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."

Comments

London is nowhere near Sellafield.

[Rexz]

I don't say that Boston is the same as New York. Please don't do this to my country.

Re:Bomb em!

[amliebsch]

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.

Jokes

[Bonhamme Richard]

You all joke, but a nuclear submarine goes around the world on a lump the size of a golf ball.

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.

Re:Jokes

[Powertrip]

Let's see, if the grapefruit I ate this morning was about 12cm in diameter the total approx. volume would be about 864cm^3. Plutonium has a typical denisty of 19.84g per cm^3, giving us a total weight of 17.062Kg.... Thats a darn heavy grapefruit! Brad

For any Americans who are reading...

[BovineSpirit]

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.

Trigger-happy reporting? Not on /. !

[toby]

As usual, a quick cross-check would have revealed that this story has been subsequently qualified in the UK press as somewhat less of the sensation initially implied:

British Nuclear Fuels, which runs the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria, claimed yesterday that no nuclear material had gone missing from the site ... a spokesman for BNFL said similar discrepancies have been recorded in audits since 1977, and do not represent real losses of radioactive material ... it is impossible to know precisely how much plutonium is at a nuclear site. Plutonium is created inside nuclear fuel rods while reactors are running, so scientists can only estimate how much plutonium is in them. Only when spent fuel rods are reprocessed, by dissolving them in acid to separate out the plutonium, uranium and other materials, can the true quantities be measured...

--UK Guardian, 18 Feb 2005.

Re:Bomb em!

[cameldrv]

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.

Re:Bomb em!

[Anonymous Coward]

The first article linked doesn't say what grade of plutonium it is, and the second article seems to be playing silly buggers right now. But to expand on this: "weapons grade plutonium" is 93% pure Pu-239. If there's more than 7% Pu-240 in the mix, the chances are that the Pu-240 will spontaneously fission, making it next to impossible to assemble a critical mass that is necessary for the nuclear explosion.

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.

Oxidation states

[orzetto]

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.

Re:Bomb em!

[arivanov]

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.