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?
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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").
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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.
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?