America Finally Abandons Plan To Convert Plutonium Bombs Into Nuclear Fuel (reuters.com) 127
MOX hoped to convert plutonium from Cold War bombs into fuel for nuclear power plants, but even though the project was about 70% complete, Washington has pulled the plug. Slashdot reader Mr. Dollar Ton shared this story from Reuters:
The Department of Energy told Senate and House of Representatives committees in May that MOX, a type of specialized nuclear recycling plant that has never been built in the United States, would cost about $48 billion more than the $7.6 billion already spent on it. Instead of completing MOX, the Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, wants to blend the 34 tonnes of deadly plutonium -- enough to make about 8,000 nuclear weapons -- with an inert substance and bury it underground in New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Burying the plutonium would cost nearly $20 billion over the next two decades and would require 400 jobs at Savannah River, the Department of Energy has estimated.
Re: hmm 34 tons is nothing (Score:1)
Easily retrievable there. Why not use it to fuel extraterrestrial spacecraft like NASA did with Curiousity? They said it was the last few grams they had. The several tons DoE has could be put to good use by NASA.
Re: hmm 34 tons is nothing (Score:5, Informative)
use it to fuel extraterrestrial spacecraft
Wrong isotope. The boom boom kind is Pu239. The kind with the crazy alpha emission is Pu238.
Re: hmm 34 tons is nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
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Reactors are more complicated though - they require feedback control. There have been a few small test reactors in space, but not for a long time, and there are no current designs or information on long-term reliability. An RTG is so simple there's practically nothing to go wrong.
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> The Russians have had nuclear powered radar satellites for a long time.
Oh geez, read about them more. They were a disaster, leaking coolant into orbit, failing constantly, crashing in northern Canada, etc.
If you're going to promote reactors in space, Soviet examples are likely not something you want to mention. Kinda like promoting cars with the Trabant.
Please drag your feet to avoid this: (Score:1)
After completion of the burial, as usual costing 3X more than expected, a year later, an unanticipated global warming feedback loop kicked in raising global temperatures 5C. The order was given to unbury the plutonium and get it in reactors ASAP.
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Pu239 can run a reactor in space,
Pu239 can run a reactor pretty much anywhere. Well, not so much a reactor as a single large power excursion. Great if you want to, for example, recharge all your Teslas at once, as well as power the entire world's bitcoin mining at the same time.
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Humanity's been there, done that (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Project Orion needs the plutonium for 600000 bomblets for escaping the solar system and then braking at the target system for that ark to escape the neutron star, as National Geographic channel has taught us.
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Obviously it's physically possible to distribute that much plutonium in the entire volume of the ocean, the question is how? Metallic plutonium has low solubility in water so you'd have to process it to something like plutonium chloride. But even then you wouldn't want to have a big block of the stuff if the isotope is Pu239 -- the critical mass is only 11kg.
Getting rid of that much Pu239 is a major engineering project if you want to do it safely, with no chances it will diverted or accumulate anywhere. T
Re:hmm 34 tons is nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
What a fucking waste. Just give it to the French so they convert it into MOX. Since apparently they can afford to do what the USA has failed to do.
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Lots of people did things in the 1970s we don't do know. Like smoke, put led in gasoline, drive cars without seatbelts, and build nuclear plants that suck flames into inaccessible wiring conduits.
Now if you compare France's projects in the 1970s with today - Flamanville - you come to a rather different conclusion than the one you're suggesting.
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France has a gas centrifuge cascade at their Georges Besse II uranium enrichment plant. The USA started one and then cancelled the project. It means the French can enrich uranium an order of magnitude cheaper than the USA. For example. They also manufacture MOX fuel. The French nuclear industry has not degraded quite to the point the USA nuclear industry did.
Fast neutron reactors (Score:3)
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Let it run for a couple of years first ... the BN-600 didn't do so well at not catching fire after all. It's a rather common refrain for liquid sodium cooled reactors.
https://www.wiseinternational.... [wiseinternational.org]
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They aren't even going to make a decision on continuing with the BN-1200 until next year. After the problems with the BN-800 came to light and required a redesign it's been on hold. Even before then plans were scaled back repeatedly until only two planned units were left.
Like all new nuclear it has the same basic problems. Unknown unknowns costing an unknown amount to put right, at a time when cheap and reliable sources of energy are growing rapidly and attracting a lot of investment. No matter how much gee
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Fuel manufacture is on a somewhat separate track, with several projects going on in parallel. In particular, BN reactors are design to accommodate the future uranium nitride fuel (nitrides contain more uranium by weight than oxides).
The main competitior of BN-1200 is BREST - an awesome reactor cooled by liquid lead and on-site fuel reprocessing. Rosatom might decide to build a demonstrator BREST-300 first rather than commit to BN-1200.
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Multiple large fires of the coolant are worrying even if by happy accident it has only caused extremely expensive cleanup instead of radiation release. This has been a problem endemic to commercial scale sodium cooled reactors and 2 years runtime isn't enough to dispel that terrible fucking history.
Lead cooled is a nice pie in the sky alternative though. Only half a century or so delayed by the fucking morons who keep pushing sodium cooling ... sodium cooled reactors are proof positive that only blaming env
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The planned BN-1200 will be even safer, it'll contain the molten fuel catchment area to contain the corium lava if for some reason reactor does melt down.
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> but nothing catastrophic
Wow... you should write ad copy.
Fuel (Score:3)
This stuff cost a ton of money and energy to refine. Don't throw it away. Seal it up in ceramic caskets and bury it in the middle of an army base somewhere. There might be a use for it in 50 years.
Sapphire Project Pu is crap. (Score:4, Informative)
This 34 tons is crap Pu we bought from Russia and it's satellite countries, to keep them from selling it to whoever.
Russian Pu is very radioactive, unlike ours.
We swapped the slugs out after a short period, so it made more Pu-239, not Pu-240 and up.
We also purified ours, but I'd bet that classified. :)
You can't stand next to a Russian nuke for long, or all your hair falls out, lol.
That's why we buy Pu244 from russia for spacecraft RTG's.
This needs to be burned (atomically) or buried.
You can't find ours with a Geiger counter. :)
We made over 10,000 tons of Pu at Hanford, btw. It's on record.
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George Webb's story is that all of the Russian HEU was actually used in naval reactors and that is a significant part of the corruption going on in DC.
Webb is able to say "I have been saying that for 2 years" to a lot of legacy media stories, he has excellent sources, very excellent researchers and a hell of a mind, so is worth watching, imho.
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George Webb's story is that all of the Russian HEU was actually used in naval reactors
That would be a neat trick since the HEU was downblended to low-enrichment uranium (LEU) in Russia before it was shipped to the US. America paid for this to be done in-situ in Russia, mostly to take the HEU out of possible black-market hands. Nice conspiracy theory though.
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AFAIK, it will still run in a reactor -- you'd just need more shielding when processing it or loading the reactor with MOX.
One can argue that the increased radioactivity/Pu240 contamination is a feature, not a bug. Makes it harder to misappropriate or for amateurs to machine into a bomb core.
Like someone would care, lol. (Score:2)
Terrorists make bombs that are Way more dangerous, thankfully, they blow themselves up a lot, so that helps too.
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> Makes it harder to misappropriate or for amateurs to machine into a bomb core.
Right, so the guys that strap a bomb to their belt and blow themselves up are going to be deterred by radiation?
Sure.
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Please explain. (Score:2)
We'd love to hear what you have to say, vlad. :)
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On this planet, in this reality, it's Pu created by the US government for military purposes and now surplus to requirement due to a massive downsizing of the nuclear weapons it possesses and has ready for use or stockpiled. The Russians are dealing with their own overstock of Pu-239, they have a reactor and existing reprocessing lines that should be able to turn it into usable fuel to burn it.
Soviet-era weapons-grade Pu isn't particularly radioactive, any more than US weapons-grade Pu is. The USN uses a sli
86k years is for pure 239. (Score:3)
Real plutonium is a mix of things, depending on how it's made.
All other forms of Pu is More radioactive, and it has a huge cross section for fission, which adds to the radioactivity over time.
In other words, the crappier the Pu, the faster it gets dangerously radioactive.
Pu239 gives off alphas as it's primary decay, but those can cause fission of other Pu atoms, and the cross section for the impurities is Much larger than the 239, making it more likely to happen over time.
Fission gives off many things, whic
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Why even both? Designs like CANDU can already incorporate raw plutonium into the fuel mix. This screeching environmentalism run amok at fuel refinement.
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The US doesn't have CANDU reactors and allowing the US to export its MOX to Canada isn't entirely uncontroversial.
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The US doesn't have CANDU reactors and allowing the US to export its MOX to Canada isn't entirely uncontroversial.
In other words, it's an environmentalist problem just like 30 years ago. The environuts screech that "the end is coming" "CO2 will kill us all..." and then protest against nuclear power which per KWh is dirt cheap, and won't have a serious impact against the economy unlike renewables.
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> In other words, it's an environmentalist problem just like 30 years ago
Well that's the dumbest thing I've read all week.
Shipping US bomb fuel to foreign countries is controversial because shipping bomb fuel is controversial.
But sure, let's blame this on some ill-defined group you made up in order to assuage your political leanings.
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fuck off you ignorant cunt
The height of intellectualism right there.
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He spelled ignorant correctly.
AND chose to use that rather than the more common 'stupid.'
He truly is an intellectual amongst the rabble.
A very low bar, admittedly.
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Dirt cheap?
While some people, like you, continue to state that per KWH, nuclear power is "dirt cheap", others talk about how many billions to spend to get rid of the radioactive crap that's left sitting all over, wherever there is a nuke plant...and how to keep it safe for 10,000 years. What is the cost of just one night watchman for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at every location where nuclear materials, including spent fuel, for all those years. I'd assume salary will go up in time, as well as cost of benefits. Add those, and the cost of how to protect that stuff for all that time to the "dirt cheap" cost, and it goes up just a tad. Don't get me wrong, I grew up next to the first commercial nuke plant in the US, and am not totally against it...but I do believe we ought to be truthful about the total cost, not just the short term cost to the ratepayer, but the long term cost to the taxpayer, too.
I agree that the longterm cost should be included but it's not as bad as you think when you take into account the time value of money. Nuclear plants just need to be funded in a way that there is money set aside to watch over the waste for an indefinite amount of time. For example, using your night watchman example, setting aside 2 million per night watchman should be more than enough. The interest on 2 million should be 80k per year at 4% interest without touching the principle. This could fund that ni
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> $48B to build a reactor. WTF. That's absurd.
No, $48B MORE than $7.6B.
More absurd.
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> US to export its MOX to Canada isn't entirely uncontroversial
I don't know why, they paid for Russian Pu to be sent here to mix. I find it difficult to believe it would be more controversial to send US Pu here.
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> The engineers are beholden to ... OMG! ... politicians
They are beholden to their bosses, who are beholden to the shareholders.
You've never actually worked anywhere remotely need the power industry, have you?
> Nuclear power in the US is highly politicized
If the industry is so bad at public relations, then are you sure you want that industry building reactors.
I mean, just stop and think about what you're saying. You're saying that the industry group is so disorganized that it can't overcome some patch
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Seriously right.. why not just ship it to Canada?
Hasnt canada already destroyed a lot of "weapons grade" plutonium?
http://publications.gc.ca/Coll... [publications.gc.ca]
why pay to burry it when we can safely convert it to electricity?
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> they would need a MOX fuel processing plant just as the US would.
Its about 45 minutes up the road from me in Port Hope.
AECL did argue that some minor changes to the CANDU plant design would allow unmixed fuel to be burned, they called it EC6 and the overall project was CANMOX:
http://www.snclavalin.com/en/projects/the-canmox-solution.aspx
Originally pitched to the UK, but ultimately went nowhere.
Shot at alianz (Score:1)
My math might be wrong, but I'm coming up with ~700 million to just shoot it into space. 68,000 pounds at 10k per pound. Now maybe I'm off, say due to handling and there being a difference between putting something in orbit and shooting it at the Oort cloud. But even if I'm off by an order of magnitude it's still far cheaper. Maybe?
Re:Shot at alianz (Score:5, Insightful)
My math might be wrong, but I'm coming up with ~700 million to just shoot it into space. 68,000 pounds at 10k per pound. Now maybe I'm off, say due to handling and there being a difference between putting something in orbit and shooting it at the Oort cloud. But even if I'm off by an order of magnitude it's still far cheaper. Maybe?
This would never be approved. It would be very dangerous to put nuclear material on a rocket. Our rockets are not near reliable enough and it would be very hard to prevent something like this from crashing back to earth if the rocket exploded. Even if you could put it in a explosive proof container, the politics of it would likely never let it happen not to mention that an explosive proof container would greatly increase both the weight and the expense.
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I agree you're probably right about the logic being used for not doing it, but I don't know if it makes sense to me... by explosive proof container, you're pretty much just talking about encasing them in tungsten or such. Like I said, even if I was off by an order of magnitude it'd be cheaper. That's a lot of bribe money for the world powers that would do anything besides complain.
Re: Shot at alianz (Score:2)
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Or you could set up a nuclear waste dump on the moon, and staff a moon base there to watch over it...
Now, that's a great idea! Our first moon base, so we'll call it... Moonbase Alpha! And let's see, the transport ships, Falcon is taken by Elon, how about calling them Eagle?
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Actually not an unsolvable problem, but adds a massive amount of weight for armor. And you would probably have to do it 1kg at a time or so.
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Wait, are you talking about creating a thirtyfour ton plutonium ingot? Because that would be a good band name.
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That's a very very bad idea.
Critical mass. (that'S a good band name)
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You forgot several 1000 tons of armor shielding to make sure it does not make the US uninhabitable if a rocket blows up on launch.
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I think you're overestimating how eager the stuff is to spread over large areas. It's a metal. It forms ingots and you can machine it. It does not evaporate readily. Parking it directly under a shuttle engine for a while might do it, but it's not prone to it. More to the point, it's already used as a fuel source in space probes.
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Ability? Pure plutonium isn't just a nuclear material - chemically, it's pyrophoric. The hard part is stopping it from burning.
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Aluminium and magnesium are also pyrophoric. We make engine blocks out of their alloys. Pyrophoricity doesn't mean it will spontaneously ignite in air, just that it can burn under the right circumstances. (i.e. heated with a blowtorch, finely divided than subjected to flame, etc)
The solution is either:
(a) to store and transport Pu as an oxide. It can't be burnt, since it's already chemically "burnt."
(b) use a less-flammable cladding material to protect it from oxygen.
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> it can burn under the right circumstances. (i.e. heated with a blowtorch
Like a rocket engine?
> finely divided than subjected to flame
Like an exploding rocket?
Wait, are you defending or criticizing this concept?
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It is also a metal that corrodes into a fine powder with Oxygen and humidity.
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Am I the only one to notice the irony of wanting to have a substance that was created to be the payload of a rocket be the payload of a bigger rocket?
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My math might be wrong
I don't know about your math, but your idea is wrong. First of all, it's going to be dangerous to potentially have a launch accident and have it rain down on anyone living under or down wind of the explosion.
More importantly, this is a finite resource, so it would be an incredible waste to jut launch it into space. Who knows what we may be able to use it for in the next 50, 100, 200 years.
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Melt and mix it with glass. Mold the result into a torpeo like shape and temper it for increased strength. Then take them out to an oceanic subduction zone, where one continental plate is sliding under another. Drop them from the surface into the muck at the bottom on the plate that is going under. The glass torpedo should have enough velocity to bury its self pretty deep into the sediment sealing if off from the environment. Eventually it will be melted and mixed into the mantle of the earth. If it ever do
"Like the Obama Administration" (Score:1)
If the Obama administration really wanted to do this, why were they not the ones to cancel the program?
It seems like Trump deserves credit for that...
I for one am all for nuclear power but that program seems like a giant waste of money and it is well it was cancelled.
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Construction of the MOX plant was started a long time back, Google Google... The project started in 2000, construction was started in 2007 under Bush the Younger. I recall that Congress pulled the plug on financing it a couple of times before restoring the funding keeping it limping along, probably for pork reasons -- South Carolina where the plant was being built has two Republican Senators. The project was doomed from the start pretty much.
The 34 tonnes of surplus Pu is US-made, it's not Russian despite w
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Candu is magic, it can do anything. Making oddball fuel like MOX for a Candu or any light-water reactor is a nightmare of regulatory oversight, delays, cost escalations and regular lightly-enriched fuel which meets current regulations is cheap as chips now and for the forseeable future.
The perfect solution would be a reactor that can be fuelled with metallic weapons-grade plutonium without reprocessing it, downblending it or converting it to an oxide formulation. The BN-800 fast-spectrum reactor the Russian
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Billions of energy? ...
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Yes, "Billions of energy" is short-hand for some billions of dollars in value of energy produced. Try to keep up. I know you're slow.
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That's funny. I've never been describe as a "Boot Licker". I'm well known as having zero respect for AuthoriTIE!
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tWhy? Becuase I might get a bad reputation and nobody will hire me? Cry me a fucking river. I'm not a coward, unlike you. I give two shits about what you think of me.
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As a general rule of thumb, when a project is "90% complete" you are at about the halfway point in both time and resources.
Sad (Score:2)
I wasn't aware there was even an attempt to do this. I've always thought that highly enriched fuel could never be turned back into power grade, but if possible, it would be a massive boost to our energy reserves.
The waste will still be a problem. It will leak. It's already leaking in Nevada and only the local papers seem to bother covering it. Tritium has been found outside Wattsbar Nuclear and TVA keeps buying up land to keep it from getting out.
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I've made tasty cheese out of (goat) milk and lemon.
Penny wise and pound foolish. (Score:2)
... wants to blend the 34 tonnes of deadly plutonium ... with an inert substance and bury it underground in New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Burying the plutonium would cost nearly $20 billion over the next two decades ...
Ant then someone will discover / invent something super useful -- like warp drive, Mars/Venus terraforming or Earth climate control -- that requires this plutonium and it will cost N times as much to dig it up and separate it out. Even though it would cost twice as much, turning it into fuel seems more productive than burying it, and we might even learn new things while actually doing something with the stuff.
France went there too (Score:2)
France also tried that. The Superphenix reactor [wikipedia.org] was designed to burn plutonium. It was completed in 1981, and abandoned in 1997.
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Nah this is MOX fuel. It will burn in basically any light water reactor.
Refreshing language (Score:1)
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Cool, I'm an imbecile.
You have x tons of some stuff that is dangerous.
So you bury it/burn it/hide it or whatever.
Cost mucho $$$$
Or you build a reactor (mucho $$$$)
Generate XXX PetaWatts of electricity - mucho mucho $$$$!
Then you have to bury/burn/hide what's left over
Cost mucho $$$$
Same result, except that you've gained XXX PetaWatts of electricity...
Do I have to draw you a picture??
Mac