Nuclear Fuel How-To

ATMosby writes "The BBC has an article that pretty much sums up everything you might need to know if you wanted to refine nuclear fuel and build some atomic weapons." From the article: "Uranium is the basic raw material of both civilian and military nuclear programmes. It is extracted from either open-cast pits or by underground mining. Although uranium occurs naturally all over the world, only a small fraction is found in concentrated ores. When certain atoms of uranium are split in a chain reaction, energy is released. This process is called nuclear fission."

Comments

Fission? No kidding!

[sjbe]

When certain atoms of uranium are split in a chain reaction, energy is released. This process is called nuclear fission.

Thanks for clearing that up for us...

So?

[0racle]

Big deal, my high school physics textbook had all this information as well.

I wonder how many people are going to think this is some sort of threat to 'national security.'

Re:So?

[AKAImBatman]

Big deal, my high school physics textbook had all this information as well.

Actually, your high school physics book probably has *more* information. This "in-depth article" is nothing more than a few graphs and a description.

That being said, nuclear fission technology is stupidly simple in it theoretical foundations. Once one is able to build an atomic pile (demonstrating sufficient purity of U235), it's only a short period of time until a gun-type A-Bomb can be made. All you need is two sub-critical masses of U235 that add up to a critical mass. Mount one mass in a stationary (and strong!) holder. Take the other piece and mount in some sort of gun. The more force the gun can impart on the second piece, the better. Fire the first piece at the second, and viola! You're dead!

Ermm... I mean... you can see a pretty light show from the U235 compressing into a super-critical bundle.

Nuclear reactors and Implosion bombs are a bit more difficult, but not beyond any country with sufficient industrial capability. This article from the magazine "The Progressive" tells you how to build a hydrogen bomb. Good luck on that, though. Implosion bombs aren't too bad with computer modelling, but H-Bombs are REALLY, REALLY tricky.

Of course, if a Slashdotter with no formal training in nuclear science can desribe how bombs are built, is there any question as to why nuclear materials are carefully controlled?

Re:So?

[Rei]

I'm wondering why slashdot seems so impressed by this; this is all common knowlege (and very incomplete for the public domain). I mean, using language "This is then purified in a chemical process and reconstituted in a solid form known as "yellow cake" "? "A chemical process"? Can they get more vague? Why not just state some of the processes, like dissolution of the ore in strong acids (phosphoric, sulphuric, or nitric)? Heck, I once ran into a paper that discussed proper methods for manufacture of appropriate corrosion-resistant seals for gas centrifuges. :P

Here we go again: "converted into a gas, uranium hexafluoride". Why not just say how hex is produced - it is dissolved in nitric acid to produce uranyl nitrate, reacted with ammonia to produce ammonium diuranate, reduced with hydrogen to produce UO2, then converted with HF to UF4 (which is a nice storage method, because it can be readily converted to either hex, ceramics, or metal). You react the UF4 with fluorine to produce UF6.

Just stating the chemical pathway isn't giving away any sort of secrets; this is all public domain. The technical challenges are in setting up a large scale refining process, and not getting caught doing it, because large quantities of many involved chemicals (for example hydrofluoric acid) are monitored.

They only mention two enrichment methods (gas diffision and gas centrifuge), and ignore some of the newer methods in development (I'm rather fond of the LIS (Laser Isotope Separation) methods; they take advantage of the fact that the different isotopes of uranium ionize differently from different wavelengths of light. AVLIS works on uranium gas ionization, while MLIS works by encouraging the selective disassociation of U235 hex. There's a couple other methods in development as well.

Even what they mention of gas diffusion and gas centrifuges is vague. For example, the whole world was reading two years ago about the controversy over the "aluminum tubes" - the centrifuge rotors are flow-formed from tubes and welded to a central shaft, which spins on a fine bearing at the base and is magneticly suspended at the top. Because of the high forces on the rotors, you need high grade alloys. Iraq never had used aluminum - its imported designs called for maraging steel, and the aluminum was ill-suited for welding as well. This was all over the news - where were the editors then?

I could easily keep on going, but I think the point is made - why are the editors impressed by this article? It's nothing - they've clearly never bothered googling for uranium enrichment before.

Re:So?

[AKAImBatman]

My favorite method is the Buckets method of separating the UHF in your backyard. Quick (yeah, right), easy (if you are REALLY strong), and safe (you'll be dead when you're done)! What could be better? ;-)

Re:So?

[Rei]

The tough thing about implosion bombs is getting a uniform shockwave. This requires high purity explosives that behave exactly the way you want, every time, high-predictability capacitors, and very time-precise triggering mechanisms. Parts that can be used in the triggering mechanisms (such as krytrons) are harder to come by.

Such capacitors and explosives are within the reach of a state like Iran (and Iraq claimed to have produced them before the first Gulf War), Krytrons, however, use beta from Ni-63 to help keep the gas in them ionized (to allow for a faster arc discharge), so they take more effort.

Re:So?

[Doc Ruby]

Iraq got nuclear training from Pakistan's AQ Khan during the 1980s, while the US beefed up Hussein's rudimentary WMD program. And Pakistan got its krytrons from the US at that time, too.

Re:So?

[Rei]

That's not the case with a gun-type weapon. Colliding two pieces of >90% enriched U-235, (with alternating spheres of polonium and berylium the center of the device to be crushed by the high explosives), at high speeds, will give you a nuclear explosion (even if low yield), even if you don't know why.

Amateurs who don't know much at all about particle physics build Farnsworth Fusors for fun. All you need to know to build something is a design. Physics doesn't care if you know why it works.

Re:So?

[Doc Ruby]

That article merely scratches the surface, showing the hearty Rumsfeld/Saddam handshake video. The truth is that the US was beefing up Iraq, while officially denying it - which backfired when they invaded Kuwait. And beefing up Iran, while officially denying it, after they beat the US out of their country with our hostages. Some say it was a good covert policy, to set two belligerent threats to the US against each other. But it backfired then and now, with both built-up countries threatening our security, more every time Rumsfeld's crew gets to "help".

As for "bias", do you have an actual contradiction of the facts? Which "unbiased" source do you get your facts from? When you say "CBS", I expect you're referring to their simulated memos story last year, the facts of which were corroborated by the secretary who wrote the actual memos? And with "Newsweek", is that the story last week of Guantanamo prisoner abuse by Koran desecration, which is further corroborated by Pentagon reports going back to at latest 2002? Or are you referring to all the stories those outlets published, including the NY Times, promoting the Bush/Rumsfeld stories of Iraqi WMD, sending us to war in Iraq? All based on the uncorroborated "intelligence" of then-anonymous sources, revealed to be alternately the liar called "Screwball", or Chalabi, the Iranian agent?

Re:So?

[AKAImBatman]

Does your theoretical standpoint include tossing as much Plutonium onto a pile until it goes boom?

Lord, I hope not. It's not going to go "boom", it's going to get REALLY hot and burn through a few things. Anybody standing near by would be wise to back off.

tell me why they need a beryllium source, vice using intrinsic neutrons from spontaneous fission

Because nuclear devices are dangerous? Gun type devices are no longer used in most applications because they're far too easy to detonate. Any accidental detonation of the internal munitions could result in the device being triggered. As a result, nuclear scientists prefer to have a controllable nuetron source for safety. i.e. A neutron source "trigger".

Why is a reflector needed if the bomb is designed to burn through from the center out?

Are we talking implosion or H-Bomb? The reflector on H-Bombs is a bit trickier. It's designed to temporarily withstand the power of the atomic detonation in order to compress the dueterium/lithium into a fusion event. The shaping of the reflector is EXTREMELY important to the success of the fusion event. That's part of the reason why H-Bombs are so tricky. (Even more so than an implosion weapon.)

On implosion weapons, the reflectors are designed to direct the charges inward toward the plutonium core. Without this outer shell, the bomb would fizzle. (This fact was used by some movie, who's name I no longer remember, to disable the "backpack nuke" by prying a plate free from the bomb.)

Reflectors are also used to help maintain the materials in a subcritical state.

What fraction of the fuel is actually burned?

The goal is "as much as possible", although the performance of weapons rarely reaches that degree. Off hand, I don't remember how much is usually burned, but I believe it's a fairly low amount.

Why are the specific energies of high energy neutrons released from fission more important than the average?

Ite all comes down to cross-section and capture ratios. Unlike the model often shown to the public, the nucleus of an atom is not directly "smashed" apart. The neutrons are instead captured by the atom. This destablizes the atom and causes it to split. Slower moving neutrons are more easily captured, and thus tend to be desirable in a reaction. However, since high speed neutrons are more common, they must be slowed down with some form of moderator. As I understand it, this is accomplished in bombs by making the material into a paste. Fast breeder reactors use these fast neutrons directly to create plutonium.

How is the fuel orientated to minimize the effect of gammas heating the fuel?

Off the top of my head? Dunno. Google has answers to this, but I believe it's something that can be easily found through experimentation.

Did I pass? Hopefully I understood all the questions well enough. :-)

Seriously, are you suggesting that even with access to the basic nuclear information, plus the publically available equations, nuclear weapons are too difficult for most counties to build? Because the sheer number of counties who have them would seem to suggest otherwise.

Re:So?

[Rei]

So your issue is really just how detailed are available designs, then? Ok, lets use a public description of Little Boy (the first one I ran into - much better designs are available):

64,1kg of HEU (80% average enrichment). The bullet was a cyllindrical stack of U-235 rings each 10cm wide and 16 cm long, containing 25.6kg total (6 rings). The stack was backed by a tungsten carbide disk and steel backplate, all within a 1/16th inch thick steel can to form a complete projectile. The target was a hollow cylinder 16 cm long and wide, weighing 38.4 kg. It was fabricated of two rings that were inserted into the bomb separately. The bullet contained 89% enriched HEU; the target the rest of the uranium.

The bullet was encased in a boron "safety sabot" to help prevent accidents; there was also a plug on the target. When fired, these would strip off. You could easily omit such safety features if you were unconcerned with safety.

The tamper assembly was thick tungsten carbide surrounded by a steel forging, 60cm wide, with a combined mass of 2300kg. A hole was bored in the forging to insert the tamper and the target; the hole was threaded to allow secure attachment of the gun. At the back of the hole, past the target, there was space for one or more polonium initiators (I can dig up several polonium initiator designs for you if you would like; Little Boy used four very inefficient ones - the bomb would have worked without an initiator, and the decision to use an initiator wasn't even established till March 1945).

The gun was a 3" antiaircraft gun, 6.5" wide, 6 feet long, bored out to 4", weighing 450kg, with a breech block of 34kg. Standard cordite propellant was used, to achieve a 300m/s (slow) velocity. Of course, given how unsafe the Little Boy design was, even dropping the device hard enough could have given some significant (even full) yield.

The complete weapon was 126 inches long, 28 inches in diameter, and 8900 pounds. Need a diagram?

Note that being "exact" doesn't matter; Little Boy was a very conservative design, and allows for very large tolerances of error. The worst you'll get is a lower yield.

P.S. - I found this information in 5 minutes. Imagine someone actually dedicated to the cause of building a nuclear weapon...

Re:So?

[Doc Ruby]

Rumsfeld was Reagan's envoy to Iraq.

The Reagan arms shipments to Iran might have reached a value of $82B. Even the smaller, officially admitted figures account for TOW missiles illegally shipped through Israel, which were strategically valuable to Iran in its Iraq war. That's what "Iran/Contra" was (half) about, but I suppose you've got some kind of "legitimate" explanation that excuses that illegal guns/drugs/policy scam.

The memos were confirmed by the secretary who was in the office at the time of the events, while the denial comes from someone connected only by relation, speaking in partisan "defense" for a dead person who acted independently, according to their conscience. Witness vs. self-interested hearsay, but your "bias" sensitivity is oneway, at best.

Newsweek's retraction acknowledged only that it was irresponsible to cite only a single, anonymous Pentagon source before publishing. Of course, Newsweek let the Pentagon review the story for days, without complaint, before publishing it. Only when the White House blamed the story for Afghan riots did Newsweek retract, though even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the riots weren't caused by the story. While the military reports several acts of desecration ("inappropriateness"? talk about "bias"), including reports that they set of riots, and that a Koran was put into a toilet deliberately. Stories corroborated by independent people in the prisons, who had no way of synchronizing their stories. In prisons where other prisoners were being beaten, raped, electrocuted, and humiliated - "tortured" is the word, if you can forgive the bias towards "truth". I guess that the torture must be the product of our "left biased press". Which bias led them to promote Bush's lies about WMD, and Iraq's threat to the US, as much as possible. Screwball and Chalabi, Bush's uncorroborated anonymous sources, aren't biased, though - their WMD lies are true, right?
Many of these facts are reported by "left biased press", so I'm sure you'll ignore them. You dislike the conclusions drawn by the messenger, so the facts they document are irrelevant. Of course, you can't reply with an example of an "unbiased" source, because you prefer the rightwing propaganda you repeat. Which comes from the president and his execs, so it must all be true, right? Who needs the press, when the president can go around the filter, and tell us all the truth.

And while we're at it . . .

[Maradine]

. . . let's be alarmist about it, because the info didn't exist anywhere else.

Re:And while we're at it . . .

[Phil Karn]

Not only that, much of the basic information about the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear weapons was openly published by the US decades ago in the book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.

Girlfriend

[RancidMilk]

Sounds like the same thing with my girlfriend. There is a tight bond, and when she is ripped off of me, lots of energy is released.

Only in America...

[RobertB-DC]

Only in our beloved country could someone think that this set of pages "sums up everything you might need to know if you wanted to refine nuclear fuel and build some atomic weapons." The information presented is what anyone with a high-school level knowledge of science should know. It's what anyone old enough to vote should know. When Bush claimed that Saddam was buying yellowcake from Nigeria -- even if it had been true -- it should have been obvious that without a lot of additional sophisticated equipment, it was about as useless as talcum powder.

On the other hand, I did get a nice refresher on the process. You do forget a few things in 20 years. And I can use the site as a resource for my kids, since they'll be too busy being taught "Intelligent Design" to be bothered with anything as mundane as chemistry and physics.

Re:Only in America...

[Rei]

Oh, also, I didn't notice this comment of yours:

It is idiotic to believe that Iraq technology remained static for 10 years, and it is rather naive to believe that with that length of time to aquire material with the illbegotten oil-for-food revenue, that he didn't already have the equipment within his country to refine whatever uranium he was able to import. But this is America, where we allow people to believe whatever they want to believe...

Apparently you think reality is idiotic. Suit yourself. :) I'll quote:

Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraqs ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.

Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.

Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years.

They go on to talk about how Iraq wanted to retain its knowlegable people in case the sanctions were ever lifted, but even its knowlege base eroded.

Note that the ISG had every motive to *overstate* the case (and its head was ardently pro-war). I've seen several reputable groups contest some of the measly "intent" evidence that they provide for the various investigated programs. If you want to discuss this more, we should probably take it off slashdot, or we'll get too off topic; the issue is how easy nuclear weapons are to make.

Nothing new, check your encyclopedia

[Chairboy]

The article basically covers the same stuff that's been in encyclopedias for decades. I'm sure we'll get a bunch of posters nervously posting about how irresponsible it is to release this info, but it's hardly ground breaking.

The better informed the public is to how these things work, the better off we'll be in participating in our national policies. Saying that the information should be restricted is akin to arguing in favor of 'security through obscurity'. I argue that if you criticize both the BBC article and Microsoft for their security policies, then you're exhibiting traits of hypocrisy.

In the end, the part of the equation that's required is the presence of uranium. It's hard to get. It's even harder to mine/refine, especially in secret.

Re:Nothing new, check your encyclopedia

[amliebsch]

It's even harder to mine/refine, especially in secret.

Bingo. Technologists, expecially computer geeks, seem to have a tendency (perhaps justifiably) to believe that mere knowledge of HOW to do something means that actually doing it is trivial. In this case, however, this knowledge is not a severe threat because its implementation remeans one of the most difficult, dangerous, and expensive processes known to man.

Re:Nothing new, check your encyclopedia

[Anonymous Coward]

most difficult, dangerous, and expensive processes known to man? sounds like finding a woman to be your partner to me

Not Even Close

[rgmoore]

Sorry, but that site isn't even close to "everything you might need to know" about building a Bomb. That's more like the 5 minute capsule summary. If you really want to know everything about building a Bomb but don't want to get a security clearance, the best place to look is Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapon Archive. It's amazing just how much non-classified information it contains.

Gone Fission

[bigtallmofo]

(Oblig Simpsons Quote)

"Furious George! What have they done to you? Smithers, this monkey is going to need most of your skin."

Article is an excerpt...

[DaedalusLogic]

From: "Nuclear Weapons for Dummies"

Chapters you'll get in the full book:

"Oppenheimer Shcmoppenheimer"
"Building Your First Triggering Device"
"Oops, Look at All the Fallout"

$14.95 US / $19.95 CAN

Errors I noticed

[Profane MuthaFucka]

-Enrichment levels for uranium meant for power plants is about 20% U-235, not 3%.
-The gun and implosion types of bombs aren't tied to the fissile type. You could use either type with either plutonium or uranium.
-They didn't mention confinement of the reaction on the gun type of bomb. If you don't try to hold it together with a heavy bomb casing, the bomb will blow itself apart as soon as fission begins, resulting in a really low yield.

If you were to try to build a bomb from these instructions, it wouldn't work.

Re:Errors I noticed

[abb3w]

-Enrichment levels for uranium meant for power plants is about 20% U-235, not 3%.

No, that's about right. Standard commercial PWR/BWR reactors use 3-5% enrichment; CANDU heavy water reactors can use lower enrichment. Research (and military?) reactors tend to use higher enrichments-- 20-90%. However, the NRC has been strongly encouraging universities to recalculate the load geometries to rely on fuel at the lower end of that range to limit the amount of highly enriched uranium in non-military facilities. The school I studied Nuclear Engineering at downgraded from 95% enriched to 19.9% enriched in 1992 or so.

-The gun and implosion types of bombs aren't tied to the fissile type. You could use either type with either plutonium or uranium.

Actually, I recall that because of the neutron energy profile from fission, Pu-gun type bombs do not work well-- you tend to get only partial fission before it blows apart.

Re:Enrichment in USA?

[jfmerryman]

I believe we use gaseous diffusion.

Re:Not That Easy

[Colin Smith]

They could pretty much dispense with steps 2 and onwards. They'd probably just pack the nuclear fuel round some conventional explosives, oil and ammonium nitrate mix and contaminate as large an area as possible. The centre of New York, Washinton, London is some very expensive real estate.

You Forgot

[Greyfox]

This handy article on what to do with your plutonium once you've refined it. A must have for any organization interested in building such a device...

Inconsiderate

[rlp]

The Beeb could have at least provided a translation of the article in Farsi. :~)

Just another example

[Wapiti-eater]

of the decline of /. into a cespool of sensationalist pablum. This reads like it was published by the National Enquirer - not a "news for nerds" site. (maybe a 'news for n00bs' site)

Not news, not newsworthy, not even mildly interesting to anyone who was awake in 6th grade science class.

What's next? A front page story on the dangers and publich health threat of dihydrogen oxide?

The Curve of Binding Energy

[KudzuKat]

As many others have noted, the information in the BBC article is readily available from numerous sources. For a good understanding of the concepts and dangers, I recommend The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee.

Re:How is this information of significance

[BrentRJones]

to anyone reading slashdot?

Way short of "everything"!

[abb3w]

The article says nothing about the composition or manufacture of the membranes used in gaseous diffusion, how to handle the corrosive nature of U-hexaflouride, and mentions NOTHING about Laser isotope separation (let alone useful tidbits like the actual activation frequencies for U235 and U238 hex). The folk running the Manhattan project had better info than this even before they started. Buy a good introductory textbook and you'll get way better instructions with far more technical detail.

I guess the slashdot editor thought it was a slow news day or something....

slow news day on slashdot...

[spirit_fingers]

C'mon guys, this information is both old and public, and it's about as useful for making bombs as Monty Python's infamous guide to flute playing (blow in one end and run your fingers up and down the holes).

Let's have more stories about nude pictures on Yahoo!

everything?

[Vilim]

"The BBC has an article that pretty much sums up everything you might need to know if you wanted to refine nuclear fuel and build some atomic weapons."

This is true, in the same way

"Everything you need to know how to build a car is that pistons get pushed down by gas exploding which turns the crankshaft which turns the wheels"

is everything you need to know to build a car. Or

"Think of space as a sheet with masses as balls"

Is everything you need to know about general relativity

A general overview of anything is usually quite simple however in practise building a nuclear bomb is pretty difficult.

Oh come on...

[reverseengineer]

I mean, the article is interesting enough, and relevant given the recent nuclear activities of Iran and North Korea, but this information is widely available and is far from technical. The principal thing that keeps everyone from possessing weapons-grade fissile material is the processing, a step "informatively" denoted with a pair of arrows.

If you want plutonium, you need to have a working fission reactor, which ostensibly makes you subject to regular inspection (and is hard to hide). If you want Highly Enriched Uranium, the enrichment process requires things like production scale mass spectrometers, giant centrifuges, and nasty chemicals (uranium hexafluoride, anyone?)- basically, a large amount of equipment that serves little other obvious purpose.

Of course, what we've seen with North Korea in particular is that the rest of the world knowing you're try to build nukes isn't always a deterrent to building nukes anymore, and in fact makes a handy bargaining chip where you agree to stop making plutonium in exchange for something you want, and then once you get it, continue making plutonium anyway.

Newcular World Order

[Doc Ruby]

They left out the address of AQ Khan, who runs a mailorder nukes biz in Pakistan. Just put an account# from Libya, Iran or North Korea, or maybe Saudi Arabia on your order, and you can get all the tutorial you need. You'll still have to get the fuel from somewhere, but there's plenty of Russian, Kazakh or even good ol' Italian mafia dealers. Try the Carlyle Group - they might be your one-stop-shop, including the negotiations that signal your initiation into the nuclear club.

Re:How long?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

How long before /. gets shut down for distributing this information?!

Well, first it needs to start distributing information.

Re:Fission? No kidding!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not as simple as you think it is.

Only U-233 or U-235 is useful for fission reactions. While U-238 can fission, it requires at least 5 MeV of kinetic energy from an incident neutron, while U-233 and U-235 require no energy. This makes U-238 fairly useless for fission except in the case where plutonium is made (U-238 + n -> (U-239)* -> Np-239 -> Pu-239). Pu-239 requires no energy to fission (and this is general of all heavy nuclides with odd atomic masses).

U-235 is 0.65% naturally occuring, and U-238 is 99.35% naturally occuring. In order to make a reactor undergo a self-sustaining fission reaction, the concentration of U-235 in increased (enriched). This has to be done for reactors and bombs (though there are methods to make a self-sustaining reaction with natural fuel--very large reactors). Since U-235 requires no energy from the neutron to undergo fission, a slow neutron that spends more time passing by the nucleus will cause fission to occur more often. This is why nuclear reactors are moderated (typically with water, heavy water, or graphite).

If a nuclear bomb were moderated, the time to moderate (slow down the neutron to thermal energies) would allow heat transfer to occur. This would expand the bomb and destroy its geometry bringing the fission reaction to a halt. For this reason, nuclear bombs are designed to operate on fast fission reactions. This is also why a nuclear reactor cannot explode like a nuclear bomb.

You want fusion? You got it!

[Tackhead]

> If they had a story on how to make a working fussion reactor then i might be a little intrested

"Good news, everyone!"
- Professor Hubert Farnsworth

Farnsworth Fusor. More on Wikipedia.

Buildable and safely operable by any grad student. A non-fusing version (using only hydrogen) that serves as a proof-of-concept could be built and safely demonstrated by a group of bright, mechanically-inclined, and well-equipped high school student.

If, by "working", you mean "produces more energy than it takes to operate", the Farnsworth Fusor doesn't work. If, however, you mean "produces a neutron flux whose presence can only be explained by fusion", it works just fine.

Detailed reads...

[jpellino]

"The Curve of Binding Energy" with Ted Taylor walking John McPhee through how much damage you could do for surprisingly little effort. Including a tour around southern Manhattan and speculation on using a poorly made nuke to topple a World Trade tower into the river...

That book inspired...

"Mushroom" by John Aristotle Philips about his paper at Princeton describing how to build a bomb. A student of Freeman Dyson, he got far more info than he ever dreamed he could get. The very impressive paper saved some less than stellar grades, and generated quite a buzz, more than a few cloaky phone calls and IIRC the paper got classified by the gummint.

Next week he demonstrates

[crovira]

"How To Be A Gynacologist." (BIG geek appeal.)

But the next program in the series is a bit of a let down. Its on "How to reconcile the Russians and the Chinese"

Try the nuke faq & friends

[johnjaydk]

Try the Nuke faq instead http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html that should give a clue as to how these things are build.

Now we need to enrich the stuff first. These guys http://www.urenco.com/ do it for a living and have a few nifty articles on centrifuges.

We also need a suitable boiler to make the good stuff(tm). My personal favorite is the Canadian (take that you pacifists) Candu design http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/.

This should get you in the WMD business in no time. Now don't try this at home unless you've got your own TV-show...

The Los Alamos Primer

[602]

During the Manhattan Project, Robert Serber periodically gave lectures on basic fission bomb physics to newly arrived scientists. Those lecture notes were published by Univ. of California Press in 1992 as "The Lost Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb"; it's still in print. You'll need at least sophomore-level physics to understand it.

---
The BBC has an article that pretty much sums up everything you might need to know if you wanted to refine nuclear fuel and build some atomic weapons.

Should read "...explains nothing of what you might need to know..."

Pure Freedom

[Chagatai]

The United States of America has no need for such rudimentary devices as centrifuge plants. Our pure, Grade A, one-of-a-kind type of Freedom makes the atoms settle in different layers so we can build our peacekeeping devices to stop terrorists and provide more freedom. It's like a breeder reactor, but here in the US of A, it's a Freedom Reactor, sir!