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London Nuke Plant Loses 30 Kilos of Plutonium
solafide writes "The Globe and Mail reports 'A British nuclear-reprocessing plant [at Sellafield] cannot account for nearly 30 kilograms of plutonium, but authorities believe it is an accounting issue rather than a loss of potential bomb-making material, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority said.' Although it says later plutonium is only 1% of what they deal with there. The Times Online has more details."
I don't say that Boston is the same as New York. Please don't do this to my country.
To pre-empt the tin-foil hatters: it is not possible to construct a nuclear weapon from power-grade plutonium, and terrorists do not have the technology to refine it into weapons-grade plutonium. However, it would make a nasty dirty bomb.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
A nuclear weapon only uses about a grapefruit sized piece of fissionable material.
And only about 8 grams of matter were actually converted to enegery by the original nukes used against Japan.
30 kg missing seems like a big deal to me. I'd like to know for sure whether its an accounting issue or someone else has it.
Sellafield is right up in the north west of england. London is in the south east. The people who decided where to put Sellafield(then Windscale) are, however, based in London. Strangely they decided the best place for it was as far away as possible.
you had me at #!
If you reprocess tons of spent fuel then those little fraction-of-a-percent measurement errors add up. Also, in a big plant you could have an ounce of plutonium stuck in a filter one place, another ounce elsewhere, and add up to tens of kilos.
What's scary is that the margins of error are big enough to include several bombs worth of material.
The BBC has had this story since yesterday!
From what I read on http://news.bbc.co.uk, the "missing" plutonium was a result of the way in which material was accounted for, not an actual loss.
-- The problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.
That's not exactly true. Several governments have investigated the possiblity of making bombs from mixed-isotope Pu. It is possible. However even the best designs have a chance of a fizzle due to premature fission when the critical mass is being compressed. Making a bomb from power grade Pu is definitely quite a bit harder than making one out of pure Pu-239, which is harder than making one out of Uranium.
Power grade plutonium doesn't have that problem to the same extent, because the reaction doesn't have to happen at a precisely controlled moment.
Separating out Pu-239 from Pu-240 is a similar problem to separating U-235 from U-238: slow, tedious, and lots of centrifuges and similar. Because the relative weights are so close together, it's a significantly harder problem. This is why the production of weapons grade plutonium requires very regular reprocessing of fuel from the reactor core; otherwise, you'll get too much Pu-240, and it becomes too hard.
Depends on how it's reprocessed. If you use the fuel until it's considered "spent", the plutonium in the mix will be a combination of Pu-239 and Pu-240, and will only really be useful for power generation and/or dirty bombs. For weapons grade plutonium, you need a high (93%+) concentration of Pu-239; Pu-240 will render it useless for that purpose. If you don't pull the fuel out and reprocess it on a very regular basis, you'll get enough Pu-240 in there to contaminate the mix, and you can forget about weapons grade material.
While the radiation is a problem - the chemical issues with Pu are almost worse. The stuff is more poisonous than Arsenic
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Google most likely.
http://www.google.com/search?q=plutonium+refining
it would be highly difficult for most people to get any use out of that plutonium. radioactive material is purified to only 3% for use in power plants and needs to be purified up to somewhere around 90% to be weapons grade.
ergo, i don't think i would be extremely worried if someone had stolen it.
Trouble is, even the tiniest changes might have profound effects, so theoretically you supporting Apple might through some Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events, be catastrophic.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
Depleted uranium doesn't have much of a 'dirty bomb' problem... Just a general chemical problem -- not that much different from what you'd get from burning lead, nickel, or cobolt. Plutonium is more like arsnic with heavy cancer causing problems added in.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I'm guessing what you are thinking about is causing fission in the other transuranics (or anything with Z numbers greater than lead) by using high-energy neutrons. Even in that case, you will not get the exponential growth in energy necessary to make a nuclear bomb. There are only a few nuclides that have the right properties for making a nuclear bomb.
If you want to include fusion, then using anything other than hydrogen in the mix is real challenging .
That's misinformed. This is not weapons grade material, and the facilities necessary to make it weapons grade are visible from orbit. By the way, they don't account for several kilos every year - look at the less reactionary articles (such as the BBC article) and you'll find that this is the norm. Regardless of all of it, they state very clearly that they're probably not missing anything at all, but that 30 kg of plutonium extra is on paper.
Sellafield is nowhere near London. It's about a 300 mile drive away according to Multimap. It's at the complete opposite side of the country.
While the radiation is a problem - the chemical issues with Pu are almost worse. The stuff is more poisonous than Arsenic
It seems to be a myth that plutonium is very poisonous. See fx the wikipedia entry or The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity
You're right, I'd like to point out also that the same atom can have different toxicity depending on its oxidation state. If you have seen Erin Brockovich, where the whole case was Cr(VII) being measured with the emission limit of Cr(III), causing poisoning among the population, well that's the same thing.
U and Pu are actinides, and that means they can have many different oxidation states, each with its own chemistry.
This is also why lead in gasoline and paint is carcinogen, while veterans have lived with lead bullets in their body for decades.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
It's not any particular lump(s) of Pu that are missing. I think they took in some used fuel rods and estimated somehow how much Pu was in it. Then, when they reprocessed them they found they had slightly less Pu than they expected.
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Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It's Sellafield who's lost the Plutonium, not London. I realise that most Americans are geographically challenged and that this is a smaller mistake than usual (When I was at University in Swansea, it was not infrequent for americans to say "Oh, you're in Wales... that's in London isn't it?").
http://blog.nexusuk.org
In 1977 the United States announced the successful underground detonation of an atomic weapon made from civil plutonium - in 1962. In a Department of Energy publication on weapons nonproliferation it says "Virtually any combination of plutonium isotopes -- the different forms of an element having different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei -- can be used to make a nuclear weapon." The report goes on to say "While reactor-grade plutonium has a slightly larger critical mass than weapon-grade plutonium (meaning that somewhat more material would be needed for a bomb), this would not be a major impediment for design of either crude or sophisticated nuclear weapons." It even evaluates how the ability of the organization building the weapon affects the scenario - " At the lowest level of sophistication, a potential proliferating state or subnational group using designs and technologies no more sophisticated than those used in first-generation nuclear weapons could build a nuclear weapon from reactor-grade plutonium that would have an assured, reliable yield of one or a few kilotons (and a probable yield significantly higher than that)."
That's a bad thing, but what really worries me is that the management of the Sellafield plant are probably right that the missing material was not removed from the facility. They are using the plutonium in the creation of Mixed OXide fuel (MOX), a mixture of plutonium- and uranium oxide fit for normal nuclear power plants. The process involved includes various complicated cutting, soaking, and moving activities which must be done remotely due to the extreme radiation hazard. Due to the reactions of the various substances involved, this process also results in accelerated and unusual state changes in the materials. So they're not really sure what happened to the stuff - where it may be lying around or how much of it has turned into what - even though it is still under their control. There wasn't an accounting error - they can't account for the stuff because their accounting system doesn't work. They don't understand the process well enough to predict the outcome. And that scares me.
oops no, we got one
2 &cid=11709124
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13984
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Plutonium is no more toxic than lead or other heavy metals. Radium is more than 200 times as radiotoxic than arsenic.
http://russp.org/BLC-3.html
From Wikipedia's article titled "Plutonium":
As of 2003, there has yet to be a single human death officially attributed to plutonium exposure. Naturally-occurring radium is about 200 times more radiotoxic than plutonium, and some organic toxins like botulism toxin are still more toxic. Botulism toxin, in particular, has a lethal dose in the hundreds of pg per kg, far less than the quantity of plutonium that poses a significant cancer risk. In addition, beta and gamma emitters (including the C-14 and K-40 in nearly all food) can cause cancer on casual contact, which alpha emitters cannot.
Here is the article about the Nuclear Boy Scout. Quite an interesting read.
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Depleted uranium has the problem of "Journalist Blame" attached to it. It was heavily used in Gulf War 1 and the Serbian Bombings and the areas where it was used are suffering cancer rates between 10 and 50 times above the world average. This was erroneously blamed on it.
The reaility is that the cancer rates around Basra, parts of ex-Ugo, Western Bulgaria, Western Romania and so on are caused by the choice of targets for "shock and awe" campaigns.
The shock and awe campaigns blanket bombed into oblivion the industrial potential of the target countries - Iraq and Serbia. This industrial potential was mostly built in the late sixties and early seventies using enormous quantities of Asbestous and plastics that emit carcinogenous chemicals when burning. All this got released when they were bombed back into the stone age.
Which in turn resulted in tens of thousands of people to die, dieing or who shall die of cancer in the targeted areas and the areas downwind from it (Bulgaria and Romania on the Balkans and Iran in the Gulf).
This has been blamed by various shallow journalistic research on depleted uranium. It may have a role, but it is minor. The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Sellafield is nowhere near london (in UK terms, obviously in US terms everywhere in the UK is practically the same place).
nowhere in the article does it even mention London. Sellafield is in Cumbria, very far north, and closer to Ireland than London (which is why they [Ireland] make such a fuss about it in the first place).
"Them Londerners is gonna build one of them atomic bombs and get us."
:) "You don't need to see our nuclear arsenal. These are not the Vanguard SSBNs you're looking for."
:)
It's a leeetle late for that. We more or less gave the UK The Bomb before many of our parents were born.
Of course, they seem to be following the philosophy of "Speak softly and carry a big thermonuclear device." You hear a lot about the US and Russia, you hear about French special forces vs. Greenpeace over nuclear testing in the South Pacific, but the UK seems content in letting everybody forget who else has The Bomb and the submarines to launch them from.
Heck, even the Canadians were a nuclear state under the old "Take our atoms! Please!" program and probably could be again given a few hours. Of course, it seems redundant considering how married they are to the US nuclear arsenal via programs like NORAD as it is. And, heck, most people don't even know Canada has its own military at this point.
Iranians, Koreans... it just goes to show it's those WASPs you really gotta keep an eye on. Next thing you know it'll be the damned Kiwis... "No, really! They're just... uh... leftover props from the filming of the Lord of the Rings! Nobody here but us sheep!"
I just ordered some Iosat Potassium Iodide pills. After hearing about North Korea and then the government report of possible future attacks I had heard enough. I live within 15 miles of Seabrook in NH and I'm well within the 300 mile radius of several other nuclear power plants. If Chernobyl did nothing else it served as opportunity do study the effects of fallout on people and it showed that leukemia and skin cancer didn't increase after the meltdown, but thyroid cancer did, but only in areas were KI wasn't distributed. What's your towns emergency supply and do you think you'd be able to get to it in an emergency?
Please refer to the entry for the word, nation, in your nearest dictionary and stop bothering me. Or if you don't have one of those, look at the entries for country, nation and state on Wikipedia.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Long answer: They are called the United Nations because their organisation was founded to unite (and build bridges between) different nations. The fact that their members are `countries'--actually, they're states--has nothing to do with this aim.
Analogy: a charity to help people affected by the tsunami doesn't have to only accept donations from or be run by those who had their homes washed away.
In fact, by definition, a non-state nation doesn't have any representation, so who would represent it as a member? Don't believe me; look at what the UN say. A nation has a national identity and culture (and usu. a common language) and a state has someone in charge--it makes perfect sense that the UN would be a collection of states' governments who want to unite nations.
It may be true that the UK government has political reasons to call it a nation (although they probably haven't IMO). That does not change the fact that it factually is a nation. There's a lot of straw flying around here; don't you think? That's correct, it does (unless you are talking of status as meaning representation or government). From whom? Even after Wales just won the Six Nations (rugby tournament) against England, the English called the Welsh lots of names but they never said "you're not a nation and only part of the `UK nation'" because they would then be questioning their own national identity (as well as, for that matter, their right to be in the Six Nations). Find someone who resists it (except you and you clearly haven't used your dictionary yet). There's absolutely loads of straw blowing around. The population size of a nation does not effect its existence, nor does the fact that it is a political subdivision within a country or state. It is not just me. Its eveyone else here (which is what makes us a nation). Oh and the international community (e.g.: UN) also agree. Functionally, it is less than a state within another country, because the National Assembly does not have primary legislative power.Socially, it is more than a non-nation state within a nation because it is a nation with its own social identity.
Quit the ad-hominem arguments and give me a single valid counter-argument. When you've done that, you can try proving the truth of your valid counter-argument.Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
"blitzkrieg" translates to "lightning war".
The idea behind blitzkrieg isn't a massive bombing campaign - It's to advance in an invasion so rapidly that the enemy has no time to fall back and regroup.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?