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NASA Restarts Plutonium Production
Celarent Darii writes "In what looks like good news for the American Space program, NASA has restarted production of plutonium. According to the article, after the closure of Savannah Rivers reactor NASA purchased plutonium from Russia, but since 2010 this was no longer possible. The native production of plutonium is a step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long term space exploration."
Maybe if NASA is really good Santa will bring them some plutonium.
My first thought upon reading the summary was that if the Savannah River Site is closed, where are they making the new plutonium?
The answer, according to TFA, is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
if Iran will impose sanctions on the United States...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Am I wrong in thinking the UK has a plutonium stockpile it really doesn't know what to do with? Simply not juicy enough?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21505271
jh
RTGs are designed to survive both the explosion and an uncontrolled impact with the ground.
Even if ruptured by the impact, plutonium is an immensely dense material - it's not easily scattered.
it scatters in smoke just fine. look up "windscale fire"
.... make up your mind?
You used to produce Plutonium and you saw it was good. But then man got greedy and raced upward to the skies and eat from the forbidden fruit. And complicated-gdp-involving-economy-formula was not happy and it convinced you that it was bad. And Plutonium was no more, Savannah Rivers dropped the Rivers and became a p0rn5tar and the fallen from grace NASA purchased plutonium from Russia. Now there is what looks like good news, the saviour will be born, the native plutonium-producer child of NASA. A step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long space exploration. After a jump backward, sort of.
I wish we just got rid of the jumps backward.
An RTG falling out of the sky may hurt if it hits you on the head but other than that it's mostly harmless. Besides we already spread Pu all over the globe in the 60's and 70's, it's now a geological layer marking our entry into the nuclear age for millions of years to come..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Nonsense. NASA wouldn't want to go backwards now, not when they're on the verge of building their very own rocket that can take men into space!
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
Slashdot will correct me if I'm wrong but if memory serves me correctly, part of the reason we don't recycle spent fuel rods is because of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (Treaties?) we signed in the 1970s. Apparently recycling old rods yields weapons-grade materials, even if their final purpose is not for weapons.
The Pu in the fuel rods is not the right isotope, it is almost all Pu239 (U238 + neutron = Pu239, [after a stage as Np239]). NASA needs Pu238. What Pu239 is in there would be a real bear to separate from the Pu239 (more difficult than the separation of U235 from U238 because the mass difference is less).
Mod parent informative. Plutonium burns readily, and oxide particles can be scattered widely. OTOH, RTGs are built to survive all kinds of launch failure, including pad fire and uncontrolled reentry. Also, the amount of Pu in an RTG is 1-4 kg, less than what has been released in all but the puniest atmospheric nuclear tests, which the humanity has survived rather well. So, no apocalyptic zombie hordes as a result of even a faulty RTG burnup.
The wiki article on that fire notes that it released large amounts of iodine-131. The fire was caused by attempting to produce plutonium, not by burning plutonium and the reports on its cause seem to be either uranium and magnesium/lithium cartridges.
Plutonium dioxide is already oxidized. It's chemically impossible for it to catch fire, and again, dense and heavy with a high melting point.
We can just start reprocessing existing spent fuel and recover the material we need from that?
We can't. The path to Pu-238 (the isotope used in RTGs) is Np-237 -(n)-> Np-238 -(beta-decay)-> Pu-238. Np-237 is a byproduct of neutron irradiation of U-238, but it must be separated and fabricated into target pins before further irradiation, otherwise your Pu-238 will be drowned in a mass of Pu-239 and higher isotopes, and there is no practical way to separate it. (Separating U-235 from U-238, three atomic units of difference, is difficult enough; Pu-238 and Pu-239 are a single atomic unit apart.)
Hundreds. HL is 87 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
For the folks who don't know, we are talking about plutonium 238. This has a half live of 88 years so decays rapidly and produces a fair amount of heat. Using thermocouples this can be used to generate power with no moving parts. The decay route is alpha particles which are fairly easy to shield against. Your favorite bomb material plutonium 239 has a half life of 24000 years which leaves it safer to handle but not useful for thermoelectric generation
you need more information. the pu-238 used in RTGs is in oxide form, bound with Oxygen 16 to absorb the occasional neutron (it is mostly an alpha emitter) that can be formed. So, the pu-238 is "already burned", in a sense, and in a form to be safer to humans.
We didn't stop producing plutonium just because it wasn't economically feasible (when did that stop the government from doing anything) -- the history of plutonium in the United States has been littered with accidents and costly, multi-decade cleanup projects that cost billions of dollars. See Rocky Flats, et al.
Commercial reactor waste has very little weapons-grade material in it, because in order to maximize production of weapons-grade Plutonium, you have to use a commercially inefficient fuel cycle to minimize the amount of spontaneously fissioning Plutonium isotopes being created through continued neutrox flux.
More succinctly: the more time U238 spends being bombarded in a reactor (thus, the more energy you create from the same fuel assembly), the more likely it is going to pass the "sweet spot" of Pu-239 into the undesireable Pu-240 or Pu-241 which poisons a prompt supercriticality which is created during a nuclear detonation. The reactors at Hanford that made the vast majority of weapons-bound Plutonium for the US weapons stockpile used somewhere around 6-month fuel cycles, where the average commercial reactor uses the fuel assembly for several years.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The isotope of PU used by NASA is not the type you make bombs from. I guess you could freak people out by spreading some radioactive material with a 'dirty bomb' - but basically, dirty bombs are a psychological weapon more than an actual hazard - they get people to panic and hurt themselves. They don't do much or any direct damage.
They type NASA uses won't fission (which is what you need for a nuclear mushroom-cloud, city destroying type explosion). It only decays, and as it decays, it produces a lot of heat and radiation (which, in a spacecraft, gets converted to heat also). NASA uses the heat to create electric power using a device called an RTG - Radioisotope thermal generator, which directly converts heat to electricity without any turbines (although, much less efficiently than a steam or gas turbine, but that's not a big concern for NASA).
If you want to kill multiple birds, then wind turbines are the answer.
/ducks
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
1g of Pu-238 produces .5 watts, which is really useful for long-lasting portable devices. There are some early pacemakers running from Pu-238 that are still operational.
For example, a few grams of Pu-238 could power an iPhone for a century without ever recharging...
(but would cost tens of thousands of dollars..)
Well, I did just that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
Seems like plenty of nasty stuff escapted, but no plutonium...
Actually non-fissile material can be used as a X-ray/gamma reflector, once thing get cooking good in the pit, the gama rays get reflected back to the secondary implode it and the excess neutrons which can transmute some of the PU-238 into fissile PU-239, some of which is going to fission.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Using a solar sail is certainly sailing. You use light pressure instead of air pressure, and the construction of the sail is different as a result, but it is certainly sailing. And sailing into the direction that the light originates is tacking and can be done with a solar sail together with gravity. What's your problem with it?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Oh no! With 'worthless for weapons' Pu238 and $100 of explosives someone has caused billion of dollars of damage.
The explosion would warrant news, and a response by the bomb squad. In a short time, the news would leak that there was plutonium in the explosion. At that point, the entire population of the city would panic and head out of town. At least several dozen would be killed (migrate a large city at a moment's notice and statistically deaths will occur)
All the people in that city know at this moment is that a bomb went off, and radiation was detected. If it gets announced that the radiation is from Plutonium and not Gadolinium or Americium, then it's going to be a panic. Plutonium = nuclear bomb to the general public.
So now you have an entire city on panic, and the nation will be glued to the news reports, or headed home themselves. A copycat bomber at this point would be devastating, a second actual dirty bomb would be the call to 'Shut Down Everything' as no one is going to remain in a city while dirty bombs are exploding.
So now you have the entire country in fear, thanks to 'Up to the minute latest reports' coming from CNN/FOX/etc.
Let's go forward a few weeks:
Bills need to be paid, and people are going back to work, but not the people of the original sites. Those places are going to be off limits, both due to crime scene investigation, and people's fear of radiation, especially plutonium. Everyone in the city will be wearing dust masks, even if miles away.
It's going to be a good long time before the government can convince people that the radiation zones are small. Until then, people will take no chances. Cleanup is going to be expensive as hell as material must be removed enmass.
Buildings adjacent to the target will likely remain closed for a longer period of time than necessary. Lawsuits are going to be coming for any building that even clicks once/minute on a geigercounter, so owners will be ultracautious. ...
Ok, I could go on, but you can see that the 'damage' from the dirty bomb is not in the literal physical damage. A cheap bomb can cause millions of damage, and one that utilizes 'bomb' associated components like plutonium will cause billions and several deaths even if the initial blast fails to kill any.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
IIRC, ingesting even a small amount of pu-238 is dangerous. Alpha particles don't travel far, except in vacuum, so they decay and damage the cells in your body, including the DNA strands. You are actually safer with an equivalent amount of gamma radiation, because you only get damage from the particles that decay inside of your body and not from the ones that pass on through.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
So if that's all it takes we'd better hope that THE TERRORISTS don't figure out that strapping a block of C4 to a smoke detector is going to cause ELEVENTY BILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF DAMAGE.
You have such an over active imagination it's equal parts cute, fascinating and scary, all at once.
Hi, this is the parent of this particular topic parent which I started replying too:
If the vehicle burns up on launch or explodes at a low altitude there goes the county, launch facility, what have you.
If it burn up in the upper atmosphere perhaps world wide cancer rates double or there goes any thing where the jet stream stears the fallout event for the next 6 months or so. So just saying... great for the space program though... parse... parse... ; )
See how we're talking about rockets there? See how the general article is talking about plutonium for RTG use.
Now all those things being apparent, can you perhaps see how a discussion on a very complex scenario where we intentionally try to make plutonium oxide burn is irrelevant - except - as I pointed out - if a rocket was actually using thousands of kilos of fluorine-based propellant. Which, as your link points out, they don't because although you can build an engine powered by it, handling fluorine in quantities like that is incredibly toxic in every possible capacity, environmentally devastating and not a currently used fuel in commercial launchers for all these reasons.
Ok. Let's deal with overbroad:
We live in an oxygen rich environment. There is oxygen everywhere. When something is left out in the open, it slowly oxidizes to some form of oxide.
Unless you have exceptionally specific, extreme circumstances, this means something which is at it's maximum oxidation state will not burn.
We do not live in a fluorine permeated atmosphere. We don't have accidental piles of trifluorochlorine lying around. Commercial rockets themselves are not run on reactive fluorine fuels. The failure mode of a rocket launching would be to combust in an oxygen atmosphere with liquid oxygen and kerosene fuels, or the aluminum-based solid oxide fuel.
So again: it's not "comically overbroad", you're being pedantic. Because fluorine and specifically trifluorochlorine is literally the only way that a maximally oxidized metal compound is going to "burn".