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National Security Cuts Into NASA's Plutonium

Posted by michael on from the get-out-the-oars dept.

cleveland61 writes "Space.com is reporting that an "undisclosed national security agency" is being assigned 7 Kg of NASA's 16 Kg supply of Pu 238. With a half life of 90 years Pu 238 is used mainly used in cases where batteries won't do here on earth. (Pacemakers, deep sea diving suits,etc.) It also provided the fuel for the Cassini Probe. My question is; Who is getting it and what are they using it for? Please tell me its Doc Brown looking for his 1.21 jigawatts!"

37 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Think small by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    That's quite a bit of energy in that there chunk.

    Think small. This isn't likely being used to make bombs or what have you. Materials with a much shorter half life are used for that.

    This is more likely for spying equipment.

    The question is - where do we suddenly need thousands of covert transmitters?

    1. Re:Think small by RNLockwood · · Score: 3, Informative

      Pu 238 not likely to be used for a bomb since it won't fission, Pu 239 and U 235 are used for that.
      Might be usefull for tamping though but U 238 is lots cheaper.

      The half life of Pu 239 is 25,000 years and I have heard that it is warm to the touch. Pu 238 would be still warmer yet.

      The half life of U 235 is 730 million years.

      If fissile isotopes had short half lives we wouldn't have bombs or reactors. The fissile material would decay away too fast.

      --
      Nate
    2. Re:Think small by Royster · · Score: 2

      The half life of Pu 239 is 25,000 years and I have heard that it is warm to the touch. Pu 238 would be still warmer yet.

      I hear it's even warmer if you hold it to your genitals, but you won't catch me testing any of these claims.

      --
      I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
  2. Just a guess by Wrexen · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the "undisclosed national security agency" is, in fact, the National Security Agency

    1. Re:Just a guess by David+Frankenstein · · Score: 3, Informative

      More likely the NRO. They are the ones in charge of the sats.

    2. Re:Just a guess by yzquxnet · · Score: 2

      But the guys I spoke to told me that there was no such agency as the national security agency. What gives?

      hah, I made a funny. okay, not really.

  3. I know why! by SecretFire · · Score: 2, Funny

    You see, all of the slightly-moderately paranoid types are already concerned about the government, but the "aliens are here" crowd haven't really been thrown a bone recently by government. Can you name a recent major occurance for this group? I tihnk we just have some sympathetic dude in the NSA who wants all the conspiracy shows to keep their ratings up.

  4. two answers by Apreche · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the easy answer is they are making a few nukes.

    the answer that took a little thought is that indeed the NSA needs plutonium to make an unbeatable UPS for its large powerful computer systems. This way the will never have a power out, meaning they can spy on everyone 24/7 365.

    --
    The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
    1. Re:two answers by dramaley · · Score: 2, Informative

      Nukes use Pu-239, not Pu-238 as this article was about.

      --
      ----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
    2. Re:two answers by Muad'Dave · · Score: 3, Informative
      My chart shows that Pu238 is an alpha emitter, and is subject to spontaneous fission. A I recall, the thermoelectric generators use the heat given off by the Pu238 to generate power with what are essentially thermocouples.

      --
      Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
  5. Same thing by benh57 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The undisclosed agency is likely using it for the same thing NASA does - RTGs to power satellites. RTGs could help power secret spy sats just as well as science sats. They provide quite a lot of power and with them you don't need the solar arrays.

    1. Re:Same thing by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree. And without the solar panels, these satellites will be mostly invisible until they start transmitting. So you have a back-up communications or spy array just in case China starts taking pot-shots at our birds with a laser.

    2. Re:Same thing by David+Frankenstein · · Score: 2

      And without solar panels, you can make a stealth sat so the baddies on the ground won't know it's overhead.

    3. Re:Same thing by chris_mahan · · Score: 3, Funny

      Oh great, so when an "unspecified" agency launches an "unspecified" payload from an "unspecified" rocket in the middle of an "unspecified" location, we might have an "unspecified" problem aboard the rocket and have"unspecified" consequences that will spew "unspecified" elements in the athmosphere and cause "unspecified" damages to an "unspecified" number of people in "unspecified" countries.

      Dang, talk about precision warfare.

      --

      "Piter, too, is dead."

    4. Re:Same thing by CTalkobt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually what makes the parent post intriguing is this.

      Currently the US has a set of Satillites that can form a communications relay and then beam messages to the ground.

      Suppose we have some black birds ( Satillites ) that operate solely on Nuclear Power with passive ( eg visual / thermal etc ) pickup of information / images. Now, let's broadcast the data to the communications relay and send it down encrypted.

      Since the birds doing the oberservation are "dark" - there only encryptions being laterally to earth's orbit their flight paths wouldn't be known.

      Hmm..... *looks up in the sky anxiously*

      --
      There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
  6. Re:Perhaps by TamMan2000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Pu 238 is a large molecule, fusion requires small molecues combining into larger ones. The only use for Plutonium in a fusion devise is as a "fuse" used to set of a big hot fusion reaction (H-Bomb).

    Along the bomb line...
    we already have a lot of nuclear material stockpiled in bomb form...

    --
    "I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
  7. Undersea Equipment by Detritus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've read that RTGs have been used for undersea equipment, like the combination line tap/recorder systems that the NSA has been reported to use on undersea communication cables.

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  8. i know exactly why... by skydude_20 · · Score: 2, Funny

    but then I would have to kill you...
    So please just sign on the line below and we'll be set...

    x___________________

    --
    Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
  9. It's going to be planted evidence. by Jon+Howard · · Score: 3, Funny

    They took it so they could plant it on suspects (or plant the radiation on their gear, at least) to prove that they got the "real" terrorists.

    There's going to be a "dirty bomb" conspiracy that gets busted soon, maybe a few.

    1. Re:It's going to be planted evidence. by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2

      Tracing the source of a radioactive element is not so simple as you may believe it to be.

      It's like tracing purified water in a bottle... once it's out of the bottle, assuming it didn't pick up any contaminants from the bottle, and it was pure before - water's water. The bottle was the only identifier.

      Admittedly, varying levels of different contaminants could be used to ID the chemical's source - if it's not refined beyond the tolerance of the detectors - and the quantum properties of the individual particles could be used (in theory) to ID them, if those properties were known in advance of the theft.

      Do you know of another method I'm unaware of?

    2. Re:It's going to be planted evidence. by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2

      That would be reasonable, but the chemical in the article is supposedly straight PU-238 - not in combination with anything.

    3. Re:It's going to be planted evidence. by Jon+Howard · · Score: 2

      You could be right. Perhaps not. I honestly can't say - however, the article merely mentions the quantity as a "7-kilogram parcel of Plutonium" and "7 kilograms of Plutonium 238," which doesn't specify the degree of purity attained.

      Based upon who it is that has the plutonium, I imagine the goal would actually be to lure in potential terrorists by offering it for sale. It's entrapment, sure, but that isn't a concern, I'd bet.

      Of course, if planting evidence was the goal, a national security agency would be able to get their hands on the chemical composition of PU-238 and dope their sample appropriately. Then again, since the quantity is also supposedly about half of the US reserves (barring anything in warheads), it would be tough to pinpoint it to one lab.

      I gues it really comes down to my not haing been particularly serious in the first place ;)

  10. Probably just a security measure by The+Infamous+TommyD · · Score: 2

    My guess is that this is a security measure to better protect material that may be useful for making a dirty bomb. I also like the satellite theory, though.

  11. Whilst not trying to sound like an Xfiles fan. by -douggy · · Score: 2

    Secret spy satlites. Moon mining? Nuclear powered aircraft out in Nevada.

    Comedy alien answer: Nuke them from orbit.

  12. Re:War on drugs? by neksys · · Score: 2

    Is a kilo a lot of plutonium to be purchasing? I don't know how much a "lot" is, I don't know much about it period. Reading it like that, though, it sort of seems like, "I'll be buying 7 fries from McDonald's this year, even though I've got my own potatoes and a deep frier.". *shrug*

  13. Correction.... by jsimon12 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Please tell me its Doc Brown looking for his 1.21 jigawatts

    Just so you know the accepted pronunciation of giga was actually " JIGA ", hence the usage in Back to the Future, people just stopped using that pronunciation when gigabyte drives became more prevalent in consumer goods cause people saw the G and figured it was said like Go instead of like Giant . So the time machine in the movie was powered by 1,210 megawatts, or 1.21 gigawatts.

    1. Re:Correction.... by chriso11 · · Score: 2

      I've always called them "bigawatts".

      --
      No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
    2. Re:Correction.... by Greg+Lindahl · · Score: 2


      It's a US-vs-GB thing, just like theta and beta and zed/zee. The use of Giga with a hard G in science predates consumer use of the term by quite a while...

  14. Shortlived isotopes are used.... by jsimon12 · · Score: 2

    The fusion material in most of our nuclear weapons is Hydrogen 3, Tritium, it actually has a half life of 12.32 years. So most warheads get a regular refresh every few years. Don't you remember the big stink people were making a few years back when the US stopped tritium production, the military types were worried the Russians would take advantage of our "Decreased state of readiness" since we were letting the tritium in our warheads degrade. Course they restarted tritium production a few years later.

    1. Re:Shortlived isotopes are used.... by rjh · · Score: 2

      Bzzt--thanks for playing. Tritium is used to boost the initial fission yield; it's not used in the secondary stage.

      A different set of compounds (lithium hydrides?) undergoes fusion, but this isn't the terminal stage of the nuke. The fusion is almost purely an incidental product--they're not looking to liberate energy from the fusion, they're looking to liberate neutrons. Specifically, real freakin' energetic neutrons which can induce fission in the U-238 shell surrounding the nuke. So essentially, there are three stages: a small fissile device at the core, then a small fusion stage, and then a really honkin' huge fissile stage which amounts for >90% of the liberated energy.

      In fact, some of the early H-bombs used no hydrogen at all. If you get U-235 in the same shape as a softball, it'll spontaneously go supercritical; but if you get a cylinder of U-235 with a diameter slightly less than a softball, it can be arbitrarily long without going supercrit. To make it go supercrit, you use explosives to implode its shape, at which point it goes supercrit. The U.S. tested a 500kt "H-bomb" which was one of these purely fissile (i.e., "A-bomb") designs. ... Why do nuke designers prefer fission reactions to fusion ones? When uranium splits, it does so by breaking into big and heavy atomic fragments (+46 charge). These atomic fragments carry away the majority of the reaction energy and dump it almost immediately as heat. By comparison, when hydrogen fuses to helium, the end product is a very light atomic nucleus and the majority of the energy of the reaction is liberated as neutrons, which can travel for quite some distance before giving up their energy.

      Basically, fission has a lot more bang for the buck.

      If you really want to know more of the physical details behind nukes, check out FAS (here) and the Bremsstrahlung Effect.

  15. USSR used RTG's for decades.... by jsimon12 · · Score: 2

    The Soviets used RTG's for their satellites for decades, namely cause they made such crappy solar panels and such. But thanks to them there is a crapload of plutonium orbiting the Earth ;)

    1. Re:USSR used RTG's for decades.... by AJWM · · Score: 3

      The Soviets made some use of RTGs, but they also used nuclear reactors in some of their spy satellites, as a very heavy duty power source. Way beyond RTGs.

      Cosmos 954 was one such. The normal end-of-life manouever for those things was to eject the reactor core to a much higher orbit while the rest disintegrated on reentry. 954 didn't separate, and pieces of satellite and reactor core were strewn across northwest Canada. The cleanup operation (Operation Morning Light) took a while, and we learned some interesting things about Soviet space reactor design from the pieces.

      --
      -- Alastair
    2. Re:USSR used RTG's for decades.... by Telecommando · · Score: 2

      Not just the Soviets, the US did as well.

      Voyager, Cassini, Galileo, numerous spy sats and all Apollo moon missions had RTG reactors. I believe at least one of the Mars missions did as well.

      Do a search for "SNAP 9A reactor" to find out about the failed Transit 5-BN-3 mission that spread P-238 over the entire world in 1964. That one accident is credited as the main source of P-238 in the environment and was still detectable in the upper atmosphere as late as 1995 (The last time anyone checked). One group of researchers reported that contamination from that one accident was spread to every continent and was probably responsible for increased lung cancer rates 20 years later.

      The US currently has 4 abandoned plutonium reactors still in orbit, the Soviets have an unknown number. 8 of the reactors known to be still in orbit are damaged.

      Apollo 13's reactor is on the bottom of the Pacific ocean, hopefully undamaged. The other Apollo reactors are on the moon.

      Both the US ans the Soviets have used these reactors since the 60's to provide power on Earth for weather stations, light houses, marker buoys and monitoring and surveillance stations. It's assumed the Chinese have done the same but there's no information to confirm that.

      There was a reference a few years ago on the web about a CIA spy station in the mountains somewhere in Asia that had one of these reactors buried in a landslide and never recovered. I can't find it on the web anymore so maybe it's been pulled.

      There's no reason to assume that the plutonium in question is going into space. Maybe they're setting up a secret monitoring station in Afghanistan.

      --
      Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
    3. Re:USSR used RTG's for decades.... by Detritus · · Score: 2

      RTGs are not nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors initiate and maintain a chain reaction. RTGs generate heat and electricity from the natural decay of radioactive isotopes.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  16. It's an asteroid bomb, duh by Sembiance · · Score: 2, Funny

    Let's see... a few days ago an asteroid was discovered that we 'are told' 'may' impact the earth.
    And now plutonium, 7 kilograms (EXACTLY enough to build a nuclear bomb) is being sent for use to an 'undisclosed agency' ?

    Duh, I think we all see what's going on here.

    Someone is trying to make chocolate ice cream taste better by using plutonium.

    1. Re:It's an asteroid bomb, duh by Greg+Lindahl · · Score: 2


      Wrong kind of plutonium.

  17. Stop that Earthling! by t0qer · · Score: 2

    *melvin the martian*
    Quick somebody stop that bush! He just stole my plutonium 238 Actuator!