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Jan 9, 2009 01:00 AM | 10
One of the great things about working at the longest-continually published magazine in the U.S.—born in 1845—is thumbing through the archives. Our environment reporter, David Biello, was thumbing through some bound volumes earlier this week, and he came across a gem from our February 1947 issue.
The piece, which has no byline, is quite timely, despite being more than 60 years old. It hits two of today's growing crises square on—energy and the economy—by suggesting a replacement for silver and gold monetary standards:
Uranium.
That's right. Less than two years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, someone thought it would be a good idea to back currency with a radioactive substance. So instead of gold, Fort Knox would be filled with uranium. Or, today, maybe Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada, could do double duty as a currency standard warehouse. (Worth noting: The "ultrasecure uranium warehouse of the future" is in Oak Ridge, Tenn., just a few hundred miles from Fort Knox in Kentucky.)
The argument speaks for itself:
Proposed as an international monetary standard to replace the silver and gold that have traditionally set the world's standards of values, uranium's claim to this position is based on the fact that atomic fission can convert a part at least of any mass of uranium directly into energy. Energy, the ability to do work, is suggested as a far more logical basis of economic value than any possessed by the precious metals.
Several properties of uranium metal preclude its use in actual coins, particularly its hardness and the ease with which it oxidizes. The various proposals for international control of fissionable materials as a means to control atomic bombs, however, might lend themselves readily to the issuance of an international currency backed by centrally controlled uranium metal.
Under such a scheme, atomic energy could be the basis of a reasonable currency whose value would be keyed to available energy, upon which depends production, the true modern measure of wealth. While we may never jingle uranium coins in our pockets, we yet may spend paper currency or coins of more adaptable metals backed by uranium as our present silver certificates are by bars of that metal.
Damn, we were really looking forward to jingling uranium coins. Imagine going through airport security and forgetting to take those out of your pockets.
Photo by Marshall Astor via Flickr
Tags:
uranium,
nuclear,
economy,
economic crisis,
energy
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10 Comments
Add CommentWow. I thought whatever was backing our currency was already radioactive waste. The symbolic implications of this just blows me away.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe downside of using minerals as currency is the great expense (both cost in $, lives, and resources) of mining it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPrinted money is cheap. ...of course, not worth the paper it's printed on...
the solution to the economic crisis isn't adding fuel to the fire of greed and excess and corruption, it's self-reliance and living healthy, honest, constructive lives. Curing symptoms only prolongs the suffering.
The downside of using minerals as currency is the great expense (both cost in $, lives, and resources) of mining it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPrinted money is cheap. ...of course, not worth the paper it's printed on...
the solution to the economic crisis isn't adding fuel to the fire of greed and excess and corruption, it's self-reliance and living healthy, honest, constructive lives. Curing symptoms only prolongs the suffering.
The downside of using minerals as currency is the great expense (both cost in $, lives, and resources) of mining it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPrinted money is cheap. ...of course, not worth the paper it's printed on...
the solution to the economic crisis isn't adding fuel to the fire of greed and excess and corruption, it's self-reliance and living healthy, honest, constructive lives. Curing symptoms only prolongs the suffering.
wow, crazy triple post. sorry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo your bank teller would use a Geiger counter instead of a calculator?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisand then if you happen to live in a "mineral rich" country, and try to extract and refine your "richness", some other country or international consortia will state you are trying to build atomic bombs, will invade you and "free" your people from your govt, and charge it all on the uranium you were mining already... like oil!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat world we live in!
as an additional side note, uranium does have a half life, (ok, probably in the upper part of thousands of years, I don't have the number handy but I remember it is high), so if you stockpile it (as in a deposit or a vault), you'd be loosing money slowly, a thing that is already done by our currency model (one thousand dollars now days buy much less than back on 1940s), then, one ton of uranium would buy now less (although not as much as the dollar) than in 1940s!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisuranium is the future because when uranium is all done there is a new "pac-man" type microbe that can turn uranium into fuel and it will be a momentous occasion and all uranium is expensive ABOUT 29 TIMES THE PRICE OF COPPER so instead of Cu we could just be seeing U
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYAY FOR URANIUM AND HOW IT CAN HELP OUR CRISIS
Note that the jewelry is from Moab, Utah, where taxpayers will foot the bill for the removal of the Moab Uranium Mill tailings by the DOE, at a cost of several hundred million dollars. Over $1 billion has been paid out to downwinders, uranium mine and mill workers, and other nuclear workers (or their families) killed or made ill by exposure to uranium and other radioactive materials as part of the nuclear weapons program. Now the uranium industry wants to get going again, when many mines have yet to be reclaimed, particularly on the Navajo Nation.
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