Is the Uranium Fuel Proposed For Small Modular Nuclear Reactors a Weapons Risk? (reuters.com) 190
Reuters reports:
A special uranium fuel planned for next-generation U.S. nuclear reactors poses security risks because it could be used without further enrichment as fissile material in nuclear weapons, scientists said in an article published on Thursday. The fuel, called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, is enriched to levels of up to 20%, compared with about 5% for the fuel that powers most existing reactors.
Until recently it was made in commercial amounts only in Russia, but the United States wants to produce it to fuel a new wave of reactors... "This material is directly usable for making nuclear weapons without any further enrichment or reprocessing," said Scott Kemp, one of five authors of the peer-reviewed article in the journal Science. "In other words, the new reactors pose an unprecedented nuclear-security risk," said Kemp, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former science adviser on arms control at the State Department. A bomb similar in power to the one the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 could be made from 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) or less of 19.75% enriched HALEU, the article said. "Designing such a weapon would not be without its challenges, but there do not appear to be any convincing reasons why it could not be done," it said.
The authors said if enrichment is limited to 10% to 12%, the supply chain would be far safer with only modest costs...
TerraPower, a company backed by Bill Gates that has received funding from the [U.S.] Energy Department, hopes to build its Natrium nuclear plant in Wyoming by 2030 to run on HALEU. TerraPower in late 2022 delayed Natrium's launch date by at least two years to 2030 due to a lack of HALEU. A TerraPower spokesperson said Natrium will use HALEU as it allows more efficient energy production and reduces nuclear waste volumes. "TerraPower has made reduction of weapons risks a foundational principle" the spokesperson said, adding that its fuel cycle eliminates the risk of proliferation.
Reuters notes that America's 2022 climate legislation "included $700 million for a HALEU availability program including purchasing the fuel to create a supply chain for planned high-tech reactors."
But the study's authors argue that if it becomes a standard reactor fuel, it could eliminate the distinction between peaceful and nonpeaceful nuclear programs — in countries around the world.
Thanks to Slashdot reader locater16 for sharing the article.
Until recently it was made in commercial amounts only in Russia, but the United States wants to produce it to fuel a new wave of reactors... "This material is directly usable for making nuclear weapons without any further enrichment or reprocessing," said Scott Kemp, one of five authors of the peer-reviewed article in the journal Science. "In other words, the new reactors pose an unprecedented nuclear-security risk," said Kemp, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former science adviser on arms control at the State Department. A bomb similar in power to the one the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 could be made from 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) or less of 19.75% enriched HALEU, the article said. "Designing such a weapon would not be without its challenges, but there do not appear to be any convincing reasons why it could not be done," it said.
The authors said if enrichment is limited to 10% to 12%, the supply chain would be far safer with only modest costs...
TerraPower, a company backed by Bill Gates that has received funding from the [U.S.] Energy Department, hopes to build its Natrium nuclear plant in Wyoming by 2030 to run on HALEU. TerraPower in late 2022 delayed Natrium's launch date by at least two years to 2030 due to a lack of HALEU. A TerraPower spokesperson said Natrium will use HALEU as it allows more efficient energy production and reduces nuclear waste volumes. "TerraPower has made reduction of weapons risks a foundational principle" the spokesperson said, adding that its fuel cycle eliminates the risk of proliferation.
Reuters notes that America's 2022 climate legislation "included $700 million for a HALEU availability program including purchasing the fuel to create a supply chain for planned high-tech reactors."
But the study's authors argue that if it becomes a standard reactor fuel, it could eliminate the distinction between peaceful and nonpeaceful nuclear programs — in countries around the world.
Thanks to Slashdot reader locater16 for sharing the article.
Depends, how much fuel per reactor? (Score:2)
Is it 2 lbs? Shrug.
Is it 2200 lbs? Huge problem.
Article of course doesn't say and the science.org article is pay walled.
Re:Depends, how much fuel per reactor? (Score:5, Informative)
This article [world-nuclear.org] discusses several SMR designs with fuel loads between four and twenty tonnes.
Re:Depends, how much fuel per reactor? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, "small" is a relative term. NuScale's reactors are tiny -- 45 MW apiece, or roughly 1/20 the size of a conventional reactor. However they envision a dozen or more units per site, so the amount of fuel on site isn't going to be much less than a conventional reactor -- say fifty to seventy tons rather than 120 tons or so.
TerraPower's reactor units are much larger than NuScale's. It's going to be 345 MW. So it's safe to say there's going to be many tons of nuclear fuel on site and being shipped to the site on a regular basis.
Now that fuel in the case of NuScale is no worse than fuel for a conventional reactor, but we know HALEU is part of the fuel picture with TerraPower, but we don't know how much or how. TerraPower likes to talk about their admittedly very interesting sodium cooling and energy storage capabilities of their Natrium design, but they aren't very keen on talking about their fuel technology. Given that they were formed to commericalize traveling wave reactors, I'm guessing that the design only uses a small amount of HALEU to breed fissile fuel in surrounding fertile materials. That's probably not going to be much of a leg up for a bad actor pursuing the uranium path to a nuclear weapon.
But I'm not sure that the uranium path is all we need to worry about. Likewise I don't doubt Terrapower's claims about reducing proliferation risk of nuclear fuel reprocessing, but that's just one risk scenario. I take a nuclear technology claims about proliferation resistance about the same way I take a software company's claims about hack-resistance. It needs independent design review by experts looking at every facet of the technology. This thing is designed to produce fissile plutonium -- granted a small amount at any given time -- as part of its normal operation. If we imagine that there were a number of reactors like this operating in a country like Iran, they'd certainly have a lot of clever people working looking at their potential usefulness on the plutonium path.
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I think the idea is to use very little HALEU with mostly natural uranium or spent fuel. Like I said I don't think HALEU significant for the uranium pathway. I'm wondering what a state that had a bunch of these could do on the plutonium pathway if it has significant scientific capabilities.
In any case the HALEU isn't an SMR issue per se; it's just a feature of TerraPower's Natrium design.
Re: Depends, how much fuel per reactor? (Score:2)
You might want to do a bit more research about weapon grade plutonium. Pu-239 is used for weapons. And to get it out of a reactor, the uranium fuel is left in the reactor for a relatively short time. The reason is because Pu-239 easily absorbs another neutron and becomes Pu-240, which is quite unsuitable for weapons because it spontaneous fission far too frequently. In fact, it was this Pu-240 contamination that mandated the use of an implosion bomb such as fat man, instead of the simpler tall man device. I
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hey! ( 33014 [slashdot.org] ) postulated that Iran's high-enrichment uranium processing would/could be repurposed for plutonium weapons. I was pointing-out that Iran, as the US's whipping-boy (See: Stuxnet), has been the boogeyman of nuclear power while other countries (See: Israel, North Korea) do much worse. Part of that boogeyman fairy-tale is, Iran will escalate to bigger weapons, just as the USA escalated to plutonium.
Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:4, Insightful)
GP was founded as an honestly pro-environment group based on science. It had a very basic message: wiping out entire species, polluting the oceans and air, and devastating huge swaths of forest is bad.
They had great success but later leadership swept aside common sense environmentalism and went political.
There's some quotes floating around from one of the founders that he is opposed to how GP approaches things like nuclear power today.
Re:Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:5, Interesting)
What happened to Greenpeace happens to many organizations that advocate for controversial policies.
The people who join and donate are those who are most passionate, and they then vote for leadership that pushes even further to the extreme, causing the moderates to leave in frustration as the organization veers out of the Overton Window and descends into irrelevancy.
Re: Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:2)
Who have they imprisoned?
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I take it you're referring to Trump. He hasn't been imprisoned and you don't know what his sentence will be. So I call BS on your statement.
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Re:Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:5, Informative)
Now the Democrats have used mass lawfare to imprison their political opponent on expired misdemeanor, zombified charges before the next election to give their guy a chance at the ballot box. For democracaayyyy!
You mean Trump? He was charged with falsifying business records, which is a felony, not a misdemeanor. The statute of limitations on that is 5 years, but the statute of limitations in NY tolls for up to five years while the defendant is out of the state for a continuous period, which he was for pretty much his entire time as president and probably most of the time since then, making the effective expiration potentially ten years. Additionally, for a 228-day period during the year 2000, the statute of limitations was tolled, so nearly a year of that time wouldn't have counted anyway. So the "expired misdemeanor" thing is false on both counts.
And if you think this helps Biden at the ballot box, you're a fool. The folks on the right are, predictably, using this to make questionable claims that this was a politically motivated prosecution. This is standard operating procedure for Republicans (and, to a lesser extent, many Democrats as well) — everything good is my fault, and everything bad is someone else's fault. But in reality, a jury of Trump's peers, including at least one who appeared to be a Republican Trump supporter (and possibly more than one), decided that he was guilty of the crimes that he was charged with.
More than that, Trump has failed to convince a single juror in multiple criminal and civil trials recently — 42 jurors in total [cbsnews.com]. Two companies within the Trump Organization (the umbrella company that is over all of Trump's businesses) were convicted of 17 felony tax evasion charges.
And Trump's charitable organization was dissolved to settle a lawsuit over improperly using funds for campaign financing [reuters.com].
The fact of the matter is that Trump's questionable business dealings go back a long way. The wealthy rarely get prosecuted for crimes, but he has a long history of not paying contractors, to such a degree that he has been sued 3,500 times [usatoday.com]. Normal people do not get sued thousands of times for unpaid bills.
This sort of behavior is *not* normal. The question is not whether he has committed any crimes that he should be prosecuted for, but rather why the legal system is so broken that he didn't end up in jail LONG before he ran for president in the first place. Were he an average person instead of an extremely wealthy person, he likely would have been brought up on fraud charges decades ago.
But the voters and leaders on the right are quick to defend him, and deflect, deflect, deflect, and scream persecution, despite mountains of evidence that he's the kind of dirtbag who most people, if you described the things he has done, would say deserves to be behind bars, as demonstrated by the fact that 42 jurors in four trials, after examining the evidence, unanimously agreed that the things he and his company have done violate the law. So when presented with the actual evidence in person, rather than the political spin from right-wing trash journalism, he couldn't even convince 2.4% of those jurors (one juror). That's not just guilty. It's staggeringly guilty.
Even still, the Democrats were well aware that the Republicans would almost certainly rally around him, just as they have done over and over when his crimes and appalling behavior are called out. Yet they prosecuted him anyway because it was the right thing to do even if it cost them the election.
So basically, the reality of the situation is the exact opposite of everything you said. You might want to get your news from a source that actually has some journalistic integrity left.
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This is standard operating procedure for Republicans (and, to a lesser extent, many Democrats as well) — everything good is my fault, and everything bad is someone else's fault.
How are you measuring that to know it's a lesser extent with Democrats?
Re: Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:2)
And besides all that... Trump isn't even in prison!
Re:Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:5, Insightful)
Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor, you imbecile.
You're right.
Unless the records are falsified in support of some other unlawful activity. That's super-available information. You can just Google "why Trump felony" and you'll find pages upon pages of explanations that even right-leaning lawmakers haven't been able to demonstrate incorrect. I mean... they'll whine and complain and deflect and accuse and blame and lie, but not actually demonstrate a flaw in the legal basis.
One where the statute of limitations had long expired.
You're right.
Unless the case is in New York, where such expirations were tolled in 2021 due to the courts having been mostly inoperable during COVID. That's super-available information. You can just Google "Trump felony statute limitation" and you'll find pages upon pages of explanations that even right-leaning lawmakers haven't been able to demonstrate incorrect. I mean... they'll whine and complain and deflect and accuse and blame and lie, but not actually demonstrate a flaw in the legal basis.
Your knowledge of this case is as non-existent as I fully expected.
Friend, you're replying to a wall of text tearing your position to shreds and you're pulling two "facts" which are debunked by a} just a modicum of searching (oh, by the way, go ahead and search for 'why the reasons why this was allowed aren't legit' and you won't find anything reputable) and b} the simple fact that actual fucking lawyers and judges said so.
Braying "the election was stolen" for four years with virtually the only evidence of election-tampering being Republicans doing shady shit isn't a great playbook for every topic. Get a new game.
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The irony is that if the original poster had stopped with the first paragraph
Just like political parties. They and their base drag each other further and further to the poles.
then I would have agreed, but then the second paragraph demonstrated having swung so far towards one of those poles that it almost made me question the validity of the original point itself.
There are plenty of loud voices in the Democratic party that are pretty far towards the poles, and to the extent that they are involved in policymaking, it pushes the party as a whole in that direction. As a result, the party is going farther a
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The irony is that if the original poster had stopped with the first paragraph
Just like political parties. They and their base drag each other further and further to the poles.
then I would have agreed, but then the second paragraph demonstrated having swung so far towards one of those poles that it almost made me question the validity of the original point itself.
There are plenty of loud voices in the Democratic party that are pretty far towards the poles, and to the extent that they are involved in policymaking, it pushes the party as a whole in that direction. As a result, the party is going farther and farther towards the left pole.
But prosecuting someone like President Trump isn't an example of this. Frankly, this case hearkens back to the trial of Al Capone and how he got convicted for tax evasion because they couldn't convict him for a large number of worse crimes that he had managed to cover up. Between the Secret Service deleting/losing all of their texts from January 6th, Trump's henchmen using Signal in what seems like a deliberate attempt to evade public records law, Trump tearing up papers and throwing them away, etc., IMO, there's rather strong reason to expect that all sorts of shady stuff was happening in his White House, and it seems likely that the things that are being prosecuted are the tiniest tip of an ice cube floating in a martini in a glass atop the tip of the iceberg.
Not that Hillary Clinton would have been that much better as president. She has always struck me as a serious autocrat. Most Democrats who voted for her were voting the "easily recognized name who is not Trump" ticket. And that's why Trump won to begin with.
The problem with having primary elections is that mostly the die-hard party members bother to vote, so the candidate is chosen by the most extreme voices. We would all be better off if primaries went away and we replaced it with an open two-tier election, where the final election gives you three or four choices out of a much larger initial pool from all parties combined, with instant runoff happening at both tiers.
I suspect that it's much the same with groups like Greenpeace. Presumably, their organizational structure and/or voting structure made it too easy for the more extreme voices to take over.
Just wanted to say... I pretty much agree with all of that. Nice to see a neutral, rational view that doesn't paint either "side" as a bunch of saints.
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Braying "the election was stolen" for four years
A stopped clock is correct twice a day. Every election has been stolen since I have been alive.
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Unless the records are falsified in support of some other unlawful activity.
Except Trump hasn't been convicted of any other unlawful activity, either prior to the NY conviction or concurrent with it.
You can say that it doesn't matter if he had prior convictions because "everyone knows" he's a criminal, despite no court saying so, and that's basically what the NY prosecutors claim. But that is a very dangerous precedent.
This is already leading to the normalization of criminal charges against political opponents, just like many 3rd world countries do. It happened to Trump, and it is happening with the BS charges against Hunter Biden.
It is wrong, and more importantly, it is a mistake. Swing voters tend to agree with Republicans on this more than they agree with Democrats.
I'll admit I'm not a lawyer and not fluent with how that'd defined, but... there's a certain circular logic there. Requiring that you're convicted of the second crime before you can be charged for the first isn't as intuitive as it seems. Basically, what I understood is that - legally - the requirement doesn't include conviction. The jury was given instruction - which apparently was legally accurate - that they were to determine from evidence given if the records meddling was done in service of other ill
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Requiring that you're convicted of the second crime before you can be charged for the first
That's not the requirement. They could convict him of a second crime at the same time.
But they weren't asked to do that because the prosecutor didn't have a case or they weren't in the same jurisdiction. His tryst with Stormy happened in Nevada.
The prosecutor argued that a 2nd conviction wasn't necessary, and the judge accepted it, but there is no precedent for it, and it likely be tossed out on appeal.
The appellate court in NY has unusually broad power to reverse. In most appellate courts, a judgment can o
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Except Trump hasn't been convicted of any other unlawful activity, either prior to the NY conviction or concurrent with it.
In a slight sense he has. This Jury was given the task of deciding if he was guilty of another crime and was told to only convict him of this crime if he had committed another crime. By giving him a felony conviction they have confirmed that they are convinced, beyond reasonable doubt, that he committed some other crime, even if they don't know, because of his cover up, what specific crime it was.
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The Jury Instructions included 3 possible other crimes that elevated the underlying crime from a misdemeanor to a felony.
Each juror just had to be convinced the falsification was in order to commit at least ONE other crime:
The federal election campaign act
Falsification of other business records
Violation of tax laws
I'm copying the above verbatim from the jury instructions. It's not that the jury did not know what these other crimes were. They just only had to believe the falsification of records was in order
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if he had committed another crime
*intent*. Actually committing another crime is not the requirement of elevation for a class 1 felony. They only need to demonstrate intent to commit another crime. Actually having committed another crime would just be a bonus.
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Correct. And they didn't have to agree on which other law he broke. Some jurors could pick #1 from the list, and others could pick #2 or #3.
Nor did they need to decide there was sufficient evidence to actually convict him of those other crimes.
This is unprecedented. The rules were tailored for Trump, which is why so many people see this prosecution as a political vendetta. If some random business owner had done the same, it would've never gone to trial.
The worst part is that it allows Trump to play the vict
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Also, those payments as described are guaranteed a violation of tax law, and were obviously campaign related. And if it isn't double-counting, the payments were falsified to falsify a different payment to zero. It would be incredible to claim that a juror decided that yes, Trump falsified the records, but didn't do it for both 1st and 3rd reasons.
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Yes, it looks like he broke several other laws.
However, "looks like" has no precedent as the standard for conviction rather than actually being convicted of the other crimes.
The jurors could use their "feelings" to decide guilt and didn't even need to all feel the same thing. It was a custom criterium just for Trump.
It may feel good to see this happen to Trump because he's with the other tribe, but abuse of the justice system will now be the new normal.
If Trump wins in November (he's ahead in the polls), he
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Congratulations, you danged "commie libtard jerk"! You now have a ton of my respect, whatever that is worth. Staying above the situation, observing that setting bad legal precedent(s) and dragging political opponents through the court system for "the win" is not good for our country.
You focused on the repercussions implied in "Be careful what you wish for", and the future cost of changing the rules to get what you want now.
Our politics differ, but today I realize that we share a key value: the betterment
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It's not unprecedented!
His own CFO, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to the breaking the same exact law for a different crime!
From the indictment:
"The defendants, in the County of New York an elsewhere, on or about April 11, 2016, with the intent to defraud, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise, to wit, a Form W-2 Wage and Tax Statement 2015, and the defendants' intent to defraud included an intent to commit another crime and to aid and conceal the commission thereof."
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Thanks for the correction.
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However, "looks like" has no precedent as the standard for conviction
That's the only standard of conviction, if the jury thinks it "looks like" beyond all reasonable doubt that you committed the crime you are charged with, you get convicted. And the jury all thought that Trump falsified records for the commission of another crime. I'm not sure how you're concluding that these records were falsified but then reported accurately to the IRS? Sounds crazy, no wonder you didn't comment on the part where your pet criminal obviously committed crimes.
Trump will do whatever he can to appoint judges and prosecutors
He already did, he'll do it agai
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Except Trump hasn't been convicted of any other unlawful activity
Not sure why you open the phrase with the word "except" as if "conviction" is actually required. It's not. What is required is "intent to commit". That is the only bar required.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legis... [nysenate.gov]
You can say that it doesn't matter if he had prior convictions
No. "Convictions" don't matter period. They are not a requirement. The law isn't complex. There's no complex legalese to interpret. Just 46 words of which "conviction" isn't one of them.
Stop making up non-existing laws. They are there for everyone to read.
This is already leading to the normalization of criminal charges against political opponents, just like many 3rd world countries do. It happened to Trump, and it is happening with the BS charges against Hunter Biden.
Good! We should be holding politicians accoun
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Yes it was all a big hoax and nobody could ever prove anything and nobody went to prison or had to be pardoned.
Except for his personal lawyer.
And his CFO.
And his campaign manager.
And his deputy campaign manager.
And his national security advisor.
And two of his political advisors.
And his economics advisor.
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How do you distinguish "lawfare" from a group of criminals facing consequences for their criming?
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"How about when the judge donates to the Biden campaign and"
It was a grand total of $35 and has already been cleared!
Is this all you have?
In the meantime, the FL judge making comically absurd rulings in favor of President P01135809 has her job thanks to the defendant!!!
Lawfare (Score:2)
Democrats have used mass lawfare to imprison their political opponent
What is lawfare? Is that a fancy new word for holding people accountable for obeying the laws as written?
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It's been decades since GP was worried about nuclear power because of bombs.
I'd be surprised if the average age of a GP member is high enough to remember or even have been born during the Cold War which is the last time nuclear war was a serious concern for most people.
Current GP opposes nuclear power plants because they oppose anything with the word "nuclear" in it. It has been a lifetime since they were a science based environmental organization.
Re:Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't about waste, it's about anyone with access to the fuel being able to divert it into nuclear weapons. No need to generate and isolate plutonium. No need for centrifuges for further enrichment. Just using the fuel as-is.
And when it comes to nuclear weapons, once you have a fission explosion, regardless of what it took to get it started, there's no limits to your potential scale, because you can always Teller-Ulam your way to ever-bigger bombs. It's just a question of how heavy you're willing to get it, and whether it wouldn't just be better to use a MIRV approach.
If the fission bomb needs to be large (1t in this case), it certainly complicates its use as a weapon, but doesn't at all make it impossible. North Korea's Hwasong 17 [wikipedia.org], for example, has a payload of 2-3,5t and a range of 15000 km. Or if you go with something like Status-6/Poseidon [wikipedia.org], your max warhead size is basically limitless. If you want to go for something more terrorist-y than military-y, shipping crates carry 20T, while the cargo hold of a bulk carrier is tens of thousands of tonnes. Assault tunnel [wikipedia.org] max warhead sizes for undermining ops are also basically unlimited.
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It would be difficult to build a fusion bomb with HALEU.
Lithium deuteride requires a trigger temperature of 100M kelvin.
A basic HALEU gun bomb isn't gonna get near that.
Little Boy was a uranium gun bomb and only had a core temperature of a few million kelvin.
Fusion bombs use plutonium implosion triggers, which are much hotter.
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Why are we talking about gun bombs? You can make implosion bombs with uranium pits too, they're just bigger. The US made some in 1950s; they just standardized on plutonium because it's a superior option due to the lower criitical mass. And HALEU's is exponentially larger still. Uncompressed it's like 20x bigger, not sure about compressed.
This entire discussion is just one of scale. Larger bombs give you greater neutron efficiencies.
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An implosion bomb is harder to make and is much harder for larger cores.
Good luck compressing 1000 kg to critical mass.
Gun bombs are much simpler. We don't use gun bombs for plutonium because they don't work. Plutonium fissions prematurely and blows the device apart in a low-yield explosion.
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Again, why are we still talking about gun bombs? Nobody here was talking about gun bombs. Certainly not the researchers above, who say that you can make a bomb with 1000kg of HALEU. Honestly, if anything the larger scales probably make it easier to make a symmetrical explosion (just requiring a correspondingly larger amount of explosives) to a given density, and you also take out the motivation for the complexities miniaturization of everything else once you've decided from the start that the bomb is g
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The material doesn't have to explode to be destructive. Contaminate a huge area badly enough and it would be a nightmare to clean up.
Or some whacko could just take a sufficient quantity and dump it a water supply or spread it around downtown, at malls, wherever.
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Contaminate a huge area badly enough and it would be a nightmare to clean up.
Not really.
HALEU is only mildly radioactive.
You could hold an ingot in your hand, and it wouldn't hurt you.
It's less toxic than lead.
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HALEU is only mildly radioactive.
So you'd have no problem with eating it or breathing the dust or drinking the particles? I would.
It's less toxic than lead.
Yeah that's not the ringing endorsement you think it is. Lots of things "less toxic than lead" will kill you or fuck you up.
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Then why steal HALEU from a super secure facility when you can buy lead shot at Walmart?
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If you had your choice of exposure to lead or HALEU, which would you prefer?
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What is it you think "bad faith" means?
Because if you're going to single out the highest evil, there are plenty of people pushing directly for carbon emissions, and doing it in bad faith. Greenpeace is counterproductive, but you'd want to start with those other guys first.
Re: Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:2)
Greenpeace has promoted and owns natural gas companies because it didnâ(TM)t want nuclear in the 90s. It has promoted all sorts of bad behavior by its actions, donâ(TM)t like pumping gas and oil from the sea, then we will have to get it on land where it is a lot more devastating to the environment. But land protests arenâ(TM)t as splashy (pun intended) and photogenic as driving your own boats in eco-terrorism protest.
Re: Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:5, Informative)
By saving coal as a fuel for electricity production, it could be argued, that Green Peace is the single most evil organization or political movement of all time.
Oh that's far from their only transgression. Another major one is GMO crops. GMO is easily a viable option for indefinitely sustaining food production in a safe way, but they're having none of that. In fact, not only are they the biggest advocate for environmentally wasteful agriculture (aka "organic") and a powerful lobby against the green revolution, but they're the world's biggest advocate for malnutrition in impoverished countries.
Re: Most nuclear safety is in bad faith (Score:2)
Oh and:
https://www.dailydot.com/uncli... [dailydot.com]
The problem is not fuel... (Score:3)
Re:The problem is not fuel... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is my basic problem with nuclear power. It's not the technology itself... but, in America at least, with any process we always get to the point where someone in power decides they can cheap their way out to save money and/or grab some sweet short-term big bucks. With nuclear, the potential downsides of that are especially problematic.
Tight regulation can help ameliorate that, but - hey "socialism".
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Yep. Looks like that may not be a positive survival factor for the next few centuries though. No big loss.
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Tight regulation can help ameliorate that, but - hey "socialism".
Erm, regulation depends on enforcement and it is amazing at how weak enforcement can be when money is at stake. Having the regulations is one thing, enforcing them is another. America simply can not handle money intelligently. Like a drug addict presented with the possibility of more drugs.
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Or none at all. They are even more excessively expensive than large reactors and there are no prototypes. I predict that by the time anybody has a prototype ready and operated long enough (if that ever happens), there will not be any business case left.
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The problem is also the fuel. It has to be protected at all stages of its lifecycle, because even if it can't be used to make an atomic bomb, it can be used to make dirty bomb. So from the point at which it is enriched onwards, it must also be guarded carefully.
And that's assuming you trust the government with it in the first place. Iran is talking about exporting its nuclear technology to neighbouring states like Syria and Jordan.
Not a problem (Score:2, Interesting)
A decent SMR for small scale deployment doesn't need much maintenance. You can bury the thing in concrete and mount the fuel on a failsafe mechanism (say, rods that melt before dangerous levels of heat are generated) over a pit.
Once it's sealed up, you really only need surface access for pipes to carry steam to the steam turbines and cooled condensed water back down.
If anyone wants to steal that fuel, they need to be prepared to control and defend the site while ripping out tons of concrete. It's not wort
Re: (Score:2)
What you describe are theoretical designs that are little beyond the napkin stage.
The only SMR anywhere near a prototype is NuScale's, and they can't be encased in concrete. They require constant monitoring and a large cooling pool for emergency situations. Obviously the pool is safety critical so must also be monitored and protected, be earthquake proof, not evaporate away etc.
NuScale's design is also worse than a conventional reactor for fuel consumption, requiring a refuelling cycle every couple of years
Re: Not a problem (Score:2)
The pool is not safety critical, it may be production critical but you can shut off any nuke in existence without needing to cool it after shutdown.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not what NuScale says.
Sniff Test (Score:5, Interesting)
You absolutely cannot build a fission bomb with uranium enriched to only 20% without further enrichment. I don't know who's saying that but they're full of shit. You need uranium enriched to 80% at a minimum and even that requires a very clever bomb design and exotic neutron sources to supplement the uranium. Most uranium bombs require 90-95% enrichment to work and even then resist miniaturization.
This paper isn't actually about US SMRs. It's a stalking horse for claiming that the Iranian nuclear program, which halts enrichment of uranium at 20%, is a proliferation risk in its current form rather than requiring significant re-enrichment of its stocks that would be rather easily detectable under the framework of the 2014 E3+3 deal.
Re: (Score:2)
You absolutely cannot build a fission bomb with uranium enriched to only 20% without further enrichment. I don't know who's saying that but they're full of shit. You need uranium enriched to 80% at a minimum and even that requires a very clever bomb design and exotic neutron sources to supplement the uranium. Most uranium bombs require 90-95% enrichment to work and even then resist miniaturization.
This paper isn't actually about US SMRs. It's a stalking horse for claiming that the Iranian nuclear program, which halts enrichment of uranium at 20%, is a proliferation risk in its current form rather than requiring significant re-enrichment of its stocks that would be rather easily detectable under the framework of the 2014 E3+3 deal.
Except... Iran hasn't halted uranium enrichment at 20%. Try 60%. Source: International Atomic Energy Agency report dated 26 Dec 2023. "In a Dec. 26 report, the IAEA noted that Iran is now producing approximately nine kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent uranium-235 per month. Iran was producing 60 percent enriched U-235 at a similar rate in early 2023, but decreased production by about two-thirds in June. (See ACT, October 2023.) Accelerating the production of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-23
Re: Sniff Test (Score:4, Insightful)
After seeing what happened to Iraq after the US discovered Iraq didn't have any nuclear weapons, it's hard to blame Iran for trying to develop them. I'm not saying Iran's government isn't evil, but it's also basic self-preservation for them at this point.
Re: (Score:2)
"I'm not saying Iran's government isn't evil, but it's also basic self-preservation for them at this point"
If they believe that they're far more stupid than evil. At the 1st hint they would try to use nukes, America would turn their deserts to glass.
Re: (Score:2)
If they believe that they're far more stupid than evil. At the 1st hint they would try to use nukes, America would turn their deserts to glass.
Turning the deserts to glass, no great loss. The problem is what happens to anything else. Drop a nuke anywhere in 75% of America and people are going to notice bigly.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't have nukes and aren't developing nukes: Mostly safe, unless someone wants your stuff.
Don't have nukes and are developing nukes: Incredibly dangerous, expect to have your scientists assassinated and facilities bombed, sanctions, opposition from world powers.
Have nukes: Very safe, except for the armageddon thing.
Re: (Score:3)
North Korea has nukes, and they brag about it, specifically about their ability to target the US with them. Haven't seen much nuking from the US, not even threats (beyond 45 saying he had a bigger nuclear button than Kim). Same goes for Pakistan, a nuclear power that established the Taliban and gave refuge to Bin Laden.
It's quite obvious the US does not disturb hosti
Re: (Score:2)
It is of course worth keeping in mind that Uranium enrichment is an extremely non-linear process. Almost all the work in the process is to get from the natural state of 0.7% up to just a few percent enrichment. To go from 20% to 80% is just a few more goes through the cascade cycle (compared to the thousands of goes through that the first few percent take).
I don't write this to contradict anything you've said, only to point out that there is some advantage to a nation in keeping stocks at 20% enrichment, a
Re: (Score:2)
One of the issues is that the definition of precision and difficulty are woefully outdated. No one here is doing extreme UV lithography. We've had the technical capability to create highly enriched uranium for just shy of 100 years by now, a high degree of precision and control is these days not difficult to achieve with even outdated tech.
Re: (Score:2)
So, let's discuss those challenges... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Designing such a weapon would not be without its challenges, but there do not appear to be any convincing reasons why it could not be done."
To make a nuclear weapon work, you have to compress the uranium or plutonium with an explosion outside it. With highly-enriched uranium, you can do it with a gun-shaped design - more or less, fire a slug of U into a hole in the majority of the mass. That was Little Boy.
With plutonium, the gun shape doesn't work. The supercritical mass more or less squirts out one side before it compresses enough to fuse well. So you get a dirty bomb, but from a mushroom cloud standpoint, a dud. So you have to implode it by firing explosives from all sides simultaneously, and they have to push inwards all with the same force, or again, it squirts out one side and you get a dud. That's why implosion type bombs are harder to make work. Also why Iran, North Korea, etc. are building enriched uranium bombs.
Now, instead of trying to get enough implosion energy with 140 pounds of uranium (little boy), let's try doing it with *2200* pounds. That's a much bigger ball, so a gun-type weapon isn't going to work. Sure, in theory you *might* be able to get an implosion device to work, but it's going to be correspondingly huge. Like, way too heavy to drive around in a semi trailer. You'd have to assemble it in the same place you're going to set it off.
You're also going to have to reprocess the fuel rods to cast your core blocks in the right shape. So, your evil lair needs a refinery and very precise machine shop, all of which will be working with very radioactive metal.
And you're going to need 10-20 tons of very good, very consistent high explosives. Tubs of ANFO in the back of a rented truck won't do it. Again, if the initial boom isn't exactly symmetrical, you get a dud.
So, who are we worried is going to build this bomb? And who do we think it'd get used on? This is nation-state difficulty stuff. But it's too big to deploy. So you can only use it on your own soil. Iran and Korea already have more highly enriched uranium, precisely because they want to be able to threaten their *neighbors*, not blow up their own cities. They might take a ton of 20% enriched and turn it into 140 pounds of 95% enriched to make one deployable bomb. But they're not going to build a 20% bomb.
If you're a terrorist organization and have access to 10-20 tons of high explosives and a ton of 20% uranium, you don't build one nuke underneath Gotham Stadium (sorry, Bane). You can make dozens of bombs each big enough to level a major building. Which are easier to build and transport. And if you have the radioactive material, you can make them dirty bombs. Though you'd be much better off using high-level radioactive waste, because you want something with a short half-life so it's more dangerous (U-235 is poor for this use).
So, there may not be convincing reasons why it *can't* be done. But there are very convincing reasons why it *won't* be done.
Re: (Score:2)
And, of course, doing that gives you two more problems. Not only is that high-level radioactive waste more dangerous to work with, it doesn't stay high-level radioactive for long periods of time. Compared to U-235 it has a very short half-life, meaning that you can't use your bomb as a threat for very long, compared to what the major
Re: (Score:2)
Though you'd be much better off using high-level radioactive waste, because you want something with a short half-life so it's more dangerous (U-235 is poor for this use).
And, of course, doing that gives you two more problems. Not only is that high-level radioactive waste more dangerous to work with, it doesn't stay high-level radioactive for long periods of time. Compared to U-235 it has a very short half-life, meaning that you can't use your bomb as a threat for very long, compared to what the major nuclear powers have in stock. Probably the most effective way to use that waste is by adding it to a conventional terrorist weapon, contaminating the blast zone and adding to the long-term death toll.
Yes, exactly.
We're talking about fuel for reactors in the United States. It's highly unlikely any other nation is going to get its hands on a ton of US reactor fuel. So the only actors we're worried about are terrorists.
Re: (Score:3)
So, your evil lair needs a refinery and very precise machine shop, all of which will be working with very radioactive metal.
Isn't uranium only mildly radioactive? As long as it's not close to its critical mass anyhow.
Re: (Score:2)
So, your evil lair needs a refinery and very precise machine shop, all of which will be working with very radioactive metal.
Isn't uranium only mildly radioactive? As long as it's not close to its critical mass anyhow.
Sure. I have some uranium ore in my rock collection which is radioactive enough to make my Geiger counter click satisfyingly, but I have no health concerns about having it in my closet.
U235's primary decay chain is via 4.7 MeV alpha particles, which are blocked by even dead skin. So unless you're making metal vapor or fine dust, you're really at very little risk. The big risk is if you inhale or eat that dust or metal vapor, because then those alpha particles are emitted right into your internal organs.
O
Re: (Score:2)
It depends what the goal is. In the Middle East, for example, a long lasting dirty bomb might be preferable, because it could upset the Zionist's claims to the region on religious grounds if it is poisoned with nuclear material, even if the level of danger is relatively low.
While Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, maintaining the capability to refine the uranium and develop a bomb quickly is probably a big consideration for them. Just like Japan.
Re: (Score:3)
Why do you think a gun-type bomb won't work with a larger amount of lower-enrichment uranium?
The problem with gun-type bombs (as opposed to implosion devices) is predetonation spraying the fuel around before it goes fully boom, but fundamentally, the larger the fuel mass is, the less of a problem that is, not more. The time constants get larger with the larger masses.
The lower the proportion of U235, the faster you're going to need to smack that plug into the core. Just plopping it into place won't do. You need to push the U235 atoms close enough for the overall cross-sectional neutron capture to reach a sufficient level of positive feedback.
And you need to push the *rest* of the core together too, to increase its density and to hold it in shape.
This is why no amount of unenriched or lesser-enriched uranium will give you a satisfying boom, unless you're pumping it wit
Re: (Score:2)
Because U238 gobbles up fast neutrons a lot better than U235, and unless you remove most of it, the average 2,5 neutrons from each U235 fission will be mostly absorbed by U238 instead of starting another fission. Having more mass will simply mean you have more U238 as well.
SMNR is dead (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC the claim that they produce more waste included things like PPE in the definition of waste. You're either being unintentionally or intentionally misleading here, because most people who see "more waste" in the context of nuclear aren't going to think "plastic gloves".
And yes, it's expensive -- so are all of the other options. The idea is to be less expensive than big reactors by making it possible to produce them with a production line rather than as one-off projects. Mass production has lowered costs
SMR fuel (Score:2)
...or they could just wait 5y for fusion reactor (Score:2)
Re:It's an acceptable risk, next (Score:4, Informative)
Full-on breeder reactors could power every aspect of American life for 2300 years
Only at an absurdly high cost. Fuel reprocessing is ridiculously expensive. Ask the French.
Robots and AI might change that someday, but reprocessing is not realistic with existing technology.
They wouldn’t be able to get past the radiation monitors and security
Yet, there have been "shrinkage" problems in the past. Political instability is another problem, as happened in the post-USSR.
let alone their own biology as they are fatally dosed by their stolen cargo.
Toilet paper provides sufficient shielding from plutonium, which is not dangerous unless you eat or inhale it.
Re: (Score:2)
> Only at an absurdly high cost. Fuel reprocessing is ridiculously expensive.
Hmmmm.. if the fuel reprocessing is powered by Nuclear power to save costs. :0
It's almost like using computers to accelerate computer design or using machines to create industrial machines.
Re: (Score:3)
Hmmmm.. if the fuel reprocessing is powered by Nuclear power to save costs. :0
1. Energy is not the primary expense in fuel reprocessing.
2. Even if it was, nuclear energy is not free or even cheap.
Re: It's an acceptable risk, next (Score:2)
The only cost for reprocessing besides some time and a small team of techs is regulatory. Concrete and steel are rather cheap in comparison with high tech solar panel/battery/solar mirrors in space that can produce the same amount of output throughout the night.
Re: (Score:3)
That would be true if energy and money were the same thing.
They're not.
Re: (Score:2)
20% of Frances electricity production is consumed for reprocessing.
The biggest nuclear plant in France is the reprocessing facility, at LA Hague.
Re: It's an acceptable risk, next (Score:2)
These are actually entertaining reads.
https://www.johnstonsarchive.n... [johnstonsarchive.net]
https://fas.org/publication/ra... [fas.org]
Re: It's an acceptable risk, next (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Stop FUDding. Chernobyl was an intentionally badly broken design so the KGB could save face for communism. And Fukushima was one of the very first, very poor designs. Modern reactor designs are vastly superior, automated, and are essentially impossible to fail.
Re: (Score:3)
Fascinating. Somebody still believes the tired old lies that have been pushed since the existence of nuclear power. You are _really_ dumb, you know?
Incidentally, Fukushima did not fail because of poor reactor design at all. That is just you not understanding how things work and claiming bullshit. Fukushima failed because they placed the emergency generators too low and they got flooded. They could have relocated them to any of the conveniently nearby hills. They did not. Oh, and they had mobile emergency ge
Re: (Score:3)
Well, true. You did not say Fukushima failed because it is an old design. You just insinuated that was the cause. This is called a "lie by misdirection". No idea why you think that is acceptable.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, just like the "1 in 1 Million years" figure pushed for nuclear accidents? Soo, Windscale, TMI, Tchernobyl, Fukushima and quite a few near-misses. Seriously, fool-me-once applies to any such claims.
The fact is you claimed, somewhat indirectly, that Fukushima was was due to an architectural failure. In actual reality, this was you lying, because it was two details that could have been corrected without prohibitive effort (one probably with a week of electrician time). They did not, due to stupidity and di
Re: It's an acceptable risk, next (Score:2)
How many people died at both sites? Has it been more in the past 100 years than people that fell off or were burnt to a crisp in wind turbines just last decade?
Re: (Score:2)
Breeders do not work. You were lied to.