Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium Found In Dump

Urchin writes "Researchers have just identified the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. The batch was produced as part of the Manhattan Project, but predates Trinity — the first nuclear weapon test — by seven months. It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."

Comments

Mystery Pits

[Gonzotek]

"But sloppy work by the contractors running the site saw all kinds of chemical and radioactive waste indiscriminately buried in pits underground over the 40 years Hanford was operational, earning it the accolade of the dirtiest place on Earth."
Oh, great. :)

Re:Mystery Pits

[LWATCDR]

Actually that number is a very very low estimate.
Did you know that the US military is still using the stockpile of purple hearts that was made for the invasion of Japan.
The military estimates for the losses are in the hundreds of thousands for US and over a million for Japan.
Japan had also already crossed the NBC line before the US dropped the bombs. They had used chemical and biological weapons in China.

Yes it was a terrible waste of life. If the government of Japan had just cared enough about their own citizens lives it never would have happened.

Re:Mystery Pits

[frosty_tsm]

We killed just as many Japanese civilians in one bombing run with incendiary bombs as with one atomic bomb.

Everything I've observed and studied about the war points to the loss of Japanese lives would have been far higher if we invaded. If you question this, look at casualty numbers for German civilians. Plus we (racially) hated the Japanese far more than the Germans. And the Germans weren't culturally opposed surrender.

Re:Mystery Pits

[AKAImBatman]

Relatively speaking, building a space shuttle is easy once you have enough fuel. Relatively speaking.

Sorry, but no. The implosion part of the weapon is incredibly difficult. Far more difficult than your average terrorist organization could pull off. One of the reasons why the US restricts supercomputers and monitors for large detonations is that development tends to require both a computer simulation (to get the design right) and experimentation to ensure the quality of construction. If you have enough materials, you can forgo the former part and just experiment.

Perhaps you're thinking of gun-type weapons? Those are stupidly simple to build in comparison to an implosion device. However, they are made from Uranium rather than Plutonium.

Re:Mystery Pits

[HungryHobo]

They refused to surrender. TWICE.

You made a typo
"Their surrender was refused. TWICE."

Re:Mystery Pits

[LWATCDR]

That is a myth. Japan never offered to surrender. They offered to negotiate an end to the war but they would have kept Korea and most of what the had left in China..

Re:Mystery Pits

[LWATCDR]

I suggest you read some real history books.
From Gloalsecurity.org
"More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle."
Okinawa was a small island Take those numbers and just try to imagine what the death toll would have been trying to invade the home islands. 100,000 would have been a miracle.

Re:Mystery Pits

[Random Destruction]

Development has been done. Plans are available. So the supercomputer won't be needed.

Re:Mystery Pits

[Savantissimo]

The numbers don't add up - IIRC, the pessimistic (Lancet) figures are about 600,000 dead from violence, many more if you compare the pre-Gulf War I death rates with today - lots of deaths from bad water, especially among young children. The UN estimates over 500,000 Iraqi children under 5 died under sanctions beyond the pre-war mortality rates. AFAIK child mortality has not fallen much since, certainly not to pre-Gulf War I levels.

The US annual auto crash fatalities used to be around 40,000-50,000 last time I looked, so that's at most 300,000 since the start of Gulf War II.

Of course the US has a much larger population than Iraq, so even if the numbers of deaths were equal, -and they aren't even close- the death rates would be proportionally much higher in Iraq.

Neither the proportion of US GDP spent on war nor the number of US auto fatalities are a good measure of the harm to the people of Iraq.

Re:Mystery Pits

[AKAImBatman]

Plans are available.

For your sake, I hope this is a joke. The tolerances of implosion nuclear weapons are incredibly tight. The type of plans necessary to create a functioning implosion device are state-held secrets and have only been seen by a select few with Top Secret clearance. Anything you can get out of a textbook or off the internet is simply not detailed enough to produce a functional weapon.

Think of it this way. You need to pack C4 in a casing such that:

1. The force of the C4 is completely contained.

2. The force is evenly applied to the plutonium sphere such that it won't shift or move about during detonation.

3. The force is projected as close to spherically as possible.

Those are tall orders for any engineer! As I said, the tolerances are so tight that the most likely outcome of any detonation is a fizzle. Only with very sophisticated R&D can any superpower even hope to create an implosion device.

Gun type on the other hand, are easy. Just slam two hemispheres of Uranium together hard enough and BOOM. With that kind of ease of use, why would any non-superpower bother with implosion devices? (For the record, gun-types were retired by the military due to safety concerns. If anything accidentally sets off the explosive trigger... BOOM! Whereas implosion devices can be designed to fizzle if accidentally detonated before arming.)

Re:Mystery Pits

[ScrewMaster]

Why is it that everyone focuses on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely ignoring the months of fire raids that preceeded Fatman and Littleboy? Those raids caused far more devastation than both atom bombs put together. The effects were made infinitely more dramatic because of the Japanese habit of building their homes out of what was essentially paper.

Furthermore, after having been burned to a crisp, they still wouldn't grant an unconditional surrender. The only thing left was a bloody ground assault ... or The Bomb. So we nuked them. Then, after absorbing not one but two nukings, the Japanese military still wouldn't surrender! it was Hirohito himself who had to finally call a halt.

Your history is a bit ... off. The GP is correct: if you don't want a war (or want to stop one) you eliminate the enemy's capacity to wage it. The truth is, World War II changed the face of war forever, and it wasn't the atom bomb that did it. It was the long-range bomber. All major conflicts leading up to the Big One were fought with little ability to affect the other side's manufacturing base. You could cut his lines of supply ... but there was no way to reach out and attack his means of production. That meant that most conflicts were between military personnel and involving military targets. Civilian areas could be occupied or overrun, but were generally not blown to pieces.

The long-range bomber allowed direct attacks upon factories, transportation hubs, storage facilities and other paraphenalia of a modern industrial economy. This had the effect of involving the civilian population, who had previously remained distant from actual warfare (until a nation's defenses were overrun and an occupation began.) Germany and Japan both built their military machines using civilian workers and production facilities, who became legitimate targets once the ability to hit them was available.

You know what? We deduce the existence of peace because there are intervals between wars. Peace is an ideal, and like most ideals it is rarely, if ever, fully realized. Not for long, anyway. You're also wrong about why we never had future attacks from Japan. They'd have done it if they could ... we just wouldn't let them arm themselves, made them allies, and we provided for their defense. Some allies they turned out to be, using the capabilities we gave them to successfully attack our manufacturing sector. Don't underestimate the Japanese: yes, we rebuilt their their industrial engine after the War (just as we did for Germany) but our generosity came back to haunt us.

Re:Mystery Pits

[ScrewMaster]

Boy, well that sure worked well with Germany post WWI.

One of the more uninformed remarks. Look, after World War I the Allies essentially bankrupted Germany with war reparations. That left Germans prime targets for the first demagogue to come along. After the Second World War, we did exactly the opposite ... rather than destroying what remained of their economy we rebuilt it. The two situations are simply not comparable.

Re:Mystery Pits

[calidoscope]

Gun type on the other hand, are easy. Just slam two hemispheres of Uranium together hard enough and BOOM. With that kind of ease of use, why would any non-superpower bother with implosion devices? (For the record, gun-types were retired by the military due to safety concerns. If anything accidentally sets off the explosive trigger... BOOM! Whereas implosion devices can be designed to fizzle if accidentally detonated before arming.)

A couple of corrections on gun type weapons.

One is that the Little Boy bomb shot a cylindrical slug through a hollow cylinder of U-235 - much less weight to accelerate than half a hemisphere - also a better match for the gun barrel (and it was a gun barrel).

The second is that gun type weapons are incredibly inefficient in use of fissile material - critical mass for a spherical assembly of U-235 is 52 kg which would yield 1 MT if completely fissioned (a good implosion device may be good for fissioning 25% of the fissile inventory). The Little Boy's yield was about 12 kT, implying that maybe 1% of the U-235 fissioned.

Re:Mystery Pits

[Anonymous Cowpat]

1) "You're responsible for my reaction to what you did". Wrong. You are responsible for what you do. I'm not going to say that the United States was evil in nuking Japan, given the callous disregard that all sides had for civilian life during that conflict, but trying to say that the Japanese essentially nuked themselves is ridiculous.

2) The whole "comply with demands that we're making in the full knowledge that you won't be willing\able to comply with them, or else" pretext for attacking someone is how the first world war kicked off too.

3) The US took as much part in the Dresden raid as the British (and, infact, changed their bomb mix to be more effective at city-wide destruction than normal)

4) After the war, the US commander, Eisenhower, was all for using the civilian population of Germany as slave labour. He was also the person ultimately responsible for the fact that the civilian population was rationed food at 800 calories per day whilst the occupying forces were getting 4500.

5) I don't know if you'd call turning most the eastern Europe into communist dictatorships 'treating enemy countries well'. They also had an horrific rate of survival for captured PoWs.

Re:Mystery Pits

[Tenebrousedge]

Did you read that link you gave me? Most of the reactors that were involved with those contaminants have been demolished. They're not particularly hazardous at the moment. The more immediate danger is from stored wastes.

Hanford has not been cleared up and is leaking. Read about it on wikipedia. The numbers on there are talking about a million gallons of highly radioactive waste that has not yet entered the river. However bad it is now and/or was then, it has the potential to get much worse in the near future.

I was living in the Tri-Cities for a while; Hanford is the subject of daily conversation there, you may be sure. Hanford now is a major problem. It has the potential to be a catastrophe unlike anything this country has seen to date. With luck, we may yet avoid that dire fate. To say that action must be taken is an understatement.

Re:Mystery Pits

[Silverlock]

According to one of my professors, the Treaty of Versailles demanded more in reparations than the German GDP and they would have been paying until 1963. The treaty also took away Germany's main industrial region so they had even less income. That's why they decided to just print money to pay it off and that led to ridiculous inflation. Then came Hitler with his message of restoring national pride.

I believe that the economist Keynes said, at the time it was signed, that the Treaty would only put off the war for 20 years. 20 years later....

Re:Mystery Pits

[umghhh]

I would not try to build a real nuclear bomb if I tried to do something terrible - a dirty one, placed in appropriate place would do to. I think we are extremely lucky that this has not happened yet.

Re:Mystery Pits

[Ash Vince]

Sending some plutonium to Iran is something that numerous loyal Americans could live with. They want nuclear energy. We can give it to them.

But we need to be very careful not to miss, Russia is right next door.

This is the big problem with nuking anywhere. The fallout drifts and will affect friendly countries right next door. One of the reasons we were scared about nuclear weapons based in Cuba is that if we nuked them to stop a launch we would also be nuking ourselves. This is the big problem with weapons that have a blast radius large enough to level a city and cause poisons to rain down over hundreds of miles.

In fact, any attempt to launch nuclear weapons at Iran would probably set off the Russian early warning systems and they would just retaliate before our missiles hit their targets. The really worrying thing is that this would also probably true if Israel launched a nuclear strike on Iran. Since we throw billions of dollars in military aid to Israel a large number of people view us as culpable for their military actions.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/U.S._Assistance_to_Israel1.html

Re:Mystery Pits

[LizardKing]

I believe that the economist Keynes said, at the time it was signed, that the Treaty would only put off the war for 20 years. 20 years later....

Keynes wasn't the only person perceptive enough to see this. Britain's Prime Minister Lloyd George appreciated this, but had just won an election by promising to "squeeze Germany until the pips squeak". A famous political cartoon summed up the whole thing (the "Tiger" was Clemenceau, the aged and bitter French politician seeking revenge for Prussia's defeat of France in 1871).

Re:Mystery Pits

[Hal_Porter]

You're completely naive. If Iran wanted nuclear power they could buy fuel from Russia. That would be cheap and it would work. In fact that's what they're doing in Bushehr.

If they want their own weapons they'd have to spend a fortune building centrifuges, which is what they're doing at Natanz.

If they didn't want nuclear weapons they wouldn't need the Natanz plant. And it would save them a pile of money.

The problem with the NPT is that it doesn't stop countries building their own enrichment plants for a civillian program and then quitting the NPT and nuclearizing. North Korea has managed it, and it looks like Iran will do the same thing.

Re:Mystery Pits

[idontgno]

No nuclear nation failed to detonate its first implosion device.

Well, maybe one.

All externally-visible indicators (i.e., what you can see from seismography or other remote sensing, rather than watching the actual test instrumentation) were pretty unimpressive for any full-fledged nuclear detonation. Either it was faked (not that easy to do) or a fizzle.

And a fizzle is exactly the kind of failure that you have if you mis-engineer the tamper, the containment, or even the explosive lens. I.E., why you can't just run down to the local home improvement superstore and whip up everything except the fissile.

Getting the plutonium is hard; it requires a pretty large infrastructure investment in breeder reactors, centrifuges, etc., and also takes a long time. Getting the rest of the bomb is "just engineering", but it's very precise engineering with some very specific critical knowledge which is not generally available (and takes some serious experimentation to figure out for yourself).

BTW, I like the quote in the Wikipedia "fizzle" article:

This North Korean debut test was weaker than all other countries' initial tests by a factor of 20,[8] and considered possibly the worst initial test in history.[9]"

[8]# ^ Todd Crowell."A deadly kind of fizzle." Asia Times Online. Retrieved on 2008-05-04.
[9]# ^ Staff Writer. "Special report -The fizzle heard around the world." Nature.com. Retrieved on 2008-05-04.

Re:Mystery Pits

[Tisha_AH]

There were a great many factors that were considered before the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. At that point in time, allied forces had cornered the Japanese military to the home islands with it's outposts in the Pacific cut off from resupply and slowly starving into submission.

Our next move for Japan would have been the whole-scale destruction of every Japanese city with incendiaries (like what happened to Dresden Germany). In that bombing campaign, millions of Japanese would have died.

America knew that the next step would be a two-pronged landing invasion of Japan. It was determined that the US losses would have been 1,000,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen. The losses to the Japanese would have been of several million as Japan was prepared to give wooden spears to children and old men and to send them off on banzai charges against tanks and machine guns.

Just in the first few hours of the invasion the casualties of war would have around 1,000 allied and Japanese deaths per hour. This would have gone on for months.

We do not know what the dire position of the Japanese military would have caused them to bring to the battleground. Japan already had extensive experience with biological and chemical weapons and had used them to great effect in China. The German V-1 "buzz bomb" design was in Japanese hands and they were prepared to make Kamikaze attacks against the nearly 3000 allied vessels that would have been off the shores of Japan.

Certainly at the end of the war, the United States would have been much less inclined to help in the rebuilding of the Japanese government and industry. The successes of Japanese industry in the 60's, 70's and 80's may never have happened.

It is indeed unfortunate that Japanese civilians died in the nuclear detonations. Those were indeed desperate times and unfortunately the people who usually suffer the most is the non-combatant.

Re:Mystery Pits

[TFloore]

But we need to be very careful not to miss, Russia is right next door [to Iran].

Google maps is a wonderful resource. Look at it. There's about 400 miles between Tehran and the nearest Russian city, on the Caspian Sea. It's not that near.

One of the reasons we were scared about nuclear weapons based in Cuba is that if we nuked them to stop a launch we would also be nuking ourselves.

Not so much. We were concerned that the flight time for a ballistic missile from Cuba, aimed at Miami, was about 6 minutes. You cannot respond with anything other than a completely automated system in that time frame. Which is unacceptable when you are talking about a nuclear response. As to the "be nuking ourselves" we do have low-yield nuclear weapons also.

In fact, any attempt to launch nuclear weapons at Iran would probably set off the Russian early warning systems and they would just retaliate before our missiles hit their targets.

Probably not. If the United States were to launch nuclear weapons at Iran, it would probably be from SSBN(s). The flight time for a SLBM (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile) is less than 8 minutes. Most early warning systems can detect that fast... but they have a human in the loop, and alerting that human (Obama, Putin, whoever), getting a decision, and sending that decision back to the military can easily take more than 8 minutes.

The really worrying thing is that this would also probably true if Israel launched a nuclear strike on Iran.

Israel would probably use a nuclear weapon dropped by an F-15. From a distance, it's rather hard to tell the difference between an F-15 carrying a conventional payload and one carrying a nuclear payload, before it hits the target.

Assuming, of course, that you believe they have nuclear weapons, which they refuse to acknowledge. *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*

Re:Mystery Pits

[Dogtanian]

This is the big problem with nuking anywhere. The fallout drifts and will affect friendly countries right next door. One of the reasons we were scared about nuclear weapons based in Cuba is that if we nuked them to stop a launch we would also be nuking ourselves.

You were still performing atmospheric bomb tests on a site just 65 miles away from Las Vegas into the 1960s.

Re:Mystery Pits

[AKAImBatman]

Top Secret is as high as it goes. What you're thinking of is the "Need to Know" aspect of classified information. Unless the government decides that you are in a position where you "Need to Know" the designs for these weapons, then you will NOT get access to the information even if you have Top Secret clearance.

The President of the United States has the ultimate authority in deciding who gets access to Top Secret information, but that authority is often delegated to various department heads.

Re:Mystery Pits

[blindseer]

Nuclear power may not replace hydrocarbon fuels directly but hydrocarbon fuels can be produced from nuclear power. To make the hydrocarbons that are so convenient for things like making planes fly and boats tread water takes three things, hydrogen, carbon, and energy. Once you have a powerful baseload energy source like nuclear power the hydrogen and carbon can be squeezed out of abundant items like seawater and household garbage.

This is not new technology. Synthesizing hydrocarbon techniques have been around for about one hundred years.

Zinc is by far the best element

[Anonymous Coward]

I also like plutonium. It's just fun to say. Plutonium. 'How's your plutonium?' 'Good, thank you.'

Nuclear Dump

[Pinckney]

It's worth noting that the sample was found at Hanford, a dedicated nuclear site. It's a radioactive mess, and the sample was not contained safely, but it's not as if they found it at a typical municipal dump.

Re:Nuclear Dump

[chill]

Tell it to the downwinders. In 1945 alone Hanford released over 500,000 curies of radioactive iodine into the air. Three Mile Island, by comparison, released about 20 curies by accident and everyone freaked out.

A little insight..

[Kral_Blbec]

I have personally visited the fields where they doing all this. The term "waste pit" is misleading. A lot of stuff was stuffed in 55gal drums and buried in rows underground just because they didnt know what to do with it. It was always intended to go back and clean them up, but due to delays they have been there longer than expected. It wasnt just thrown out in a big pile.

There is a huge tent on rollers (about football field size) that has a crane mechanism hanging from the ceiling. The barrels (and some boxes) are mostly rusted really bad so digging is done very slowly to avoid busting any. Those that are judged to be too weak are packed into a larger barrel that fits over the old one. There is also a ventilation trailer that has automated drills to pierce drums that are under pressure slowly to release gases so they dont explode. Its really pretty cool how they have it set up.

They just didnt know any better back then, and there was no way for them to have guessed what would happen with all that stuff. Unfortunately work on the vitrification plant is constantly delayed due to red-tape, but when it gets up and running then that will be a major break through.

Note: Most of the stuff in these barrels is solid. The liquid stuff are held in huge (over a million gallon) tanks. Those are also being replaced.

Re:A little insight..

[Jane Q. Public]

A company I used to work for has also done some consulting work re: hazardous waste remediation at the Hanford site.

You paint much too pretty a picture.

Yes they did know better, but they counted on people coming in later to clean things up. Of course, the problem is that this same situation went on for many decades, and nobody came in to clean it up. Therefore, the old single-walled storage tanks (not just drums but many very large tanks) rusted and otherwise deteriorated and developed leaks. And these leaks were known about long before anybody actually tried to clean things up. It was demonstrated that some of these tanks had been leaking radioactive waste into the groundwater long enough that some of that contaminated groundwater reached the Columbia River, over 20 years ago!

About 10 or 15 years ago, one of the large storage tanks actually exploded (from chemical reactions), but any attempt at cleanup or remediation were delayed because there were no records kept of what kind of reactive chemicals or radioactive materials were in that tank! (There were both.)

And so on. Those are only a few examples. The Hanford site is nothing short of an almost unbelievable disaster area.

Re:Researchers

[gparent]

Woosh!

How is Saddam supposed to account for all his WMDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry if this is a bit off topic. If even the US can lose track of its weapons-grade plutonium, then how is Iraq supposed to account for all its nuclear WMD's before the Iraq war. I remembered EX-Pres Bush saying that unless Iraq comes clean with the accounting of the WMD's, then US will invade Iraq.
Of course, in hind-sight, accounting for the WMD's is probably an excuse to invade anyway.

Re:Worth a read - interesting article

[A. B3ttik]

When they talk about Purity, they mean how pure it is in terms of P-240. The amount of P-240 is usually determined upon creation conditions, since it is -very- difficult to separate P-239 from P-240.

Now, P-239 decays into U-235, and it -is- easy to chemically separate them.

All of this I learned in the last 10 minutes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239

Japan wanted to surrender and USA didn't accept?

[Anonymous Coward]

The atomic bomb did not remove Japan's desire to wage war, three offers of surrender previous to the bomb would indicate that their desire was basically gone already.

[Citation needed]

Or, less tersely, your assertion flies in the face of everything I have read about World War II.

Hmm, let's consult Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

By the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, the Japan campaign was underway as Allied forces closed in on the home islands and an invasion of Japan seemed inevitable if the war continued. By the end of January 1945, some Japanese officials close to the Emperor were seeking surrender terms which would protect his position. These proposals, sent through both British and American channels were assembled by General Douglas MacArthur into a 40-page dossier and given to President Roosevelt on February 2, two days before the Yalta conference. The dossier was reportedly dismissed by Roosevelt out of hand -- the proposals all included the condition that Emperor's position would be assured, albeit possibly as a puppet ruler. At this time, however, the allied policy was to accept only an unconditional offer of surrender. Additionally, these proposals were strongly opposed by powerful members of the Japanese government itself and thus can not be said to represent the true willingness of Japan to surrender at this time. Those opposed included members of the Supreme War Council Anami, Umezu and Toyoda.

So, I guess there was sort of an offer to surrender, but President Roosevelt was not willing to accept the conditions, and it's not clear that the Japanese government as a whole would have gone along with it even had it been accepted.

Re:Worth a read - interesting article

[afidel]

According to this site the core of Fat Man was ~13.6 lbs or ~6,200g. Pu239 has a density of a little under 20g/cm^3 so the core of Fat Man was ~300cc. Fat Man used a subcritical mass of Pu detonated through the compression mechanism but it just goes to show that a weapon could have been created from the sample assuming the isotope mix hadn't degraded too badly.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Actually...

[_ivy_ivy_]

87% of the US manufacturing base is devoted to weapons manufacture. The US accounts for over 75% of all military expenditures, world wide, and over 50% is on our own military (not counting the costs of Iraq or Afghanistan).

While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, do you have a citation for any of these bold claims?