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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 know it's here somewhere.
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sweet, I'll finally have fuel for my flux capacitor so I can get back to the 80's!
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Kim Jong Il is taking good care of it. He says so regularly!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A small boy with a oval shaped head was seen today in Leicestershire(sp?) saying "VICTORY IS MINE!"
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
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.
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.
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.
"cannot account for nearly 30 kilograms of plutonium... Although it says later plutonium is only 1% of what they deal with there."
Does this mean they are missing 3000kg of uranium?
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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Nasty and dirty? Ooooh!
Let's not go ballistic, here.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Imagine the puzzled looks tomorrow morning at DHS or somewhere in Maryland when the spooks are going over the composite web traffic reports.
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.
"And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?" said the interviewer.
There was a pause. "We wouldn't say escaped," said the spokesman. "Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid."
"You mean it is still on the premises?"
"We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them," said the spokesman.
"Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"
There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
"But you said the power station is still producing electricity," gasped the interviewer.
"It is."
"How can it still be doing that if it hasn't got any reactors?"
"We don't know," he said. "We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea."
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.
Oh, is that the "bowling balls" that also have uranium around the plutonium core, then aluminium and high explosives. Yeah...we know those...
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
Some weird guy in a DeLorean was seen at the spot, doing roughly 88 mph, before mysteriously disappearing ...
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
Somebody set up us the bomb.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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I found it on ebay, the starting bid is $25.00 and he will ship international.