Iraq did disclose the mobile trailers that Junior's team is trying to pretend to be a secret that Saddam was hiding and that they found.
hollandsentinel.com
The team examined at least two refrigerator trucks and a trailer, which the site manager, Nawal Nafa'a Fotohi, said were mobile food testing labs.
Such labs are of particular interest because U.S. intelligence officials believe Iraq may want to develop mobile "fermentation units" to manufacture biological weapons. U.N. officials had said inspectors would be looking for biological weapons laboratories on trucks.
Fotohi insisted the labs were used to make sure government food rations were safe, and inspectors would not say if they found anything suspicious. "We are not afraid of anything and we have nothing to hide," Fotohi said.
Once an item like these trailers is purchased the money is already spent. It may well be that they were bought with some biological purpose in mind, but once those programs were abandoned the equipment would remain. With santions in place Iraq was no doubt creative in the use of many items that survived the first Bush war.
As to why they didn't use hydrogen it is probably for the same reason that other countries don't use it. It is in short supply in most gas streams, only in west texas is it anywhere near cheap.
In 1906, gas from a well in Dexter, Kansas was found to contain 1.84% helium. In 1917 gas from the Texas Petrolia oilfield was found to contain .84% of the gas. By then the Dexter gas field had become depleted, so a large scale production facility was constructed at Petrolia. Removing the inert gasses (such as nitrogen and argon) made the residual gas burn better, so it actually increased the quality of gas used for commercial and residential heating.
Helium is so light that if released, will rise through the atmosphere and be lost forever to outer space. For this reason the U.S. Federal Government declared production of helium to be a Federal monopoly. A subsequent well in 1934 near Amarillo produced gas with 7 to 8% helium concentration. Although helium can be extracted by liquefying air, obtaining it from natural gas is far more economical. As natural gas is burned in furnaces or stoves, the rare helium, which will not burn, is lost permanently.
Strangely, the only areas in the world where helium exists in sufficient quantity in natural gas to make it commercially extractable are in Kansas and Texas.
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