I've heard of toxic assets, but this is rediculous. Lehman Brothers, the digraced Wall Street firm, has nuclear yellowcake.
According to NBCNewyork.com,
The bankrupt investment firm has 500,000 pounds of the ore and doesn't appear to have any interested buyers, the Post reported. That's enough uranium to make a nuclear bomb, according to Bloomberg.com. (Itallics added)
Now maybe it's just me. I can certainly understand a bank's need to deverisify its holdings in other inductries (Housing mortages anybody? Bueller? Bueller?), but nuclear yellowcake? Seriously? I always though that, oh I don't know, it might be something that maybe the government should be holding on to? And if Lehman Brothers were to sell it, who would buy it without the public going ape about it? When last we heard about a country having yellowcake, it sure didn't end well as Richard Pearle will tell you. Selling it to a rogue nation would presumably be a no no. We certainly wouldn't sell it presumably to a moderately nuclear nation like Pakistan or India or Israel (yes folks, Israel's got the bomb). And even nuclear friendly nations could turn it around and sell it to someone else.
If there's a brightside, the article mentions that they don't appear to have any interested buyers. So it looks like it won't be going anywhere for a while and hopefully won't go to the black market. But it deserves some scrutiny. How does a financially troubled securities firm get its hands on something so dangerous to use as a public commodity? Where is this being stored? Where's the government in all this?
And just a sidenote, how did it get the name "yellowcake" anyway? All I can think of is cupcakes from Crumbs bakery. It's so good, it makes me go nuclear!