night to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion
Plant to be dismantled, hacked into unrecognizable pieces and buried.
Workers used hammers and acetylene torches to strip away bits of gold
and other metals from the warheads' corrosion-proof plating and
circuitry. Useless parts were dumped into trenches. But the gold -
some of it still radioactive - was tossed into a smelter and molded
into shiny ingots.
Exactly what happened next is one of the most intriguing questions to
arise from a workers' lawsuit against the former operators of the U.S.-
owned uranium plant in western Kentucky. Three employees contend that
the plant failed for years to properly screen gold and other metals
for radioactivity. Some metals, they say, may have been highly
radioactive when they left Paducah, bound perhaps for private markets.
The claim - based partly on circumstantial evidence - is now being
investigated by Department of Energy officials who are also probing
the workers' accounts of plutonium contamination and alleged illegal
dumping of radioactive waste at the uranium plant. "It is my belief
that these recycled metals were injected into commerce in a
contaminated form," Ronald Fowler, a radiation safety technician at
the plant, states in court documents that were unsealed this week by
the Justice Department.
The investigation comes amid heightened scrutiny of government efforts
to recycle valuable metals piling up at more than 16 factories that
are part of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. In the past week,
congressional leaders, industry officials and scores of environmental
groups have called on the Clinton administration to reconsider a
controversial Department of Energy program to recycle scrap metal from
nuclear weapons facilities into products that could end up in
household goods or even children's braces.
Opponents' concerns soared this week with revelations, first reported
in The Washington Post, that plutonium and other highly radioactive
metals slipped into the Paducah plant over a 23-year period in
shipments of contaminated uranium. The plutonium accumulated over
decades in nickel-plated pipes where uranium was processed into fuel
for bombs, government documents show. Smaller amounts of tainted
uranium went to sister plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Portsmouth,
Ohio, the records show.
Scrap nickel from those plants is now the primary target of the Energy
Department's metal recycling program, which would be run jointly by
the federal government, the state of Tennessee and a private
contractor, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL). "If DOE denied or
didn't know plutonium was present at Paducah, why should we trust them
to release waste from identical production plants into products
ranging from intrauterine devices to hip replacements?" asked Wenonah
Hauter of the watchdog group Public Citizen, one of 185 organizations
to sign a letter to Vice President Gore Thursday demanding a halt to
the program.
Recovering gold and other valuable metals from retired nuclear weapons
had been a little-known mission of the government's uranium enrichment
plants over the past five decades. At Paducah, the process began in
the 1950s and was conducted under extraordinary security, with heavily
armed guards escorting warheads into the plant under cover of
darkness. Garland "Bud" Jenkins, one of three Paducah workers involved
in the lawsuit filed under seal in June, says he worked for several
years in Paducah's metals program recovering gold, lead, aluminum and
nickel from nuclear weapons and production equipment. "We melted the
gold flakes in a furnace to create gold bars," Jenkins said in court
documents. "The gold was never surveyed radiologically prior to its
release, to my knowledge."
Jenkins also says he never saw tests performed on nickel and aluminum
ingots that were hauled out of the plant in trucks. In later years,
when plant managers did begin screening the metals, many were found to
be contaminated, he said. Hundreds of nickel ingots are still stored
at the plant, too tainted to go anywhere, he said. A plant report
included in the lawsuit filings may shed light on the degree of
contamination in the gold. In a radiological survey of the plant last
year, technicians discovered gold flakes inside an old ingot mold used
for gold recovery. The fish scale-sized flakes were tested and found
to emit radiation at a rate of 500 millirems an hour, the report said.
By comparison, the average person receives between 200 and 300
millirems each year from all sources, including X-rays, radon gas and
cosmic radiation from space. "If you had a wedding ring made out of
those flakes you'd be getting twice as much radiation in an hour as
most people get in a year," said Joseph R. Egan, a lawyer representing
the employees.
Fowler, the radiation safety technician, said he filed a report on the
discovery of the radioactive gold in December but received no response
from the plant's management. Nothing further was done to investigate
"the possibility that [the plant] may have contaminated the nation's
gold supply" at Fort Knox, he said. Plant officials shed little light
on the process. U.S. Enrichment Corp., the plant's current operator,
says gold recovery at Paducah was the responsibility of the Energy
Department. Department officials, in a response to written questions
from The Post, acknowledged that gold was recovered from nuclear
weapons at Paducah. But, "since these actions occurred many years ago,
information regarding their past dispositions is not readily
available," the statement said.
In a letter to Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.)., department officials
strongly defended their efforts to salvage nickel and other valuable
metals that have been piling up at nuclear complex sites for years.
"Let me assure you that the safety of the public and workers and
compliance with state and federal regulations are of paramount
importance," said Undersecretary of Energy T.J. Glauthier. Glauthier
said BNFL's license requires that "any metals released for
unrestricted use will not pose a risk to human health or the
environment."
The recycling program, announced in 1996 by Gore as part of his
"reinventing government" initiative, was touted at the time as a "win-
win" deal for the environment, industry and taxpayers. BNFL, which was
awarded the recycling contract in a noncompetitive bid, has already
begun recycling some of the 100,000 tons of radioactively contaminated
metal that were once part of the defunct K-25 complex at Oak Ridge,
the world's first full-scale uranium enrichment plant. Eventually the
program expanded to Paducah and other facilities.
Purifying nickel is technically difficult because the radioactive
contamination extends below the surface of the metal. According to
department officials, BNFL was awarded the contract because it has
developed a unique technology that can safely remove nearly all of the
contaminants. But opponents say the technology has never been proven
on such a large scale. Moreover, they note, there are no federal
standards for releasing contaminated metal into the marketplace.
Previous attempts to set such standards in the early 1990s were
abandoned because of public opposition.
And, opponents add, the lack of restrictions on the recycled metal
leaves the public in the dark about which products may have come from
contaminated scrap. Even if radioactivity levels are low, consumers
are entitled to an informed choice when buying materials that might be
used by children, activists said. "The DOE has admitted they can't
protect the safety of their workers and misled them," said Robert
Wages, executive vice president of the Paper, Allied-Industrial,
Chemical & Energy Workers International Union. "Now DOE wants to dump
radioactive metals into everything from baby rattles to zippers . . .
and tell us not to worry."
Because there are no federal standards, the Energy Department's
recycling program relies on the state of Tennessee to set guidelines
and regulate the process. In June, a federal judge sharply criticized
the arrangement, saying the DOE had effectively thwarted public debate
of an issue in which "the potential for environmental harm is great."
But U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler rejected an attempt by labor
and environmental groups to halt the recycling program, citing a law
that prohibits courts from delaying federal cleanup of contaminated
sites. Still, in unusually blunt language, the judge accused the
Energy Department of "startling and worrisome" behavior in its alleged
attempts to avoid federal oversight and public review. "There has been
no opportunity at all for public scrutiny or input on such a matter of
such grave importance," Kessler wrote in her opinion. "The lack of
public scrutiny is only compounded by the fact that the recycling
process which BNFL intends to use is entirely experimental at this
stage."
DEBASEMENT
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/charting-non-linearity-hyperinflation-and-predicting-americas-future-courtesy-ancient-histor:
from Paul Mylchreest
Let’s consider the run-up to Rome’s hyperinflation. I think this
comment from jaysromanhistory.com “Good Money, Bad Money, and Runaway
Inflation” resonates with what’s happening in the US today:
“Severus Alexander (AD 222-235) tried to reform by going back to the
denarius but, once started, this path of runaway inflation and
financial irresponsibility on the part of the imperial government
proved impossible to control.”
It also seems that the hyperinflation was preceded by some kind of
banking crisis, which is an interesting parallel. From “Demise and
Fall of the Augustan Monetary System” by Koenraad Verboven:
“Papyri show it was common for private individuals to deposit money at
a bank and to make and accept payments through bankers.Bankers in the
west disappear from view around the middle of the 3rd c… A famous
papyrus from Oxyrhynchus from 260 CE shows exchange bankers closing in
order to avoid having to change the ‘imperial money’. The strategos
ordered the exchange bankers to reopen and accept all genuine coins
and warned businessmen to do the same. In 266 CE we find for the first
time transactions being expressed in ‘ptolemaeic’ or ‘old silver’ as
opposed to ‘new silver’.”
The chart shows how inflation remained relatively subdued until a
tipping point was reached in the late- 260s A.D Monetary systems can
absorb substantial abuse before there is a dramatic impact on the
price level. For example, the debasement of the coinage was already
accelerating in the early part of the third century A.D., before
plunging in the latter part. Indeed, the chart below (apologies for
the quality) only shows the trend up to 253 AD. By around 290 AD, the
coins were only dipped in silver to give them a coating (<0.5%).
STILL ONE of the BEST CONSPIRACY THEORIES EVER : NO GOLD in FORT KNOX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Knox_Bullion_Depository
"A popular and recurring conspiracy theory, as alleged by Edward
Durrell, Norman Dodd, Tom Valentine, Peter Beter and others, claims
that the vault is mostly empty and that most of the gold in Fort Knox
was removed to London in the late 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.
[3] In response, on September 23, 1974, Senator Walter Huddleston of
Kentucky, twelve congressmen, and about 100 members of the news media
toured the vault and opened various cells and doors, each filled with
gold. Radio reporter Bill Evans, when asked if it seemed like the gold
might have been moved in just for the visit, replied that "all I can
say is that I saw gold there" and that it seemed like it was always
there.[4] Additionally, audits of the gold by the General Accounting
Office (in cooperation with the United States Mint and the United
States Customs Service in 1974 and the Treasury Department) from
1975-1981 found no discrepancies between the reported and actual
amounts of gold at the Depository.[5] However, the audit has been
described as a peculiar process because it was only a partial audit
done over an extended period of time.[6] The report states only 21
percent of the gold bars were audited as of 1981 (the audit report's
issue date) and that the audit has "covered more than 212.7 million
fine troy ounces of gold" which "represents over 80 percent of the
total amount of United States-owned gold of 264.1 million fine troy
ounces."[5] A small amount of gold is removed for regularly scheduled
audits to ensure the purity matches official records.[1] The theory
continues to persist, however. Of this alleged scandal, the ex-general
counsel of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, Peter Beter,
commented: "The Watergate scandal was child's play compared with the
covered-up Fort Knox Gold Scandal".[7]"
"INTERESTING SCIENCE FICTION"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Beter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rockefeller
http://www.peterdavidbeter.com/docs/all/dbal56.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyIoskufs9E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPslTZAqZPc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tge4UfbWPCY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXqEh_61c6Q
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