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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."
Uranium regeneration is a good thing. A nuclear reactor only uses about 4% of the uranium until it has to be either discarded or regenerated (because of reduced efficiency issues) but the regeneration process makes plutonium, which can then be used in a bomb. Most of the time, the plutonium is actually mixed with uranium and it can then be used as a fuel.
Hopefully fusion will come along sometime soon...
Remember after 9/11 and some nuclear plant had some rods missing. It was another accounting error i think. Never heard much more about it.
And if they're saying that this is within standards, then obviously the standards need to be tightened up. A gram or two isn't too serious, but thirty kilograms? Jeez.
It's been often said: the hard part of building a nuclear bomb isn't building it. It's getting the fissile materials ...
1. Sellafield is nowhere near London.
Sellafield is well known for mistakes, so well known in fact that it changed it's name to Sellafield, it's old name was Windscale.
Nothing new here, please move along.
http://www.nucleartourist.com/events/windscal.htm
Hmm, Sellafield is not a city. It's a village 300 miles from London in the middle of nowhere known only for having a nuclear power plant.
When you take scale into account, saying Sellafield is in London is totally like saying the Grand Canyon is in Washington D.C.
And what are you on about? The UK has a lot of open land. It's nothing like the US, but more of the UK is fields or moor than anything else.
I watched this news article on BBC world last night (am British living in forign country). The BBC world account of this story did highlight a couple of points that take the wind out of this sensationalist post.
1. The missing 30Kg is discrepancy between the estimated amount of reclaimed fuel and the actual amount for a whole yeare (See previous post). As any engineer involved with nuclear reclamation will tell you there is no precise method of calculating the amount of fuel that will be reclaimed from nuclear waste until after it has been reclaimed.
2. On several occasions (years) Sellafield has reclaimed more fuel than estimated.
Paul Gogarty
Notice the complete lack of comment in that statement. The only important line is the first one.
British Nuclear Fuels, which runs the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria, claimed yesterday that no nuclear material had gone missing from the site
Notice that line is unqualified. If they have not ruled out accounting, being the issue, it is not yet a fact that anything is missing. Therefore the statement is true. The rest of that comment is pure misdirection. Yes it is true that the total amount of Plutonium cannot be indentified, but they could be missing 30kg that had been amassed through the reprocessing of fuel rods.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Dirty bombs aren't any more nasty than regular bombs. Because there's no chain reaction, and because the radioactive material is blown up, the amount of radiation is extremely diffuse. Both the US and Iraqi governments have experimented with dirty bomb tests, and concluded that the danger is simply in fear of radiation - it's unlikely anyone would get radiation poisoning. The BBC covers this in their documentary "The Power of Nightmares," as well.
...at least, the parts that had been declassified by then (late 1980s). I liked science, engineering, and military concepts, and besides, I figured maybe bullies won't risk beating up someone that knows how to build an atomic bomb.
I once co-opted history class for about 20 minutes after the teacher asked me whether the uranium in a nuclear power plant was in danger of exploding like an atomic bomb. I explained a lot about atomic weapons, hydrogen weapons, antimatter weapons, the history of their develoment, theories behind detonation practice, why it forms a mushroom, etc. etc. The teacher and a few of the hardier souls asked me questions, but everyone else was deathly silent.
-ulatekh (I would have posted with my name, but apparently I already moderated this conversation.)
Oh, sure... That's all fine and dandy... Except the real danger of diffuse nuclear materials is in inhalation... And in that regard, Radium is about 40x more dangerous than Pu. It's totally likely that people involved in a dirty bomb explosion will live, but will live to develop lung cancers, and die... Just like the people in Japan that didn't die from the blast outright.
Last I checked, spontaneous fission of hydrogen gas in canisters was a pretty rare occurance (i.e. it never happens). There's this thing, well, really, an electromagnetic potential wall, that stands between two happy hydrogen atoms trying to get together. We call it the Coulomb barrier. Protons, you see, don't like each other very much. And the closer they get to each other, the more they want to get away from each other.
So the best way to get some hanky panky going between two proton-rich nuclei is to force them together. And the only way to do that is to smash them up against each other with so much energy that even their electrical repulsion can't stand up to it.
That's where our friend plutonium comes in. All he needs is enough of himself and blamo! His nuclei destabilize, split apart, and go completely bonkers! Everything heats up REAL fast. So much energy is poured out of those nuclei that the temperature quickly reaches MILLIONS of degrees.
That's when hydrogen gets into the act. Plutonium's energy is just spilling over into everything, and hydrogen finally gets to the point where it begins to come together, releasing even more energy.
And that, my friend, is how you level a city in a small fraction of a second.
Halliburton misplaces Americium in Massachusetts, fails to notify Nuclear Regulatory Commission within federally-mandated deadline.
What's shocking? You sound like you're still viewing nuclear technology as some sort of mystical phenomena. I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right. ;)
;) That's the level of detail that's out there.
Perhaps information about nuclear physics was hard to come by in the early 1950s, but nowadays it takes no effort to learn about. Heck, I once ran into a paper discussing ways to manufacture effective seals for a gas centrifuge plant
Ever read about the "Nuclear Boy Scout"? As far as I could tell when trying to see if it was an urban legend, it checks out - a teenager built a simple nuclear reactor for generating small amounts of plutonium in his back yard (pitchblende, beryllium foil for generating neutrons from alpha particles, and radium paint (used for luminous dials)). It wasn't good for much except endangering the health of those who spend too much time near it, but it just goes to show what you can do.
The hard part isn't learning how nuclear tech works; it's pretty much public domain. The hard part is the implementation. The scale of operations that you need, the corrosive chemicals that you're dealing with (and depending on your method, many other constraints as well) are what limit nuclear tech to states willing to invest significant resources.
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Simple to clean up? Tell that to people still working at Chernobyl! The amount of material released was 27kg of caesium-137.
I realize it's not very effective as a weapon with direct results but should be enough to make a point.
The total cancer deaths added to the world over time with the Chernobyl disaster is estimated at 1.5 milion. After some googling it appears Caesium and Plutonium have similar effects:
These novel man-made radioactive isotopes like Strontium-90, Caesium-137 and Plutonium-239, become inhaled as fine particles and trapped in lung tissue. They are then absorbed into the lymphatic system of the body where they cause cancer by irradiating local cells and attacking the immune system. Recent research undertaken by Green Audit in Wales and funded by the Irish government has shown that excess cancer risk exists in those populations of towns on the north Wales coast which are adjacent to mud banks and estuaries where high levels of such radioactive isotopes are found.
Even in old times, the plant in Winsgale (now called Sellafield) was losing radioactive material all the time. You could out for swimming in the sea, come back at night and you didn't need a flashlight, cause you were glowing.
Also he explosion is just big enough to disperse the radioactive material. Its not like its being strapped to blockbusters
From some of the stories that I've read about the Manhattan Project, plutonium was a real bastard to work with. Besides being radioactive and chemically toxic, it loves oxygen and will corrode or catch fire if not kept in an dry inert atmosphere. Then there is the matter of its six phases, which must make for many problems in machining or casting the material.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
IIRC this happens all the time-- you have a big chemical plant with kilofeet of pipes. You have fuel rods dissolved in hot acid. You have various chemical reactions going on, some jangled a bit by radioactive effects. You have bored, semi-skilled technicians working three shifts. You end up with various soups containing hopefully separated chemical elements. You have your basic bits of Murphy's laws, resulting in vapor deposition, electrochemical deposition, sedimentation, gunk getting stuck in valve sleeves and filters, stuff condensing out in unexpectedly cool pipes, the whole gamut of undesireable side efects and reactions. And all this is happening behind several feet of concrete, inside opaque pipes, retorts, valves, pumps, and widgets. What percentage of the stuff is going to get stuck in the various gadgets? What percent of solid X is going to quietly end up in solution Y, then thrown away? I'd guess a 3% loss rate would be rather good.
The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
Aw, what's the matter? You don't get a cathartic thrill out of the idea of inflicting "shock and awe" on a massive scale, just like the 9/11 attacks inflicted it on US citizens? You think there's maybe a little moral problem with the means and ends, there, and a resulting risk of becoming the thing you're fighting against?
The lack of human reflection shown in the excited use of that New Cool Term was appalling. (As a strategy, too, it sure worked to make the Iraqi army commanders come over to our side... didn't it? And telegraphing the whole thing by talking about it in the media sure made it more effective... didn't it? Or no. Maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was one more example of the US Air Power fallacy, Vietnam B52 carpet bombing-style.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I'm looking at John Gofman on the net, and he seems to be pretty controversial.
For example, he believes that 75% of all breast cancer in the US was caused by medical X-rays!
The environmental groups are quick to cite his work, but many respected scientists in the nuclear field seem to consider him a quack.
Got another reference?