I can't believe this doesn't mention Megatons to Megawatts!? [1]
For 20 years between 1993 and 2013, fully 10% of all US electricity came directly from dismantled ex-soviet nuclear weapons. We bought downblended highly-enriched uranium from the warheads and put it in our peaceful nuclear reactors. The bombs that were once aimed at cities then powered them. This was a beautiful and true destruction of nuclear weapons.
Same can be done with plutonium using MOX fuel (as briefly mentioned at the end of the post).
For added context, this program led to the destruction of (effectively) over 20k soviet warheads. It is BY FAR the most successful deproliferation program.
For greater context, Russia and America maintain their nukes very differently. The US DOE studies them and works hard at maintaining existing stocks without building many new warheads. Russia does it differently. Their nukes have a finite lifespan. Once past, they are torn down, fuel reprocessed, and rebuilt from scratch. So pulling "20k" nukes out of the Russian system had a very different impact than pulling 20k would have from the US system.
They were upgraded instead of simply deleted from the arsenal. Russia maintains a much more active enrichment program than the US. For some reason the US seems to want to keep it that way, or at least doesn't have a problem with. It's great that we used that fuel for domestic energy but those funds paid to Russia supported their further enrichment activities. Even today the US is supplying Russia with radioactive material and procuring enriched products from Russia. Maybe less in the last year but we generally have an open exchange of supplies and information with nuclear technology.
From a war standpoint the nuclear material isn't that big of deal, the delivery system is vastly more important for national security.
Russia has been putting the squeeze on the US with regard to isotopes for many years, particularly medical isotopes. That was one of the motivating factors behind building HFIR at oak ridge.
"Design of an accelerator-driven system for the destruction of nuclear waste"
Y Kadi, JP Revol - 2003 - osti.gov
> "Progress in particle accelerator technology makes it possible to use a proton accelerator to produce energy and to destroy nuclear waste efficiently. The Energy Amplifier (EA) proposed by Carlo Rubbia and his group is a sub-critical fast neutron system driven by a proton accelerator. It is particularly attractive for destroying, through fission, transuranic elements produced by present nuclear reactors. "
Not much seems to have happened since then other than simulations, however. It might be more applicable for the minor actinides that contaminte 'spent' nuclear fuel, maybe, and which tend to have very long half-lives, but it should work for plutonium as well, though maybe MOX fuel is the better option:
> "The most important isotopes of these elements in spent nuclear fuel are neptunium-237, americium-241, americium-243, curium-242 through -248, and californium-249 through -252."
Thanks very much for posting this. I never knew about it, and always great to see a well-executed, purposeful government program that pretty much accomplished all of its goals.
Pretty curious how the anti-nuclear reactor movement went after shutting down all nuclear reactors when we badly need them, they lead to actually dismantling nuclear weapons, and at the same time coal power plants spew a ton of radioactive smoke into the atmosphere.
"The Canadian CANDU reactors appear to be well suited to MOX fuel; they would not require physical modification and MOX fuel could be burned within existing operating and licensing envelopes. Furthermore, it is anticipated that existing safety standards governing the exposure of workers to radiation could be met or exceeded. The most significant change would be the implementation of enhanced security for the storage of new fuel prior to loading it in the reactors."
It's the name. "Canada" in a name is marketing poison. The public just wouldn't like seeing US strategic weapons dismantled in a Canadian reactor. They need a rebranding as "Texacan Freedom Reactors".
Take Sea Doo jet skis. You have to dig deep in their website to find a reference to their Canadian origins, even harder on Ski Doo's website. And one would expect that Canadian heritage would be a plus for a snowmobile.
The number of articles with titles like "Why do Americans disguise themselves as Canadians when travelling abroad?" seems to disagree.
As far as "national pride" goes there is a big difference between the US vs CA.
Here (Canada) you would be hard pressed to find cCanadian flags. Really only two places fly them, government buildings (schools, offices, etc) and US big box stores (walmart?).
I lived in the US for ~6 years and this "flag" thing really stood out at first. Like i'd drive around and there would be bridges basically covered in flags. This is something you will pretty much NEVER see here.
FWIW, any fast-neutron reactor can use MOX fuel, and extracts more energy from the fuel. However unlike CANDU they need fairly highly enriched fuels which is a proliferation concern.
Doesn't really matter. Child comment mentions $1.5B in heavy water costs. That's $1.1B USD. Assuming an old, 600MWe nameplate capacity and the planned 30 year service life at 80% capacity (although they last far longer) we're talking total generated 130TWh.
That means heavy water contributes a total of 0.8c/kWh.
The cost of raw Uranium is between $0.0015/kWh and $0.000015/kWh. [1]
Disposal is like $500/kg, and 1kg gets you 315000kWh (0.16c/kWh).
Once the very expensive reactor is up and running the costs are very, very low.
[edit] Study pins it at 20% of the plant up-front cost.
"Total capital costs including interest were $14.319 billion CAD (about US$11.9 billion) with the heavy water accounting for $1.528 billion, or 11%, of this. "
$1.5 billion (CAD) for heavy water seems like a LOT of money??
That's for a liter of gaseous deuterium. According to the note in the last column, "Also sold by same supplier in the form of heavy water at price of 3940 USD per kg deuterium." Since a kilogram of heavy water is ~20% deuterium by mass, that means $788 per kilogram of heavy water. That would only come to $394 million for 500 metric tons of heavy water, significantly lower than the $1.5 billion found by kennend3.
The higher price kennend3 found could reflect the fact that Canada manufactured its own heavy water for building CANDU reactors in the 20th century whereas today there is more heavy water manufacturing capacity, including a large and relatively new plant in India: https://www.hwb.gov.in/heavy-water-plant-manuguru
Oh they have tried. Collecting various forms of hydrogen by separating heavy water has had government/military funding for decades. The basic physics has been worked out. There is no low-energy option anymore than there is a low-energy way to separate uranium isotopes.
The original heavy water plant in Vemork, Norway recovered it as a byproduct of producing hydrogen from water by electrolysis [1] for the manufacture of fertilizer. Ordinary "light" hydrogen is preferentially evolved from water when it's split by electrolysis, with deuterium accumulating in the liquid left in the cell. If the plant operator periodically extracts the residual water from a cell and uses it as input to another cell in a cascade arrangement, as done at Vemork, then high-purity heavy water can be generated as a byproduct of electrolysis with little additional cost. The Vemork plant had 108 megawatts of capacity and could produce 12 tons of heavy water per year ([1], [2]).
I expect several gigawatts of electrolytic hydrogen capacity to be built this decade for supporting "green" production of steel and ammonia with renewable electricity. Plant operators could also invest a modest effort to extract and concentrate older electrolyte batches, providing a new low cost source of heavy water. Note that this is a very energy intensive way to get deuterium, but it could be low cost because the capital and operating expenses are mostly accounted for by the plant's primary purpose (hydrogen production). The marginal cost to add a side business of heavy water recovery would be much smaller.
The book The Winter Fortress about the sabotage of the plant by Norwegian commandos makes my personal list of greatest stories ever told. It also makes me want to learn to cross country ski.
Like, nine guys went in and blew up the plant, and then skied across the trackless wilderness to neutral Sweden. All the while working under conditions that might be charitably described as austere.
I reread it every couple of years and cannot recommend it highly enough.
I'm really shocked that nobody mentioned that the CANDU reactors sold to Pakistan were used in their bomb development program. Thanks, AQ Khan and crew.
Or, you know, it could be argued that having nuclear weapons in the hands of a government that is fragile enough that it could collapse at almost any moment into massive civil strife, might not be the best idea ever.
That is, if you think that the Pakistani civilian government has ever had any power, no matter who is the guy on top, and the army aren't the ones calling the shots anyways.
The author of the post is replying to an NYT article [0] complaining that the US doesn't actually destroy nukes, but rather aims to recycle materials and so stores those materials in the meantime while awaiting need for those materials. This makes it seem like maybe the US is just being opportunisitic and not actually disarming.
Exceprt from the blog:
Second, it's extremely difficult to destroy plutonium effectively (some weapons are built out of highly enriched uranium and that can just be diluted in U-238 and used for reactors). Obviously, you can melt it down, but that just leaves you with a chunk of subcritical plutonium which someone can re-form into a new weapon. The plutonium is highly toxic, so you can't just grind it up and scatter it around without causing huge environmental impacts (watch Chernobyl if you want to get a sense of what I'm talking about here). You can't burn it because then you're going to have oxidized plutonium in the air, which you don't want people inhaling, and while you can of course use chemicals to dissolve it, vitrify it, etc. you're still left with an equivalent amount of plutonium, just bonded to some other stuff, and so it's just a matter of (potentially highly unpleasant) chemistry to get it back out again. In other words, it's precisely the properties of plutonium that make it attractive to build nuclear weapons out of that make it so hard to dispose of.
It's also very difficult to store because while an individual weapon may not be a critical mass, if you have tens or hundreds of weapons you have to worry about them getting close enough to worry about accidentally assembling a critical mass just from proximity, which, would of course, be bad.
> It's also very difficult to store because while an individual weapon may not be a critical mass, if you have tens or hundreds of weapons you have to worry about them getting close enough to worry about accidentally assembling a critical mass just from proximity, which, would of course, be bad.
Plutonium is an alpha emitter, and I believe the pits are plutonium alloyed with gallium and plated with gold to manage that and reduce chemical interactions with their immediate environment - there’s no “critical mass” storage problem, I think.
Pu-239 is an alpha emitter, but that's not the end of the story. All plutonium weapon cores are also neutron emitters because all weapons grade plutonium is impure and contains 2-7% Pu-240. Pu-240 is very prone to undergoing spontaneous fission which emits neutrons. So the presence of neutron radiation around a plutonium weapon core is unavoidable.
Furthermore, when Pu-239 is struck by neutrons (from the Pu-240 contaminant, for instance), it has a chance of undergoing fission and that results in the release of more neutrons which can cause additional Pu-239 to undergo fission. This chain reaction is how Pu-239 bombs work. A properly stored core will not sustain this chain reaction because the core is in a sub-critical configuration.
So there is in fact a very serious critical mass concern with plutonium bomb cores.
Yes, alpha particles aren't relevant to the fission reaction, so the fact that it's easy to shield against alpha emission isn't relevant. It's all about the neutrons.
Those are only the confirmed criticality incidents -- there have been "near misses" by just plain idiocy in storing plutonium, including a US nightmare where they decided to gather a bunch of rods together to take a picture of them all in frame.
I think the main source of confusion is here is that the original author said "weapons", which about half of commentators have taken to mean weapons/warheads and half have taken to mean nuclear material of any variety.
Yeah that's a fair point -- it's unlikely for pits to ever achieve accidental criticality given their design and setting. Much less so for plutonium in general which you'd likely have to deal with anywhere you have a bunch of warheads hanging out.
yes.. it seems a few people misunderstood the statement as "plutonium cant go critical" vs the correct interpretation "storing pits close to one another".
From the article, "...or melted down and formed into the pit of a new weapon with a new geometry..." did make me consider the consequences of melting near-critical amounts of plutonium or uranium. Which certainly sounds exciting!
Presumably they do so within certain mass limits and geometries? Does the critical mass change in liquid form?
Almost certainly. It's just a probabilistic balance between neutrons in vs neutrons out, and between the neutron decay rate and density of the material changing it'd be unlikely for everything to balance out perfectly to keep the critical mass the same.
The alpha particles don't cause the chain reaction. Neutrons do, and they are a good deal harder to shield than alpha particles. The rate of spontaneous fission is very low but once it gets started, in a critical mass it will keep growing.
I believe the original question was whether storage of multiple weapons in the same vicinity could result in accidental assembly of a critical mass, which appears to be something the author of the original blog came up with on their own.
I thought there was a story of Richard Feynman going round Oak Ridge and realizing that they were getting close to a critical mass of stuff stored in adjacent rooms.
>Feynman had discovered that the Y-12 Plant was storing uranium nitrate solution enriched in U-235 in drums holding 300 to 3,000 gallons. After performing some calculations, the young physicist determined that the drums were placed in potentially unsafe arrangements in a number of buildings.[0]
I think modern US designs are fusion boosted, making them immune to predetonation. Older experiments are increasingly dangerous, especially high-yield uranium guns.
In the context of this blog post, which explosive parts should we mothball and which ones are too dangerous to store intact, it’s unwise to store pre-boosted plutonium cores at all.
But, as a thought experiment, what is the difference between a pile of boosted-era plutonium cores; and a weird but moderated reactor? Specifically, does an arbitrarily-sized pile of weapons-grade plutonium marbles have the same inevitability of criticality you expect than if those are designed for use in boosted triggers?
Now obviously this would cost a shitload of cash, but could you dispose of it by building a reactor? Said reactor would consume it as the fuel, and so you'd end up with fission products instead of plutonium. The costs, security, and the fact that reactors don't use up 100% of their fuel would of course be an issue...
OP here. Yes, this seems to be the best available approach. You apparently can burn it in regular reactors if you mix it with uranium in what's called "mixed oxide fuel" (MOX). However, there are a bunch of logistical hiccups that make all of this a giant pain.
The US was planning to burn nuclear weapons plutonium in the Palo Verde plant in Arizona which are a European design designed to use MOX fuel from the very beginning.
The hang up is that they were unable to build a MOX fabrication facility in the US even with the help of the French, who have run a successful MOX plant.
I haven't seen a detailed explanation of what exactly went wrong, but it seems challenging to build a MOX facility to operate under US worker safety regulation. The trouble is that quality MOX fuel is made with a high energy ball mill that alloys uranium and plutonium oxides by making plutonium particles that are potentially deadly if you inhale them.
Aren't you suggesting that the french have more lax worker protections than the US? I would be very skeptical of that claim. Now, maybe it was """hard""" (expensive) to properly protect your workers and so it didn't make business sense, and that for some reason is enough to kill most good things in the US
was unable to eliminate plutonium particles completely from the work spaces so that workers had to wear breathing protection 100% of the time at work. It may be the French are OK with this but the US is not.
Britain built a MOX facility that was unable to make quality fuel
The Russians were concerned enough about the primary route to MOX failing that they developed an alternate "vibropacking" route that they didn't need in the end. Russia is now recycling MOX in the BN-800 reactor.
Hazard pay is sort of passable for risks like falling off a telephone pole, where you pretty much fully prevent it if you're careful and know for sure whether it happened to you or not. It's not at all compelling (morally anyway) for a risk with much higher odds, where you won't know for twenty years whether it gave you cancer. That's just taking advantage of people's shortsightedness, and I don't think "but I paid them really well" is an excuse.
With the Covid pandemic, we all saw that Americans absolutely refuse to wear masks any significant amount of time. Getting them to wear masks all day long would never work in America. In other countries, it's doable.
> Aren't you suggesting that the french have more lax worker protections than the US? I would be very skeptical of that claim. Now, maybe it was """hard""" (expensive) to properly protect your workers and so it didn't make business sense, and that for some reason is enough to kill most good things in the US
This sounds like a stereotype. What an individual country's regulations and negotiated union agreements are are not on a linear scale with France better than the US.
Conventional MOX production involves making little fuel pellets that get sintered in an oven and then somebody uses a glove box to pick up individual pellets and stuff them into a fuel rod. You'd think in 2022 they could find a way to do it with remote handling, but those plutonium particles are pesky in many ways and they are highly detectable whether or not they are dangerous so people will detect them and worry about them.
> It is perfectly fair for different regulators to have different ideas about what is safe.
I'm not saying it isn't, although fairness probably isn't the goal for safety regulations. I'm saying there doesn't exist a continuum of "goodness" that France sits above the US on for worker safety.
Interesting, it reminds me of another case of """deadly if inhaled""" : Covid (in the case if the lab leak hypothesis is correct).
The P4 Wuhan lab has been designed and trained by the French, following their own P4 labs, the know how for which... has been acquired during their own first nuclear weapons program ! I'm willing to bet that the same know how is used in the French MOX facilities !
Has Covid been the 2nd time that this know how has failed to be properly exported ?
In 2007 the United States started building a MOX facility at Savannah River for turning the old weapons plutonium into power reactor fuel. Its cost and time to completion ballooned far beyond original estimates and it was ultimately canceled.
There's a small typo around 1/3rd of the way down: It reads "Alomogordo New Mexico." The city should be rendered "Alamogordo."
It's also something of a persistent anachronism that lends itself to the historic population centers, I suspect. The actual test location was at Trinity Site, which is closer to present day Socorro and Carrizozo[1] than to Alamogordo and detonated on the north end of what was then called the "Alamogordo Bombing Range." This location is now a part of the broader White Sands Missile Range. It gives me some amusement as a local, because we occasionally hear the question "Oh, Alamogordo? That's where they tested the bomb, isn't it?!"
I hate to disappoint their curiosity, of course, but according to present day geography, no; historically—kind of—if you consider everything was then associated with Alamogordo, including the army air base! To us, Trinity Site is 80 miles to the north/northwest and on the other side of the Oscura Mountains (north of the San Andres Mountains)!
The confusion probably arises from the fact that if you want to visit the Trinity Site, the caravan departs from the Alamogordo High School parking lot.
It's mostly political problem of "it's safer to store it in some bunker than to literally ship nuclear bomb material to power plants". At least according to wikipedia there are reactors in US that were built to also take MOX but it's just not done. And process of production/reprocessing also is harder.
I'm sure it would be far cheaper to burn it than store otherwise.
That doesn't even make sense. Nearly all the fuel reactors use is shipped in anyway, only 5% of the US fuel is from the US itself. How is holding tones of weapon making stuff in one convenient location safer than ultimately getting rid of it through burning it up?
The stuff that normally gets shipped is not as enriched as weapons-grade fuel. For security concerns, one would not want to ship highly enriched uranium, so repurposing would involve "diluting" it at the storage site prior to shipment.
To add to this, a nuclear bomb is nothing more than collecting enough weapons grade fuel into one location. Once you have a critical mass, kaboom!
Nuclear reactor fuel, on the other hand, even if it is stolen can't do much more than get really hot. It's not possible (without a lot of expensive post processing) to turn regular reactor fuel into a bomb.
You did not read the article, or understand nuclear weapons at all, correct?
"
OK, so we just need to collect enough material and presto, we have a bomb. Unfortunately, it's not so simple:
Getting enough of the right material is hard.
As soon as you start to assemble the material into a critical mass, it starts reacting, and so if you do it wrong, the energy emission will cause it to explosively disassemble, which isn't fun if you're nearby, but produces a much smaller bang than you were looking for (a "fizzle").
"
A nuclear bomb is a massively complex adventure in timed explosions to get the "lens" to work. This is after you figure out what size/shape to make the "pit".
Depending on the reactor design, regular reactor fuel often contains plutonium which is rather easy to separate because it is chemically different vs other elements in the used fuel waste. Again this is covered in the article.
> You did not read the article, or understand nuclear weapons at all, correct?
The article backs up my assertions.
The hard part of assembling a nuclear weapon is the materials, not the timing mechanism.
> The pit presents two problems. First, even without the rest of the components, the plutonium pits can be reused to make new weapons, either with a similar geometry to the current weapon, or melted down and formed into the pit of a new weapon with a new geometry. We know from experience that once state-level actors get access to enough plutonium to build a bomb they generally succeed. Of course, non-state-level actors might have a much harder time building a bomb from raw plutonium.
The thing that stops nations from getting nukes isn't the mechanical parts of the bomb but rather the actual raw fissile materials.
Fuel for reactors does not contain enough fissile materials to present a problem which is why the security around it can be much more lax. On the other hand, shipping the pit for a nuclear bomb is inherently a lot more dangerous. Once you have the plutonium, making the bomb isn't an expensive prospect.
The first nuclear bomb was a gun. We shot an enriched uranium bullet into an enriched uranium pit. The timing is only complicated if the intent is to drop the bomb or shoot it as a missile. Otherwise, a gun is pretty much all that's needed to have a suitcase nuke.
> Once you have the plutonium, making the bomb isn't an expensive prospect.
Doing anything with plutonium is expensive. It has some strange physical properties, such as going through phase changes, expanding when heated and not shrinking when cooled.
This makes machining difficult. Plus it's toxic and flammable, as well as being radioactive. The Pantex plant has struggled with this for decades. It may be machined in a liquid bath. Usually under remote control. Everything about making a plutonium bomb is hard.
Metallic uranium is not difficult to machine. There's a tech note on how to do it from Union Carbide.[1] Even the radioactivity problem isn't too bad.
> Otherwise, a gun is pretty much all that's needed to have a suitcase nuke.
Truck bomb, yes. Suitcase bomb, no. The minimum size for a gun bomb is rather large.[2] Implosion bombs can be made smaller, but at a cost in complexity and reliability. The US nuclear establishment spent most of the 1950s on that problem.
That's why non-state actors getting hold of weapons grade uranium is a big concern.
The problem with "getting the materials" is a multi-part problem.
First you need some sort of nuclear power plant because plutonium is not a naturally occurring element in any quantity.
Once you have this and attempt to purchase uranium on the open market you can face being blacklisted. Do you know why this is the case? Because the jump from uranium to plutonium is actually easy.
The second is you need to use a specific reactor design. Again referencing the article some designes can be targeted to produce plutionium. This is where the bulk of the US plutonium came from.
But again, all reactors produce plutonium because even "enriched uranium" contains both U235 and U238.
U235 splits and creates energy and free nutrons, U238 captures nutrons and transmutes to plutonium.
Reactors like what we have here (Canada) actually "burn" plutonium and are not really suitable but yet India got its plutonium this way
"India's first nuclear explosion in 1974 used plutonium from a heavy water reactor that was a gift from the Canadian government."
As an added "negative" our reactors also produce Tritium which Canada refuses to sell to anyone who intends to use it for weapons.
> fuel for reactors does not contain enough fissile materials to present a problem which is why the security around it can be much more lax.
Given the difficulty and expense of building a reactor, I wonder if it would be cheaper to just start firing it into outer space. I'm guessing we could engineer a nigh indestructible container capable of surviving rocket malfunctions [without leaking]. How many Falcon 9 launches would it take...
It's the same problem as doing nuclear power in space: if the rocket blows up during the launch, or even fails normally and just falls somewhere, it would be VERY VERY bad.
This is a little more complicated than what you can learn from wikipedia.
Many thousands of US and Soviet nuclear weapons were demilitarized under the START treaties, mostly at the PANTEX plant in Texas. Demilitarized means that they were disassembled and/or damaged in such a way that they cannot be used for military purposes without extensive reprocessing or re-manufacturing. The demilled components are still radioactive, toxic, and/or classified, so they have to be securely stored somewhere.
The parts from old weapons that have completely or partially been dismantled are also held in storage. Some of the non-fissionable materials can be recycled, but the uranium would require reprocessing and re-manufacturing to be used in a weapon. It may be possible to reassemble old weapons from these components, but for what purpose? These weapons were retired for practical reasons such as being replaced by newer, better, and safer weapons (from the point of view of the DOE and DOD).
There are also complete weapons in storage that are no longer in active service. Inactive weapons are unmaintained, but could be returned to service with field level maintenance. Some of these are kept to support war plans for contingencies or capabilities that are not a current priority. For the majority though, there's a significant cost to dismantle them and no pressing need to do so.
Whether we can reprocess the fuel I think misses a larger point.
We disassemble and save parts because we don't - can't - build more.
I'm told by Livermore nuclear weapons engineers (admittedly anecdotal hearsay) that it's crazy not to test these weapons. They degrade and fail in ways and at speeds not unanticipated, and computer modeling could not replace actual testing (at least back in ~2000-2005).
So we built a bunch in a rush, found they might last 3 years or 7 years or some other random number, and now... we hold on to them and hope they work, or hope they'll work with scavenged replacement parts.
I'm sure a few carefully curated ones work, but the failure rate could be closer to 90% than 10%.
Good piece. IMHO the introductory narrative might be slightly enhanced by briefly pointing out that synthesis of plutonium was not achieved until several years after Szilard's brainstorm. Something like, "Researchers predicted that Pu would offer such-and-so advantages; however, nobody had quite yet come up with the recipe."
In other words: As described with the high-level bomb design, every material and component therein was concurrently being developed, improvised or straight-up invented to meet existing theory.
Thank you for recommending Rhodes' books; they are excellent. I may be alone in this; however I wish he had split 'Dark Sun' into two distinct volumes: One about the development of thermonuclear technology; and another for all of the spy stuff.
> the FAS report I linked above is from 1993 and states that "There is almost 1000 MT of reactor Pu (R-Pu) in existence now, with the amount growing by about 100 MT per year."
Why couldn't we find a few kg for NASA missions? IIRC for Juno mission the DoE said "plutonium is out of stock for now, come later", so they had to use these oversized solar panels.
> The fusion component also seems to involve some isotopes of hydrogen (tritium and deuterium), so it would be modestly helpful to have that but my understanding is that it's not that hard to get your hands on these isotopes.
Tritium is the most expensive thing on the planet that any of us can buy, by weight. Only exotic matter (non-naturally occurring elements, anti-matter) is more expensive, and that you basically can't buy. Tritium is not easy to make or get. And it has a half-life of 12 years. Deuterium can't be used instead of tritium.
The rest of that "fun fact"(tm) usually goes There are a number of things more expensive than tritium, for example: I think plutonium is more expensive than tritium. but you can't buy plutonium.
The post by cryptonector is correct: gram for gram, tritium for weapons is even more expensive to manufacture than plutonium for weapons.
It takes one neutron to convert an atom of uranium 238 into an atom of plutonium 239. It also takes one neutron to convert an atom of lithium 6 into an atom of tritium and an atom of helium [1]. However, the plutonium 239 atom has a mass nearly 80 times as great as the tritium atom, so the manufacturing cost per gram is much higher. The US has always produced tritium for weapons by irradiation of lithium 6; the excess neutrons above and beyond that needed to support reactor criticality could be used to produce either tritium or plutonium. The competing uses for excess neutrons were a major issue early in the American development of thermonuclear weapons, when it looked like a thermonuclear weapon might need a lot of tritium (and therefore curtail the production of a lot more plutonium).
Heavy water reactors like Canada's CANDU produce some tritium "for free" as a natural byproduct of neutron capture by deuterium. This gets removed [2] periodically from the heavy water moderator to reduce its radioactivity, and some of the surplus tritium gets sold. But by law Canadian tritium cannot be sold for weapons applications.
Not that separating tritium from heavy water is cheap or anything... It's probably cheaper than making it the way the U.S. does it, though I wouldn't really know.
South Africa's weapons were made with enriched uranium [1]. Blending highly enriched uranium into power reactor fuel is relatively straightforward. The weapons discussed in this article are made with plutonium. There are a few facilities in the world for blending plutonium with uranium for power reactor fuel, but none that are designed to handle weapons grade plutonium. The US tried to build such a facility but it went badly over budget and over schedule and was cancelled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33868375
The easiest thing to do would probably be to deform the pit so it can't be used in a warhead without re-processing. Then store them in a box using the same policy/procedures as weapon storage. They don't take up a lot of space and it's not like they're being manufactured like crazy.
Well if the US government ran a LFTR / MSR they'd have both power for the facility and something to process a lot of the isotopes and a means for extraction.
The core contention of the article is that plutonium disposal is an issue. Not in an MSR! (at least from my reading). I can see how solid fuel rods are precisely designed in old crappy fuel rod designs, since you need to design the rods to avoid them melting down.
MSRs are meltdown proof, owing to the fluid nature of the fuel. If the fuel is overheating/overfissioning, then a "plug" that is artificially cooled will melt, and the fluid pours into a shallow pool. Since the shallow pool distributes the fissile material in a way that stops the chain reaction (since effectively a volume is reduced to a sheet, so all the neutrons in the vast majority of directions don't run into another fissionable/fissile nucleus, the reaction stops)
Aside from the plutonium, IIRC molten salt reactors can "burn" a lot of "waste" isotopes since if it isn't fissile, let it hang around in the salt and a couple absorbed neutrons will make it something that can.
The fission products are in a liquid, so the fluid can be chemically processed more easily to extract products. Yeah, there's a LOT of handwaving there, but fundamentally if you have a breeder reactor you can "process" waste into a usable form.
The best thing about MSRs is that they scale to smaller sizes: the ORNL research reactor was closet-sized. A general MSR for fission product processing would have a lot more stuff for processing the salt for waste, yeah.
As for replacement parts and the associated dangers for weapons construction, that's not really a nuclear issue once the nuclear material is separated.
The inherent chemical toxicity of all this is a problem, but fundamentally what you are doing is containing the salts and processing them. Toxic stuff will eventually get transmuted to something else, so you just need to keep the core thorium -> uranium cycle going and "work on" all the rest of it to get it to a usable or more stable element.
Yeah it's expensive, but TFA mentions billions for disposal/processing. Well, we could have had a usable MSR design and tons of knowhow to go with a good disposal method.
This raises a tricky question: Should the United States open or reopen a production line for nuclear weapons in order to avoid losing their manufacturing know-how, the way we do with M1A2 Abrams tanks? The United States once produced thousands of tanks per year. Today, there is only one tank plant left open in the nation, the Lima Army Tank Plant. For years, US Army leaders have asked Congress to stop purchasing new tanks because they didn't need them, but Congress kept ordering the Department of Defense to buy tanks anyway. They did this for two reasons. First, because the tank plant is a source of jobs in Ohio. Second, because tanks, especially modern, 21st century tanks, are specialized tools, and we wouldn't want to forget how to build them. An argument is made than it is cheaper to keep producing tanks that are not needed than it would be to restart a tank production line if one didn't exist. The argument is sensible and most likely true. After the US Air Force ordered an early end to the production of the F-22 Raptor in the early 2010s, the production line was dismantled. A report in the last few years estimated the cost to restart the production line in the billions, if not the low tens of billions.
So, back to nuclear weapons. The United States manufactured tens of thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Most of these weapons have been decommissioned and the production lines have been shut down. The United States no longer manufactures nuclear weapons. Now, the incoming Ground Based Strategic Deterrent will be built by Northrop Grumman in the next few years to start replacing the aging Minuteman III ICBMs, but the warheads and the nuclear cores will be recycled from existing ICBMs.
Which raises a question: How would the United States replenish its nuclear weapons if the need arose? For example, after a nuclear war, where the US lost or expended 80% of its arsenal? The question of what to do after a nuclear war may sound absurd to some, but it's a worthwhile and interesting one. More on point, what if the nuclear cores degrade to a point where they may no longer work? This is essentially what the Department of Energy's Nuclear Stewardship Program is for. It's a program that costs billions of dollars a year and uses supercomputers to model the slow degradation of the nuclear cores in the stockpile.
But here's where it gets trickier. The New START treaty will expire in 2026. If it is not extended or replaced by a new treaty, there will be nothing stopping Russia from expanding its nuclear arsenal. China is also expanding its nuclear arsenal as we speak. Last week's report by the Department of Defense claims that China will have 1,500 nuclear weapons within a decade or so. China is building new nuclear weapons. The United States is not. And China is not bound by any arms control treaty.
Now, the US also happens to have about 1,400-1,500 nuclear weapons deployed, plus a few thousand more in storage, disassembled.
But what if China decides at some point to push past 1,500? To 2,000? 5,000?
A country with 5,000 nuclear weapons could conduct a first strike against a country with 1,500 nuclear weapons, on a 2:1 ratio, and still have 2,000 nukes in reserve for further strikes. This is why the nuclear arms race happened between the US and the Soviet Union in the first place. Any disparity in the deployed arsenals gives the side with more the advantage. So if China ever decides to expand beyond 1,500, the strategically sound move for the US would be to start building more, to match the Chinese production. It would be tragic, but it's not impossible.
But the US no longer manufactures nukes, so the old production lines would need to be reopened.
A country with 5,000 nuclear weapons could conduct a first strike against a country with 1,500 nuclear weapons, on a 2:1 ratio, and still have 2,000 nukes in reserve for further strikes. This is why the nuclear arms race happened between the US and the Soviet Union in the first place. Any disparity in the deployed arsenals gives the side with more the advantage. So if China ever decides to expand beyond 1,500, the strategically sound move for the US would be to start building more, to match the Chinese production. It would be tragic, but it's not impossible.
Submarine launched ballistic missiles and mobile missiles on land (train or truck based) break this race. If you don't know where all the enemy launchers are, having enough weapons to hit them all in a first strike doesn't matter much. That's why the US has a strong deterrent even though Russia has more warheads than it does [1]. The mobile weapons can't be guaranteed destroyed and a retaliatory strike from them will still be devastating. The US's mobile deterrent is based on submarine launched ballistic missiles but it has designed mobile land based weapons in the past, and other countries (e.g. Russia) still have mobile land based weapons.
It does mean that a change in intelligence (whether technical or human) that reveals the location of enemy launchers can suddenly enable this first strike - for example, if someone develops some technology capable of sensing where the US missile submarines are located, then you can't rapidly increase the size of nuclear arsenal fix the issue, you have to have the reserves pre-built.
I think your concern is valid, but the answer would be something like "we can reopen production lines when someone else ramps up their production first". In other words - do not escalate, but respond to foreign escalation. This is a much better approach, notice that if you escalate first you leave everyone worse off, including yourself. Perhaps others are worse off than you, but you are still worse off than you were before.
If you're wondering how would you know that someone is ramping up production (can be underground, etc.) the answer is detecting underground testing via seismographs.
About the tanks, it is indeed a problem. Just look at Germany, their military industrial complex used to be one of the best in the world (I'm talking post WW2, for example Leopard tanks) but they effectively killed it. Luckily there's always another modernization behind the corner, so as long as you don't reduce the vehicle count there's enough production. Which is what Germans (and not only them) did.
There is no world in which the US "lost or expended 80% of its arsenal" that it would matter at all whether we could produce more. I can't even think of a good analogy. "Should I store a box of extra smoke detectors in my attic in case I have a house fire and my current ones are destroyed?"
I think the more realistic need to produce new nuclear weapons is that for some reason parts availability for the existing ones becomes a maintenance problem. If Warhead A requires Part B which must be produced via an industrial process that was last widely used in the '70s, you no longer have a credible warhead.
It may not even be possible to spin that process back up even on a bespoke basis because it may depend on yet further now-outdated processes. Even if that's not the case, executing to a high enough degree of precision for the application may depend on a lot of now-lost trade knowledge.
But yeah, apart from the sustainment problem, there's definitely no way that replacing 80% of the US nuclear arsenal matters if the warheads were expended in anger or destroyed on the ground by nuclear weapons.
The sustainment problem is solved as well - there was the infamous example of the "fogbank" aerogel that we lost capacity to build. It turns out it's easy enough (with an unlimited pile of money) to reverse engineer any component we might need and rebuild capacity. Nuclear weapons aren't "complicated" once you've figured out the science, they're just expensive to engineer.
Since we have maybe 10x more warheads that we need, we can easily salvage any components from decommissioned ones which is actually what's leading to the plutonium storage problems from the article.
Taking everything in the article at face value (and assuming the substance actually exists and isn't an elaborate disinformation campaign), it took over a decade and $100,000,000 to recreate this single part of the warhead.
I don't know if we can call this a runaway sustainment success story. It's not as though we actually have limitless piles of money to throw at weapons systems.
I respectfully disagree. In the 12 months following a nuclear war, Americans would still need to file their taxes before the April 15 deadline, the federal and state governments would still have to pass annual budgets, software vendors like Microsoft and Apple would still need to push updates to their products, homeowners would still need to pay their annual property tax bill, people would still need to refill their drug prescriptions.... life could recover and go on. I'm not convinced that a nuclear war would be so destructive that civilization wouldn't survive. Most nuclear attacks would probably target missile silos in rural North Dakota and airbases anyway, not cities.
But, as I outlined in my comment, there are situations other than nuclear war where the US might want to restart nuke production.
You're talking about a full scale nuclear exchange -- that's so far beyond North Dakota silos I don't know what to tell you. As one obvious example since you brought up Microsoft -- our Pacific Fleet Trident nuclear subs are based within 20 miles of Microsoft's campus -- they and many of our SLBM and warheads are stationed there. Nobody is going to be shipping software following a nuclear attack in Puget Sound.
That's a rather... optimistic view of what total war between nuclear powers would entail. The goal would not be only to destroy missile silos, but industrial capacity, the electric grid, military and political leadership at all levels, and the population's will to fight. All major cities and all forms of civilian infrastructure would likely be targets.
Infrastructure is a huge problem if you live in a dense population center, but a manageable one if you don't live in a big city.
Electricity isn't a requirement for survival; we lived without it only a century ago. My folks in New England can pretty much live indefinitely with a wood stove, a groundwater well, and local agriculture. It might be a rough time figuring out how to feed everyone. It would certainly be a brutal existence, and a lot of people wouldn't make it, but the world would go on.
Right, you would have some survivors, but people would not be concerned with paying taxes or anything related to tech/the internet.
Even rural areas would be very rough. Supply lines for gasoline would probably be disrupted so unless you can grow enough food for subsistence on your own land, local agriculture wouldn't help you much. We'd have to go back to horses and carriages, but with the exception of Amish areas, I doubt there are enough horses and related equipment around to make it work. And then there's security, which is probably the biggest issue. Even if you can sustain yourself, you'll need a way to deal with packs of hungry, desperate people going around with guns.
> I'm not convinced that a nuclear war would be so destructive that civilization wouldn't survive.
Civilization would survive, somewhere far from NA, Europe, Asia (ie in South Africa).
There is only two scenarios for a global nuclear war:
a) first, pre-emptive strike - then you need to take out not only nuclear arsenal of the enemy, but it's C2 and weapons production capabilities, including any administrative centers, eg Moscow or Washington
b) retaliatory, responding strike - then you need to make sure nobody from the enemy attacked you could ever wage war against you, so not only you destroy enemy nuclear capabilities (silos? why though? they are already used and empty) but any C2, weapons production capabilities, including any administrative centers, eg Moscow or Washington
In both scenarios there is no way you will see an IRS agent on the porch of your bunker in less than 10 years from the war.
There was a substance called FOGBANK. This is an aerogel used in thermonuclear bombs. It used acetonitrile in its construction. When absorbed into the body, acetonitrile metabolizes into hydrogen cyanide.
All of the records for making FOGBANK were destroyed. Too many workers were being poisoned by the stuff, so rather than pay out worker's comp and wrongful death lawsuits, the records were eliminated. As an aerogel, the stuff is brittle, crumbles and fractures. When the warheads needed to be reconditioned, it turned out that the limiting factor was the lack of FOGBANK. It turned out that some mysterious contaminant was needed to give it the exact properties necessary. So it had to be re-invented.
To address your other points, China's nuclear position has never been Mutually Assured Destruction - they've only wanted enough warheads to deter the opponent. In the past, this has meant about 200 warheads. Since the US has been developing anti-ballistic missile technology, that means China needs more warheads and more missiles to guarantee a sufficient deterrent. Only the US & USSR built so many nukes that the START treaties were even necessary.
> But the US no longer manufactures nukes
Yes we do.
Final assembly (and disassembly) is at Pantex in Amarillo, TX. Parts are made elsewhere, some in Kansas City, some at Lawrence Livermore, some at Y2. There have never been "production lines". All of them were built as individual projects. All of them authorized and approved by Congressional oversight.
> But what if?
But what if I get a pony?
How many countries has China invaded? How many have the US invaded? How many has Russia invaded? China may be run by buttheads, but I don't see them attacking others. Not like We The People have attacked and invaded.
Just looking at the number of wars that the PRC has been involved in:
1950 : Invades and Annexes Tibet
1950 - 1953 : Assists North Korea and invades South Korea
1954 : Attempted to invade Taiwan
1958 : Attempted to invade Taiwan
1962 : Sino-Indian War
1967 : Nathu La and Cho La clashes
1979 : Sino-Vietnam War
2017 : China-India border standoff
2020-2021: China-India clashes
You also claim that FOGBANK records were destroyed to cover up for lawsuits, Wikipedia does not have anything relating to that.
>Manufacture involves the moderately toxic, highly volatile solvent acetonitrile, which presents a hazard for workers (causing three evacuations in March 2006 alone).
Acetonitrile may be poison but has been used in public product very recently:
>It has been used in formulations for nail polish remover, despite its toxicity. At least two cases have been reported of accidental poisoning of young children by acetonitrile-based nail polish remover, one of which was fatal.[23] Acetone and ethyl acetate are often preferred as safer for domestic use, and acetonitrile has been banned in cosmetic products in the European Economic Area since March 2000.[24]
Acetonitrile is used on an almost daily basis by anyone doing HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography). Big 4L jugs of it. The price has gotten exorbitant though and some have switched to using mostly methanol. I don't know what this guy is talking about with the toxicity, it smells kind of nice and has a very benign label. You don't even need to wear a respirator or anything to use it.
China has also de facto militarily annexed territory larger than France in the South China Sea; territory that very clearly belongs to other nations. It was an act of war, they used their military to invade and take the territory of their neighbors.
I mean, China basically said it would go to war to conquer Taiwan. China just fired missiles over Taiwan and into Japanese territory a few months ago. Seems like they're advertising a willingness to attack; why don't you believe them?
The really tricky part about Taiwan. Politically I mean, is that it is not another country, it literally is china.
A history lesson the chinese empire fell apart in the early 1910's, there was fragmentation until it was sort of reunified in the late 1920's the communist's fought the reunified government in the thirties, paused for WW2 and were successful against the government in the 1940's. the pre-communist government still exists on the island of formosa(taiwan)
Now it is hard to say which government is more legitimate. The national government only really had ruled for 10 years at that point and by all accounts I have read they were sort of a shitty government. taiwan appears to be doing ok nowadays but remember that it ran under a military dictatorship until the 1990's
Taiwan at this point would probably be fine relinquishing their claim to the chinese mainland. but the communists do not want to let them go.
My only real take away from all this is that the chinese are there own worst enemies, what the japanese did to them in mancheria was brutal, far worst than the holocaust. What the chinese did to themselves afterwards was even worse.
This reminds me of a recent NYT op-ed where the premise was "a little nuclear war is okay." The reality is that any amount of nuclear war is the end of humanity, there is no post-nuclear war civilization, at least not for very long.
>The reality is that any amount of nuclear war is the end of humanity…
Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean, but on the face of it that’s absurd. If N Korea nuked S Korea and the US nuked them back, or if Pakistan and India decided to toast a few of each others cities, the impact on the rest of the world would be mostly economic.
> The reality is that any amount of nuclear war is the end of humanity
One of the more absurd myths still going. It's not remotely close to being true.
You could detonate all the globe's nuclear weapons simultaneously within the territory of Texas and you'd fail to kill everyone in Texas. It's also not an argument that nuclear war is acceptable obviously. Pretending humanity and or civilization will cease due to nuclear war is very outlandish.
We detonated five hundred nuclear weapons above ground over half a century, and two thousand total. You could nuke the biggest 100 cities and humanity would pick itself up and promptly keep going.
Plutonium pits can be stored and reused, but not forever. Eventually enough decay products build up to make them unreliable. It's a big problem for long-term maintenance.
A few decades. Those pits are supposed to be pretty pure plutonium. Though it is something like the 'sell by' date on your milk. You open it up and think, is it really gone bad?
> “It’s important to keep these parts around,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear expert who held federal posts for three decades before leaving government service in 2005. “If we had the manufacturing complex we once did, we wouldn’t have to rely on the old parts.” He added that other nuclear powers can and do make new atomic parts.
This is depressing. It’s much like the F-22, we’ve lost the capability to make those too. It’s remarkable how rapidly the USA has declined in the past couple decades. Pretty much the only thing we have going for us is a stranglehold on international payments, and that won’t last.
The tone of this article resembles that in http://cantrip.org/bomb.html , by the brilliant Mark O'Donnell: "matter can be neither created nor destroyed, though it can get very discouraged."
Also: "A little stray grime or margarine in your hairs-breadth mechanisms and you may find yourself festooning several square miles of nearby woodland."
For 20 years between 1993 and 2013, fully 10% of all US electricity came directly from dismantled ex-soviet nuclear weapons. We bought downblended highly-enriched uranium from the warheads and put it in our peaceful nuclear reactors. The bombs that were once aimed at cities then powered them. This was a beautiful and true destruction of nuclear weapons.
Same can be done with plutonium using MOX fuel (as briefly mentioned at the end of the post).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program