Plutonium Shipment to France on the Way

duesi writes "According to BBC News a British vessel is carrying 140 kg of weapons grade plutonium from the US to France to turn it into nuclear fuel. It doesn't take a nuclear physicist to see that this is a dangerous thing... Similar shipments have happened before, for example in 1999 and 2002 but BBC writes that this is the first time weapon grade plutonium has been shipped ever."

Comments

Not the way I would do it

[brejc8]

The critical mass of plutonium is 10 - 100 kg. (I assume weapons grade plutonium would be more towards the 10kg range).
I would split it up into 5kg bars and do a few trips. If there is a crash or whatever it wouldn't go critical. And it's not enough for a bomb is someone nicked it.
5kg / 19,816 kg/m^3 in cm^3 is ~ 250cm^3 which is 5 by 5 by 10 cm.
Pretty strange that the entire consignment is smaller than a shuttle case.

Re:Sellafield

[turgid]

You gotta wonder what the brits got planned with those many TONNES of weapons grade PU they got in the bunker at Sellafield. That place aint no power plant!

Sellafield has never been a "power plant" it's just the ignorant, stupid, sensationalist British media and such that refer to it as one.

Sellafield is an enormous site. I think that somewhere in the region of 15000 people work there on a daily basis.

Sellafiled contains many things, including the ill-fated (criminally badly designed) Windscale reactors (whose sole purpose was plutonium production), the Calder Hall power station (mainly for providing site electricity and steam and the very first Magnox in the world, now shut down for good), various separation and containment facilities including the notorious "open pond", reprocessing facilities, the WAGR (Windscale Advanced Gas-cooler Reactor - absolutely brilliant piece of engineering, now decommissioning), the MOX Demonstration Facility, THORP (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant) plus a load of other stuff.

Most of it isn't top secret and can be visited by the public. I went once on business. Very interesting. For those of us too young to remember the Cold War Era, it's absolutely incredible to see what's there.

Try clicking on the above link. I think BNFL has now got a clue and realises that IE isn't the only browser in existance...:-)

Re:Don't need critical mass to make a bomb

[eht]

I think he was refering to the effect neutron bombs have on cities, the people are gone but the buildings are still there.

Re:Highly poisonous

[turgid]

For em, the issue is that plutonium is astonishingly poisonous.

That's actually an urban myth. Read about it at the wikipedia.

140kg of plutonium is enough to cause cancer in the entire world population about ten times over.

Depends what you mean by "cause cancer." Tt is generally accepted that exposure to ionising radiation icreases your risk of developing cancer by an amount depending on the type of radiation, its strength and the time you are exposed to it. This is a very complicated subject, and people make careers out of understanding it and supervising radiation workers. Technically, exposure to any sort of ionising radiation at all increases your risk of developing a fatal cancer. For example, every banana you eat (which contains naturally-occuring potassium-50) slightly increases your risk. Having a dental X-ray increases your risk somewhat more, and so does flying in an aeroplane.

I'm not sure what the dose rate is from weapons-grade plutonium, but people are able to handle it in the lab, and people are able to stand next to nuclear warheads, all without turning green and losing their hair.

The dangers of plutonium are greatly exaggerated. I knew a man who ingested some. They figured out that the likeleyhood of him catching cancer from it was very small.

Smoking cigarettes is far more dangerous.

Re:Don't need critical mass to make a bomb

[turgid]

Sorry- misspoke

:-)

I think the danger from a dirty bomb is more likely to be contamination and ingestion by people, plants and animals of the radioactive substances. This would lead to a long-term exposure to smallish amounts of radiation which, over many years, would result in an increase in cancer cases (and therefore deaths).

Because the legal thresholds for what counts as "contamination" are very low, such a weapon would render large areas uninhabitable. I for one certainly wouldn't want to live somewhere a dirty bomb had been detonated.

Re:Don't need critical mass to make a bomb

[LWATCDR]

actually Plutonium is not that radio active. It would make a very poor dirty bomb. The danger of from Pu is that is extermly toxic chemicaly. The stuff is very poisonous.
It is not that it is so radioactive it is a heavy metal and is very toxic.
Unless you have enough to make an atomic bomb. What people do not get is that if they do not stick it in reactor and use it for fuel it will just sit around for a few thousand years waiting for someone to make a bomb out of it.
Converting it to electricity is the best thing to do with it.