So much "nuclear news" lately...

Here's a trio of interesting news stories:

1) We've run out of a key material used to make radiation detectors used in ports around the U.S. The detectors in question are sensitive neutron detectors that are capable of detecting the neutrons produced by Plutonium-240 decay. These are the best detectors for potentially telling that a shipping container or vehicle is carrying plutonium or a plutonium bomb. The material needed for these detectors is Helium-3, which is actually a decay product of tritium, which itself is (ironically) an H-bomb component. The U.S. is no longer making tritium, so we have also run out of our resources of Helium-3 for making bomb-detectors. This is particularly interesting to me since my first couple of years of graduate school were spent building neutron detectors using Helium-3...
New York Times article on shortages in nuclear detector materials

2) There's a high-level committee of civilian scientists in the U.S. called the "Jason panel", who meet every year to advise the government on defense topics. They have just released a report that claims that there is no need to build replacement warheads to maintain our nuclear arsenal. The report claims that simply building replacement parts and maintaining existing warheads should be sufficient, according to current science. That's important - many people have argued that we need to start building weapons again because our arsenal is aging.
New York Times article on Jason panel report

3) A Swiss scientist just published some papers within the scientific community claiming that we might run out of the world's Uranium resources as soon as 2013! That would certainly squash any kind of "nuclear renaissance". This isn't making a lot of news yet but has appeared on a few blogs.
PhysOrg article on potential uranium shortfalls
This was an interesting article to have in mind when I came across another news article about lawsuits blocking a proposed Uranium mine near the Grand Canyon:
Arizona Daily Sun article on conservationist lawsuits blocking a uranium mine