Deserts

Dune | Official Main Trailer
Warner Bros. Pictures

I watched the movie Dune this week. This is the first of the pair of recent movies. I've read the book and I've seen an earlier movie version, but I'm watching this movie and it's nothing like I remember. Oh, I remember some of the characters, but I remember this story being a science fiction thriller, and this movie wasn't that at all. This time the thing that struck me is that the Atreides family packs up their entire company, including their army and their families and all their associated baggage and moves to the most hostile planet in the universe. Okay, on an absolute scale it's not all that hostile, it's got gravity similar to Earth and breathable air, but when you look at it using a human scale, the place is inimical to human life. It's covered with sand. The sun will fry you, the sandstorms will strip the flesh from your bones, and if that's not enough there are giant worms that will swallow you whole. Hell might be a better name for this planet than Arrakis. You would have to be a very loyal follower of the Emperor to accept an appointment to Dune.

But you think about it for a minute and Dune really sounds a whole lot Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Very hot, unpleasant places covered with sand, governed by tyrants, but we still have people willing to pack up everything and move there, and the reason is the same: money. On Dune, it's the spice. In the Mideast, it's oil.

Baiken Uranium Mine in Kazakhstan

Today I came across a story about how Kazakstan is a world leader in the uranium mining business. Above we have a picture of one of their uranium mines. Looks like a nice place with lots of green. On the edge of a desert, but still pretty nice. Then I look on the map:

Baiken Uranium Mine in Kazakhstan

and I see it's surrounded by a desert. Just how big is that desert? Big:

Baiken Uranium Mine in Kazakhstan

The area shown is about 900 miles across, so the mine is at the edge of the desert. The Caspian Sea is at the left hand side of the map and what used to be the Aral Sea is the greenish-white blob near the top center. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is about half way between the mine and the Aral Sea.

What I didn't find is whether the Kazatomprom (the Kazakhstan uranimum mining operation) is enriching uranium, which is what you need to do if you want to use the uranium for anything besides being dense. This led me to Wikipedia's page about Enriched uranium, which was a real eye-opener. Seems the whiz kids have busy cooking up any number of techniques for enriching uranium. There is gaseous diffusion that was used at Oak Ridge during WW2. Then we have second generation gaseous diffusion that uses high speed centrifuges that is many times more efficient. This is the one Iran was using when somebody (Israel?) hacked their centrifuges and caused them to speed up to the point where they destroyed themselves. And that's just the start. People are working on plethora of techniques involving chemistry, lasers and microstructures.

I've written several other posts about Dune over the years.