Slashdot Mirror
Centrifuge May Be Superseded by Laser Enrichment
An anonymous reader writes "Australian scientists have discovered, after a decade of tests, a new way to enrich uranium for use in power plants." From the article: "There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix. One, called diffusion, involves forcing uranium through filters. Being lighter, U-235 passes through more easily and is thus separated from its heavier counterpart. The second method, widely adopted in the 1970s, uses centrifuges to spin the heavier and lighter atoms apart. Both, said Dr Goldsworthy, are 'very crude. You have to repeat the process over and over,' consuming enormous amounts of electricity. The spinning method requires 'thousands and thousands of centrifuges'."
Damn. Combine this with Brazil's uranium export programme, and you've got yourself the ultimate political hot potato.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Objective answers - rather than pro-nukular or anti-nuclear spin - preferred (some hope!)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's been around for over 20 years. What's new is that the Aussies appear to be commercialising it.
Don't they have some improved enrichment method?
Iran has LAZERZ ! PEWPEWPEW !
Call in teh marinez !
Do you know where I can find detailed information about that new method?
Kisses,
Ahmadinejad
It really pisses me off that we, Australians, invent so much stuff and then just sell it off for a quick buck to some foreign company rather than commercialising is ourselves. The Australian government has got a lot to answer for.
If this is really so novel and useful, surely an analysis of it exists that is not written by the guy trying to sell it!
The article goes on to explain that six other countries have tried laser-enrichment schemes and failed, but this effort has succeeded, and the only possible hint at why is that this new approach is that it is more "elegant and sophisticated".
Even a link to the press release would have provided a bit more information (though more legalistic than technical).
The post mentions diffusion and centripetal enrichment. There is actually a third method that has been used by several nations. The "calutron" separates isotopes using a magnetic field. It is the least efficient and most expensive method, so it is uncommon. However, it was used by the Manhattan Project and Saddam had an array running in Iraq at one time.
Making Uranium enrichment easy is not necessary a good thing. Uranium ore isn't hard to get. Enriching it is the tough part. The same processes used to make fuel lead directly to gun-type "atom" bombs. It's just a matter of degree and some machining.
Get this process down to something small enough to quietly function in a barn and you could build a weapon inside the borders of your target. A gold mine or somesuch would be all you need for cover.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Just don't tell the Iranians about this
Sigh.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
The whole frightens me. It seems absolutey crazy to encourage the use of nuclear fission in an atmosphere. There are to many things that can go wrong not to mention that there is no proven safe way as of yet to deal with the waste permanently. Instead of finding new ways to enrich uranium wouldn't it be better to focus on that 7 nation project to produce fusion power? Cold fusion may be a pipe dream but normal fusion isn't.
Just what the world needed. A faster, cheaper, simpler way of making atomic weapons.
Somebody please spread the word when the technology is fast, cheap and simple enough to fit in a garage and a hobbyist budget. So I can move to the mountains.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The first generation of nuclear reactors in the UK (Magnox) used natural (i.e. unenriched) uranium metal as fuel.
This meant that the fuel was very cheap to make but the fuel cans had to have a low neutron capture cross-section, hence the Magnox. This limited the temperatures at which the reactors could operate.
Moving to enriched uranium allowed the use of stainless steel cladding which keeps its integrity to much higher temperatures and is mechanically stronger.
There have been many developments in nuclear fuel technology since the 1950s, as one might expect. MOX was a good idea, but derailed by BNFL corporate incompetence and "environmentalist" hysteria.
The idea with MOX is that, instead of enriching uranium to increase the proportion of fissile U-235, you mix in fissile plutonium recovered from used nuclear fuel which is then "burnt up" in the new fuel to provide power. Plutonium isotopes are natural byproducts of the nuclear reactions in fission reactors.
Perhaps it would be more economical and environmentally-friendly to use more MOX than enriching fresh uranium?
Stick Men
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists should advance its Doomsday Clock toward midnight. The cheaper enrichment of nuclear bomb isotopes just advances the entropic spread of nuclear weapons and increases the likelihood of a nuclear detonation or war.
It is ironically funny that they all justify what they are doing as being for power production. Anyone out of diapers knows it is nuclear bomb technology whether it is being developed by Iran or Australia.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site: http://www.thebulletin.org/doomsday_clock/timeline .htm
E Proelio Veritas.
White house scientists are currently considering bombing iranian centrifuges plants to see if the U235 concentrates on top of the debris pile to be easily picked up by ground forces.
But in a laser, the Uranians can't go "Wheeeeeeeeee!".
No, I'm just joking, I really do love the Uranian people.
And put Dan Quayle in charge and you've gone one huge hot potatoe
Have to tell Ahmadi Nejad about this...
Does this mean we should expect sharks with uranium-enriching lasers on their head?
Could this technology be used for other "electrofloatation" purposes as well? Like, doing funny things to airborne particles and molecules? Removing heavy elements using modified electrostatic filters, or making active virtual lightning rods by electrifing N2 molecules above the instalation? Perhaps even creating free-air plasma powerlines "on the fly" (deathrays, anyone?), or making air-breathing ion jet engines?
zentrifuges were just started to get used in 70'ies for enrichment of uranium? you people may check for example the english wikipedia on nuclear accidents - not that you should check out the accidents, but there is a good book about the history of nuclear sciences from the point of time on, when people realised that they could fission atoms.
:)
The idea to use a zentrifuge to enrich uranium is older than using a filter, because of the high volatility of the uranium compounds in use (uranium hexaflourid was widely used then in a special chamber (comparable to oil refineries) to try to enrich it, which is sort of a really strong corrosion inducing material - forgive my bad english in chemical terminology)
nevertheless having the ability to use laser's to enrich, maybe we can now switch to thorium and actinium cores?
I think it was about 25 years ago. I saw a tv-program about laser isotope separation. It was american, or english.
Kim0
i now want to hear the joke to which that is the punchline...
It's "drown it in a bathtub." :)
Which is why it became a pretty good anti-Republican response, superimposed on images of Katrina-damaged areas.
According to Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistle blower - as quoted by the Sunday Times - Israel had laser enrichment technology, in actual production use, at the early 1980s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu
So - nothing new here, move along, move along.
However, it's a LONG way from lab benchtop enrichment experiments to a functioning enrichment plant. And once you get to that functioning enrichment plant, there's the question of whether or not it was economically justifiable to build in the first place. This is where the American effort "failed" - even on paper, it never made sense to pursue this technology because it was just too expensive. Sure, you need thousands of high-precision centrifuges to run an enrichment cascade. This was still cheaper than building a laser enrichment plant.
The designs for a uranium laser enrichment plant ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE are not for the fainthearted. YOu've got to have the uranium in a gaseous state. That means heating it so hot that not only do you have a pool of molten uranium, but it's BOILING. The laser is going through the HOT uranium "steam". The only material that can stand up to these temperatures is pure graphite. The design becomes like a series of rain gutters on a house that carries "more enriched" and "less enriched" streams of molten uranium back for reboiling. Somehow you've got to figure out a way of putting optical ports into this hellhole to fire the laser beams in. The laser beams themselves are a weird wavelength (green) and takes some really expensive gear to generate at all, much less with intense enough power to penetrate deeply into a fog of molten uranium. Doing all of this cheaply? Good luck.
And in the background overshadowing enrichment plant economics was and is the fact that nuclear power plants are still just too expensive a way to generate electricity (primarily due to regulatory costs) compared to coal and natural gas turbine plants. The expected boom in nuclear power plant construction forcast in the 1970s and early 1980s never materialized, mainly due to Thre Mile Island and Chernobyl, and so the need for new-fangled enrichment technology as a support industry never materialized with it either.
Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads, all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium. This, along with all those Russian brides American men now have access to, are the REAL spoils of winning the Cold War.
Err, sorry, there is no associated joke. It all came to me in one of those "Phew I've just spent the first 15 minutes of the day working so I relax for the rest of my 6 hour workday"-moments.
All they need to watch for is large aquariums for the sharks.
There is a third method that has been used on an industrial scale, which is to essentially build a huge mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers are usually used to separate atoms into their isotopes for analysis but Ernest O. Lawrence proposed this for the Manhattan Project and the Y-12 separator at Oak Ridge, TN, built in 1941, yielded some useful results before being superseded by gaseous diffusion at the K-25 facility and later the S-50 thermal diffusion plant. Indeed the first 200 grams of fissile material delivered to Los Alamos came from the electromagnetic separator, more than a year before the diffusion separator started operation (the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima used about 64Kg)
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Process heat comes from the Sun, still the best fusion reactor going.
Electrolytic by-products are:
Now if the reaction can be combined with some hydrogen injection to make water and ease the total (electrical) energy required you get a nice sustainable technology. Water, also.
Solar cells are made from the silicon, formed into parabolic mirrors that focus the IR band to the smelting pot. Interference coating the cells is easy with the free nothing called a vacuum
Electricity from the power cells drives the electrolysis and runs the station power.
With all that silicon, I'm betting that some composition can make silicon into something more ductile.
Cheap building material would be nice...
This is progress?
> There are at present only two methods for sifting
> uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.
AVLIS has been around since the 1970s, and there is also the South African cyclonic process. There are also hints in the public literature that there are other methods that were examined by the Manhatten Project and not pursued for various reasons.
sPh
Comment removed based on user account deletion
MOD PARENT UP!!! Excellent links.
Quote from the first linked article: "In MLIS, an infrared laser is directed at uranium hexafluoride gas. The laser excites uranium 235 hexafluoride gas, while not disturbing the uranium 238 hexafluoride gas."
In 1972 or 1973, I built an apparatus to test whether a flowing gas carbon monoxide laser could excite uranium 235 hexafluoride. My little project was shut down without explanation.
The Silex web site gives almost no information. The "about Silex" web page misspells the word neutrons as "neutrins".
It could be that the U.S. government has been successful at laser enrichment, but has published misleading information about the project. The article linked by Slashdot says, "One US effort involving 500 scientists gave up after spending $2 billion." That doesn't make sense. You know very early, without spending a lot of money, whether you have a laser tuned to the right frequency.
--
Taxpayer Karma: If you contribute money to kill people, expect your own quality of life to diminish.
Two Words : OH SHIT.
I don't mean to be too alarmist, but this is VERY bad news. See, it's easy to get access to uranium ore. Many countries have the mineral, and buying yellowcake is not supposed to be all that hard. Heck, some of it supposedly went through Africa. If you have just a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium, again it is easy to make a bomb. Spherical explosives aren't needed, a simple crashing together of a critical mass is enough. 10-20 kilotons is still enough to cut the heart out of a major world city, and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
But getting from A->B WAS ludicriously expensive. I read that it takes a year for a sample to travel from one side of the centrifuge plant to another, and these plants have to be enormous, costing billions. The laser method as described appears to be much cheaper and generates probably close to 100% pure U-235. Yes, it is a secret technology, but the plans can be stolen or bought, and lasers and all the other stuff needed to make it work are not restricted exports.
It might still cost a billion dollars to make a nuke, but that's it - not 10 billion. Most private individuals without access to nation state resources can't do it, but even the poorest dictatorship in the world can probably scrape together or steal from the U.N. a billion.
...Methods of enrichment? Well, shit...I guess the Calutron has to go back into the closet. Since it was used long before there were any reactors, and uses low tech methods, Iraq would never use one.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
If you read up on the Gen-4 reactor designs, you'll find that greenhouse gasses, non-proliferation, safety, and more efficient designs (a LWR reactor is rather wasteful on the scale of designs) have been taken into consideration. Rest assured that the new reactors being built in Florida, and all across the USA are being built with the best, safest technologies available.
Oh, and the thousands of centrifuges? That's just bad journalism. I don't know how lasers are cheaper at all (someone needs to actually write a decent article here), but for what it is worth, Nuclear Energy in the United States is cheaper than coal, but just barely.
Check out www.nukeworker.com and ask your questions there. Those guys know their Uranium from their belly buttons!
It's not just republicans, it's all bad-government conservatives. What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"? Nowadays, they fuck up otherwise successfull programs, DON'T lower taxes, create deficits spending money on things that don't work, and lie constantly. Modern conservatives can't even come up with good lies. At least guys like Nixon made it hard to be sure exactly what was going on. You knew he was full of shit, but what kind of shit? Bush just relies on the fact that most Americans are as almost gutless as he is, and are too cowardly to doubt anything. Or my own "leader", Stephen Harper, who tells lies that are contradicted (often within hours) by undeniable evidence. At least Paul Martin's lies left you confused and uncertain about reality... Harper's just embarass us all.
Right now, nobody needs or wants any more U235, except for North Korea, Iran, and various splinter groups.
The US Govt has PILES of the stuff, as does the USSR. Plus many tons of Plutonium. All very expensive stuff, but worth less than zero.
There's more tons of U235 and Plutonium in all the unprocessed fuel elements that have outlived their usefulness in nuclear reactors. The stuff is so worthless it's being stored or buried, not put through a relatively cheap chemical reprocessing cycle to recover the U235 and Plutonium.
If we needed more U235, there are several multi-billion dollar separation plants in mothballs that one could restart with relatively little effort.
So this laser-enrichment, IF it can ever be gotten working on a large scale, is (a) a threat if rogue states and the Mafia get into it and (b) Will produce soemthing nobody needs, and (c) probably riskier and more expensive than just starting up the old plants.
That is possibly the most hilarious irony of the entire nuclear "debate". If we simply burned the by-products of nuclear power plants, it would still dump less radioactive material into the atmosphere than if a comparable amount of power had been derived by burning coal. Coal fuel-cells might be able to do better -- at least the waste could be put into drums where people could freak out about what to do with it)... but still.
The technology to make weapons that are much more dangerous than gun-nukes are already available to pretty much anyone. Anthrax practically breeds itself. And by "practically" I mean "literally". A variety of super-lethal chemical agents can be synthesized with stuff from your local grocery store, and made into weapons using stuff from your local hardware store. A pack of matches and a forest during the summer can net you a firestorm that will destroy pretty much anything. I could go on and on. Besides, why worry about nukes when the common automobile kills more people per year than all nuclear weapons combined ever have? I'd worry more about the proliferation of the horseless carriage than about the proliferation of uranium.
The ninja effect! A source of endless Internet hilarity.
Well, the US constitution really doesn't make any exceptions about what kind of arms that citizens can own. And after all, the British -- America's traditional enemeies -- have nukes of their own. Isn't it about time that the average Joe six-pack had access to nuclear arms? Even just a little bunker-buster would be nice, in case he needs something to take with him when he travels, or goes hunting for Leviathan.
For the last time... the story about the jews and christians being forced to wear things that mark them as such was a hoax. The newspaper that printed it is known in Canada for printing sensationalist stories that are not quite true. What they did vote on is that people have to wear clothing which is in accordance with the morals of Islam, i.e. no hot pants.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
And if they're second- or third-generation nuclear workers, they've got two or three belly buttons to compare to their uranium!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Your bitterness is mighty. :)
If a photon of precisely the right frequency (and therefore energy) hits an atom, two things happen:
(1) It gets absorbed, and transfers its momentum to the atom -- i.e., gives it a little push.
(2) One electron in the atom absorbs the photon's energy, exciting it to a higher energy level.
Then, after a random time interval, two more things happen:
(3) The electron drops back down to its old energy level.
(4) The atom emits a photon, carrying the energy given up by the electron, and the photon's momentum delivers another push to the atom.
But while the first push was in the direction of the laser beam, the second one is in a random direction -- so the affected atoms, statistically speaking, wind up with a net gain of momentum in the direction of the laser beam.
So far, the laser is basically just stirring the gas. Now you tune the frequency of the laser a little bit lower. The "average" atom sees the photons at the wrong frequency, and the photons just truck on by. But atoms that happen to be moving toward the laser see the photons Doppler-shifted up to just the right frequency and they receive a push away from it -- so their average speed is reduced. Ba-bing, ba-boom, the gas is colder.
Laser cooling, along with a couple of other techniques, made it possible to get the super-low temperature needed to isolate the Bose-Einstein Condensate which got the 2001 Nobel.
rj
Uranium hexafluoride can be (and is) used in enrichment process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_hexafluoride
This substance is gaseous at 64C, no extreme temperature is needed. Laser enrichment works with this compound.
Yeah, great....so why is every man and his dog is trying to buy Uranium from Austalia right now?
I'm wondering if this type of method could also be used to find the "good" atoms of uranium in spent fuel and to separate them out so they can become "new" fuel rods. Does anybody know?
Plus, it would be really cool if they could tune several different lasers in such a way as to create a laser refinery which can separate different heavy elements beyond just uranium. This technology sounds great if it can be used to recycle nuclear waste too. Then the question becomes, will they use it to recycle?
[Sig goes here]
Use of UF6 is the MLIS process, championed by Los Alamos. Use of atomic vapor is the AVLIS process, championed by Livermore. You would not believe the endless arguments that ensued during the 1980s over which was better. AVLIS won.
Let's not forget his little campaign to deny national journalists access to him, in favour of speaking directly to regional reporters, whose views he feels are "more in line with his own."
Harper has taken some bizarre, anti-informative, anti-democratic stands in his last.... what, has it only been a hundred or so days? in power. He seems to resent that there is no puppet media outlet a` la FoxNews who will spin his denying cheap access to daycare to working mothers as a "great move to strengthen FamilyValues," or the war in Afghanistan as a "heroic mission aiding to spread democracy across the middle east."
And yet, it seems he's more popular than ever. Go figure.
TFA states "..[p]ower stations are fuelled by a specific blend of two types of uranium. About 5 per cent must be uranium 235...".
This is of course untrue, for example the CANDU reactor uses heavy water and natural uranium. Not processing uranium is cheaper than processing, laser or not.
Anybody want a peanut?
You still need u238 to dilute the u235.
What the grandparent is saying is there's no need to enrich given the surplus u235 that's lying around.
Yuck, don't remind me. The journalist thing is an unusually lame move... I'm not found of modern conservatives, and I thought I expected the worst from them. And yet Harper has still managed to underwhelm. Maybe he and Bush can get together and have a little "I'm the Decider" party, while they ceremonially burn copies of their respective constitutions and swoon over pictures of Franco and Mussolini.
This was put up by established players in the nuke field
to get a generation working on deliberately flawed projects.
It was all one big "operation merlin" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Merlin
Who knows how much time and cash was wasted on the laser projects.
A nice long list under "Laser allure'
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma
Sounds like another win for the Bazar over the Cathedrals
I caught the original article, but missed the retraction. Let it never be said that I'm afraid to admit that I'm wrong.
Sorry about that.
I don't read AC A human right
Thermal diffusion, calutrons, gaseous diffusion,and centrifuges - sounds like 4 methods to me. Two big problems with thermal diffusion, one is it is a huge energy hog and two it takes a couple of years before you get significant HEU output.
You're a bit off in the order - the first batch of uranium was first slightly enriched with the S-50, the further enriched with the Y-12, then finally with the A and B racetracks.
The Little Boy bomb was spectacularly inefficient, the 12.5 kT yield was 1% of the theoretical 1.3 MT yield if all of the uranium was fissioned.
I gotta say, the best part of that site is this map. If there was ever proof that many Americans know little to nothing about Canada, it's the diagram of the province of Saskatchewan labeled "Saskatchewan, Ontario". LOL
Of course, the actual labelling of the map was done by the Canadian Website http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/uranium_map.htmnuclearfaq .ca. So unless Americans are running nuclearfaq.ca, I suspect your 'best part' doesn't quite hold up :).
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
...oh forgot. No bomb grade waste either.
Yet the world continues to ignore the superiority of Canadian nuclear technology.
We can even burn bomb grade materials in our fast breeders that do not ship internationally.
I guess no one cares though. Maybe if we linked it to hockey somehow?
AVLIS, Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation, and it wasn't just for uranium.
We had working systems for a number of interesting materials, mercury for example. You can improve the efficiency of florescent light bulbs by tuning the isotopic mixture of the mercury used in the bulb.
The Dept. of Energy had a multi-year competition for the contracts to build their new (planned) U enrichment facilities. AVLIS was selected but the new facilities were never built because of the virtual collapse of the nuclear power industry.
It's not helping that you guys are way down there at the "bottom" of the world, either. I think you should give some serious consideration to relocating a little closer to the population centers of the world; the shipping costs alone have to be just about killing you (besides, why would someone buy stale nucular fuel shipped from almost the South Pole when they can make their own fresh fuel right here at home?!)
In short, until you can overcome the transportation issues inherent in being about a zillion miles away from your customer base your best bet is to just export your ideas and let someone else implement them.
(in all seriousness: the "because they're very far away" answer is so far the ONLY way the wife and I have been able to convince our two three-year-olds we can't just pick up and go visit The Wiggles some weekend...though one of them actually just wants to go because on our globe Australia is pink.)
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
You state that there is an excess of uranium. Is that why uranium prices have increased over 500% in the last six years? Commodity prices in general have been soaring, and many other countries use uranium. Electrification of India (nuclea power) and China (also nuclear power) is creating a surge in power consumption.
The Soviet materials have been mostly reprocessed. Consumption has reached 80 thousand tonnes per year, and production is still less than 50 thousand tonnes. Additionally, GE has already signed to build a facility in the US. Obviously someone thinks it's worth the investment.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Hopefully this doesn't get bitch-slapped as "off-topic"...
Maybe only NOW it's just become commercially viable to use lasers instead for data acquisition from subjects?
I suppose centrifuges leave the subjects somewhat flattened, deflated. After spin cycle You can't wring out much more information.
But, with the new and improved laser light show, it can be quite a fright, and as enlightening as a lightning show. Or, is that "laser light show"?
Order yours from dwon udner, at +61 2332......
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
There would be no reason whatsoever to enrich uranium (Other than to make bombs to kill people) if we were to use the CANDU and IFR technology.
Fuel reprocessing however is necessary.
There is just no way we can supply our energy needs in the long haul other than with nuclear... that is unless we accept a massive change in our life styles!
Oil is peaking now. The actual month may well be in 2007 or even beyond that - but we are effectively already at peak because we cannot signficantly grow our supplies. We can increase our coal consumption and we can liquify it as well. We can also make bio-fuels. But they will not fill the gap created as conventional oil depleats. The short of biomass->ethanol for instance is that a tonne of any biomass (not the refined cooking oils!) is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil. This is easy to illustrate by looking at the chemisty (CH2O)n -> C(n)H(2n+2).
We are starting to face a major energy crisis and this is only the beginning - barely the tip of the iceberg.
The issue is the current generation of reactors generate a pile of plutonium. While it isn't weapons grade Pu (too much Pu240 relative to the Pu239) it is still dangerous. The best course of action is to burn it up for power.
The CANDU is a near breader design and is quite efficient in its use of neutrons. It is a decent reactor to use until IFR can be put into production. Note that a CANDU can easily burn the spent uranium fuel which is incorrectly called "waste". An IFR can even burn depleated uranium.
Of course we need to allow fuel reprocessing for this to happen. The only reason we don't do it now is political. (for the short term... IFR combines the reprocessing on site and hense is far more secure).
As for the cost of nuclear energy?
The short answer is that enough governmental beauracracy can make _ANY_ industry unprofitable.
The Original method for enriching Uranium, and the easiest to build for a nation who wants to do so was the Calutron.
Dog is my co-pilot.
that can run on un-enriched uranium anyway?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This might well be vapourware (if you'll pardon the pun), but isn't it also possible that Silex has figured out things that the project you worked on missed back in the 1980s?
Mind you, USEC was an early investor in Silex, but has decided to instead go with centrifuges for their new enrichment plant, so clearly they came to a different conclusion.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If you think I'm making it up, do the research. The amount of Hollywood misinformation that the average person has is obscene. Here's one: you can't blow up a nuclear power plant and get an atomic explosion. What? Yeah, it's basically just glowing green rocks, water, pipes, dynamos, and a lot of concrete. You can blow up a natural gas or oil power plant, however.
has anyone told you that Australia dosent use LWR reactors because we dont actually have any nuclear reactors? Although our pollies are talking about it now so that may change. Apparently we were gonna have on but it was during the cold war and apparently the "Good Ol US of them" decided we were a security risk and didnt give us the tech to make one. And of course, we're all too stupid to come up with one ourselves so we just shrugged our shoulders and went on burning coal. We like coal, its nice and simple, gerhoick!
I'm sure that's true in most cases. I know Canada's nuclear industry is very well-regulated and safe. But I was in Japan in 1999, when the Ibaraki nuclear 'incident' happened. The nuclear industry, like any other, can be dangerous if safety procedures are not followed. And instead of something obvious like a big piece of machinery crashing down on you, a nuclear accident kills you without you ever realizing what hit you.
Despite the fact that the nuclear industry is one of the safest, it is psychologically more intimidating to know that you could be killed by invisible rays instead of a big chunk of steel.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Incidentally, there are more than two methods for enriching uranium--the author of the article should have read Chapter 14 of Benedict, Pigford, & Levi.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Fuck off slashbot piece of shit. All I had to say fucking fit in the subject.
http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
No news here at all. The laser enrichment method was invented by the zionists in the seventies, that is how Israel could manufacture a large number of nuclear bombs in its small Dimona reactor (currently they have got circa 220 atomic warheads). They had only 4 bombs in 1967 and only 25-to-30 in 1973, which they made good use of to blackmail USA into sending them huge conventional weapons shipments for free, in exchange for not starting WWIII by A-bombing arab capitals.
Then the laser enrichment method was invented and the jewish A-bomb production skyrocketed. They got 550 tons of uranium ore for raw material from the Apartheid South Africa, in exchange for giving six live atomic bombs to the infamous white supremacy regime, which was doing negro-cide in Angola at the time. They even conducted three neutron bomb test blasts together, the last of which was detected in the notorious Vela-incident.
Mordechai Vanunu, a converted christian, was kidnapped and imprisoned for 18 years after he told the world in 1986 about how our friendly israeli jews are amassing A-bombs in secret. He say his captors told him President JFK was assassinated by the Mossad because he learned about Dimona's secret from U2 overflights and starkly warned Israel that USA won't tolerate them making A-bombs. Indeed, the copy of those harsh diplomatic mails sent by JFK are available to see for anybody under FOIA and are on the web. (RFK then became a jew-praiser for the fear of his life, but was eventually gunned down by the palestinian Sirhan**2 for making racially insulting speeches on arabs in public.)
correct, i confused myself and was thinking about nuclear power stations. whoops!
Sounds like the laser fusion project. Aren't we the only ones (USA) doing that? hmmm....
E Proelio Veritas.
I was just reading Tony Benn's diaries from when he was the UK Minister for Technology. Interesting discussion of the security worries when the UK AEA got a Centrifuge method working.
Most people had given up on the centrifuge method, as it was mechanically very difficult to engnieer such a big fast centrifuge, and indeed the UK was about to start work on an expensive huge new diffusion plant for making fuel.
Now they had the centrifuge, which, once you could actually make it work, was cheaper and smaller and easier. So they didn't need the diffudion plant, but it occured to the Govt. that if they didn't build it, then other countries would work out that they had the centrifuge, so they would restart their centrifuge development program.
Since a centrifuge is easier to build and hide, the worry was that e.g. South Africa would start manufacturing bomb fuel in an undetectable way.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
kJ/sec/hr can mean either (kJ x hr)/sec or kJ/(hr x sec), depending on where you put the equality sign. There is only one correct form:
kW/hr =kJ/(hr x sec). Only one fraction, that is, there is only one possible place where you can put the equality sign.
There is an old tricky question: How much it is 2/2/2 ?. There is no unique answer, it can be either 2 or 1/2 depending on where the equality sign is placed.
Pass a f*ckin' chem/physics curriculum, and look around. "boom-booms" [as one of my nephews calls them] aren't that difficult to make from common, every-day stuff. If you want to make really *nasty* stuff, you can. Salt-water & electricity -> Cl2 + 2Na + H2 + O2 (think NaChlor -- Niagara Falls, Dioxin, Phosgene, &c.)
You can make explosives from frickin' Urea, for chri$t-$akes! Halogenate some carbonic acid (aka soda pop), and you can make a phosgene analog. Take a whiff, and prepare to receive your Darwin award. Don't even get me started on simple stuff like possable miss-applications of resonance theory.
The only thing which is saving us from species suicide, in my opinion, is that the mindset behind most radical religious fundamentalists [and other nut-cases] is so contrary to rationality. I [well... sorta...] live in fear of the day that a religious fundamentalist [or other extremist nut-job] passes an advanced chem/physics curriculum, and *understands* it, whilst retaining their extremist, non-rational, world-view.
The expected boom in nuclear power plant construction forcast in the 1970s and early 1980s never materialized, mainly due to Thre Mile Island and Chernobyl.
The boom in nuclear plant construction in the 70s and early 80s didn't occur because of an incident that didn't occur until 1986? Is there some kind of prescience going on here?
Power plant construction in the US was already at a very low ebb by the time Chernobyl happened. TMI plus a bunch of poorly informed "greens" jumping to the wrong conclusions had already put the hurt on the US nuclear industry. That plus horrible mismanagement of the regulations that made it impossible to build a plant without truly astounding cost overruns.
I can't speak to what happened outside the US, but at least France went right ahead and did a great job utilizing nuclear power safely and effectively.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"?
They were largely replaced by RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) - liberals and middle-of-the-roaders claiming to be conservatives. Actual conservatives are only a fraction of the so-called "conservative" office holders.
Prime example: The current immigration "reform" legislation. An actual conservative would get the borders under control FIRST. "Guest worker" programs and modifications to the naturalization process and quotas would wait until it had been PROVED that the executive branch was willing and able to enforce the immigration law. Look at the voting records of the Republican senators (excluding those who are up for election THIS year and might face a voter backlash while the issue is fresh) to see the proportion of conservatives to RINOs.
(This deal was made once before for (supposedly) a bit over a million illegals (turned out to be far more) - and the "no more" part was replaced by "ten times as many". Why should real conservatives, or anyone else, believe the second half would happen this time? Actual conservatives aren't going for it until the previous deal is enforced - which would take the pressure off if it actually happened.)
Of course the legacy news media is so far off in left field that office holders only slightly to the right of Joe Stalin are portrayed as being slightly to the left of Attila the Hun.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There is just no way we can supply our energy needs in the long haul other than with nuclear... that is unless we accept a massive change in our life styles!
Sure there is: Space-based solar.
We're less than 100 million miles from a STAR. It's trivial to collect so much solar power, convert it to milimeter waves and beam it to ground (at >90% efficiency, with most of the losses NOT showing up at the in-atmosphere end) that the waste heat from USING the energy would be enough boil the oceans. (And once waste heat becomes a problem, to put up enough sunshades to reduce the solar input to compensate.)
The limit becomes how dark things can get before you can't grow food.
With 1970s technology it would actually have been cheaper than building new fossil fuel or nuclear plants on the ground - and with 2000s tech it would be easier yet.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> Knowing what we now know about how Eason Jordan's CNN played patty-cake w/ Saddam
> in the run-up to the war, you have the gonads to cite them about that issue???
> Why don't you just cite a random Democratic Underground moonbat, they have
> the same amount of credibility.
Fox News says the same thing as CNN, so you might want to take a look at the evidence instead of wrapping yourself in a coccoon of self-delusion.
So that was the reason Iran stopped centrifugating it.
It could be done more simple, well good new for all kind of terrorists too. And so simple wow... this would speed up nuclear arms race by a factor... ehmmm
So it happened again scientist not aware of public miss use of their knowledge
That's a fair statement, however I am certain those "film strips" they make you wear for exposure-checking become an eagerly-watched fashion accessory in the plant. One of the nuclear workers in America told me that he said some folks cannot return to work after certain medical procedures, because the radiation levels in their body would set off the sensors. I don't know if we're talking Barium enemas or what here, but I'd say those sensors would mean a lot to me if I had a job like that. Not everyone is cut out for every job. I'm sure most people don't want to grow up to be in the US Marine Corps, but the ones that do, heck, they love the idea of being the front line. I'd take Nuke Worker over combat infantry any day.
So why are Australians so interested in an enrichment process if they have no large needs to do so? Do they have nuclear-powered warships, perchance? The Australians were also responsible for a ceramic-based vitrification remainder technology. I just don't get this.
Does any one know how much nuclear waste is needed to make it weapons grade? All the news reports never mention it and don't go beyond the basic head line "IRAN determine to go Nuclear".