Reason #43: Downblending

Per Rachel Maddow last night - the US National Nuclear Security Administration, whom I had never heard of, has just completed a top-secret 7-week project to, um, de-enrich 72 pounds of heretofore-highly-enriched uranium.

In other words, a bunch of nuclear material that had previously been weapons-grade has been rendered unusable for weaponry ("downblended"), and will now be distributed to small children shipped out of the country for use in various research capacities that I probably wouldn't understand, but which probably involve giant Communist super-robots.

Despite being conducted completely under the radar, the operation was, impressively, a joint effort between the NNSA, the government of Kazakhstan, which has loads of the stuff just lying around, and the IAEA, which is fun to pronounce phonetically.