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How About a Megatons To Megawatts Program For US Nuclear Weapons?
Lasrick writes "Dawn Stover looks at the incredibly successful Megatons to Megawatts program, which turned dismantled Russian nuclear warheads into lower-grade uranium fuel that can be used to produce electricity. The 1993 agreement between the U.S. and Russia not only eliminated 500 tons of weapons-grade uranium, but generated nearly 10% of U.S. electricity consumption. The Megatons to Megawatts program ended in December, but Stover points out that the U.S. has plenty of surplus nuclear weapons that could keep the program going, without the added risk of shipping it over such huge distances. A domestic Megatons to Megawatts, if you will. This would be very cost effective and have the added benefit of keeping USEC, the only American company in the uranium enrichment field, in business."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Should've done it years ago.
We couldn't possibly give up our strategic advantage in an area that has almost no usefulness in this period of time!
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
Given all the governmental fuck-ups lately, I'm surprised we haven't seen any missiles being launched inadvertently.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I believe that the US phased out almost all highly enriched uranium weapons in the 50s. HEU is touchy stuff and aside from some gun type prototype mortar and artillery shell devices plutonium makes more sense. Think of HEU as nitroglycerin, more prone to criticality accidents and plutonium as TNT insensitive and safe except in exceptional circumstances such as explosive lensing.
...the nation doesn’t need much more than 1,000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons to maintain a “strong and credible” deterrent against the possibility of a nuclear attack.
A THOUSAND warheads are needed as a deterrent? I would think a few dozen at most in case China gets a bit bold. But there's a few more decades of wealth transfer from the US Middle Class to China, so it's not going to happen.
A couple is more than enough for N. Korea. France and England won't use theirs ever - let alone on us. And Israel, well, bombing the US would be like bombing themselves.
And Russia? Please. They're having too great of a time now NOT being a World power which is a lesson we in the US should learn.
And as far as terrorists are concerned, retaliation would be exactly what they want.
Sadly, the military will strongly object, claiming they must retain the ability to annihilate civilization 50 or 60 times over. "To protect us."
Do you have any idea how much it takes to create weapons grade uranium? Umm no.
We couldn't possibly give up our strategic advantage in an area that has almost no usefulness in this period of time!
Tell it to the Chinese and Russians.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Russians got stiffed.
I know a lady who worked for the company at the time.
She also got stiffed to the tune of 10K un-reimbursed travel expenses.
But nothing like the Ruskys. Who learned the hard way about western bankruptcy laws.
BTW the company owner is still wanted in Russia, but what he did is not illegal in the USA, so no extradition.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
To take highly enriched U235 or Plutonium, that has cost 100k's per kg to produce, and convert it to a lower grade fuel. Even if you don't like nuclear weapons there are myriad potential future non-military uses that may crop up that will need highly enriched fuels, like:
Nuclear interplanetary rockets, Space nuclear power reactors, nuclear aircraft, trains,trucks, tractors, earthmovers, and (less likely) nuclear ships, where weight is critical or small size for shielding or safe containment in event of a crash is critical. We are going to run out of fossil fuel eventually and will still need high density power sources for transportation and primary production.
In the case of aircraft, nuclear power may offer the only long term solution for transporting billions of wealthy future-humans around the world at the high speeds they will demand without fucking up the stratosphere like any combustion based propulsion does.
No. We should maintain our advantage over other nations. Especially China. After all China is probably building up a giant stockpile of nukes right now as we speak!!.
I realize this is /., so to rtfa is just crazy talk. But I did skim through it. We currently have 3000 retired warheads that are simply sitting in storage decaying. These aren't sitting on top of missiles. Or even being maintained. They are costing taxpayers who knows how much money to sit in a building somewhere. Since the cost of enriching this stuff beyond what is needed to generate power has alread done. This seems like an even bigger waste to me. As they would probably have to reprocess it to use in a weapon again anyhow.
They already were, as part of the first program. US HEU was also converted, mostly from stocks, since the U.S. primarily uses Plutonium bombs, both as fission warheads, and as triggers for fusion warheads.
Addressing the suggestion itself:
The HEU supply available from weapons is now too low to deal with demands of the power industry, which is why the program came to the negotiated close that it did in the first place.
The U.S. generally could deal with both the fuel availability problem and the Plutonium weapons "problem" by:
(1) fuel reprocessing, which was disallowed by executive order of then-president Jimmy Carter, This would solve the "nuclear waste" problem at the same time, as it's not actually "waste", it's actually "unreprocessed nuclear fuel".
(2) use of Plutonium reactors which could utilize said Plutonium in the first place (which would imply breeder/fast breeder reactors, which the U.S. doesn't build due to it's non-proliferation stance, which appears to be successful, since North Korea... er... wait...
(3) another START treaty involving both Russia and China, so that the warhead reductions would be mutual. The current number of warheads is approximately those needed to implement the Brookings Institute's M.A.D. policy in the first place, since you pretty much have to drop a warhead within 100m of a hardened target to ensure the destruction of the target, and there are that many hardened targets. Nuclear weapons aren't magical in their ability to destroy -- in fact, the cluster bombs and fuel-air explosives we've been using in Iraq and Afghanistan have considerably more explosive power than tactical nuclear weapons.
So in all, the proposal is unworkable until you reverse a U.S. fuel reprocessing policy set by executive order, reverse a U.S. reactor technology policy set by executive order, and then engage in arms reductions talks with people who are currently not on very good speaking terms with us due to recent foreign policy decisions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Lets read up a little bit on it before we compare LFTR reactors and nuclear processes to putting diesel in a gas car...
Megatons to Megawatts to Megatron! Is Michael Bay involved in this?
President Carter's reprocessing ban was in fact overturned by President Reagan. It costs money, lots of it, to reprocess spent fuel and the money to build commercial reprocessing plants wasn't forthcoming until about fifteen years ago when DoE funding was advanced to build a MOX fuel fabrication plant in South Carolina. The pricetag is now $5 billion, the plant is still unfinished and there are no confirmed customers for its MOX fuel in the US despite, it is claimed, generous subsidies. As far as I know there are no commercial reactors using MOX with recycled plutonium in the US at the moment.
Breeder reactors can't earn their way simply producing plutonium fuel other than for military purposes as cost-no-object operations. They need to generate electricity too and the operational experience of breeders over the past few decades is that they are not reliable and cost-effective to run especially these days when fracked gas-fired power generators can deliver electricity wholesale to the grid for about 3 cents/kWh. The French Super-Phenix breeder was intended to produce 1.2GW of electricity but it suffered problems and delays and was eventually shut down in part due to economic factors. Other breeders have had similar problems over the decades.
As for the START process it can take a decade or more to get something both countries can agree to -- President Obama signed off on the latest START agreement but it was begun by President Bush after the groundwork had been laid in President Clinton's term. The US (and Russia too) have to consider there are other unfriendly nuclear powers in existence today such as China with limited stocks of weapons but with intercontinental range. America's ready-for-use stockpile of about 2,000 deliverable warheads has to be able to deter more than Russia.
As for the START process it can take a decade or more to get something both countries can agree to -- President Obama signed off on the latest START agreement but it was begun by President Bush after the groundwork had been laid in President Clinton's term. The US (and Russia too) have to consider there are other unfriendly nuclear powers in existence today such as China with limited stocks of weapons but with intercontinental range. America's ready-for-use stockpile of about 2,000 deliverable warheads has to be able to deter more than Russia.
This is a crucial thing to remember......any nuclear weapons strategy that ignores China is ignoring the reality of the modern world. It's not just Russia and the US anymore.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If my destruction is already determined, and there is no other way out, then having a way to convince the aggressor that he'll be going down with me is a perfectly valid tactic. Really, it's the only valid tactic on some situations.
The megatons to megawatts program was put in place because the USSR had fallen apart and the existing nuclear stockpiles of the old Soviet Union were in the hands of increasingly suspect generals in an increasingly corrupt and desperate situation.
It was in that context that the US offered to buy the nuclear fuel and give Russia money.
Compared to today... The US for all its troubles is not on the brink of civil war. Our nuclear weapons are not in danger of falling into the hands of terrorists.
So the program has no point.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Don't they have surplus nuclear warheads? Or do you think they're going to use them all?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The French Super-Phenix breeder was intended to produce 1.2GW of electricity but it suffered problems and delays and was eventually shut down in part due to economic factors. Other breeders have had similar problems over the decades.
We should come right out and say that the economic factors leading to the shutdown were largely driven by Greenpeace, and that the economic factors in most use of nuclear energy projects are driven by political, rather than engineering issues.
A THOUSAND warheads are needed as a deterrent? I would think a few dozen at most in case China gets a bit bold.
Its not about the number of missiles that you start the day with, its about the number of missiles that are left after you have been hit in a first strike.
The reason for such a large number of warheads is survivability. No weapon is 100% effective. However lets assume a hypothetical weapon that destroys its target 99% of the time. If this weapon is used to attack 1,000 warheads then 10 warheads will survive and be available for a counterattack. This is the mathematics of MAD. No matter how badly you are hit you are still unthinkably dangerous.
As they would probably have to reprocess it to use in a weapon again anyhow.
The Pentagon's logic is probably that reprocessing would be less expensive that creating new material should they desire new warheads.
Ummm, no. The economic factor for Super-Phenix shutting down was that it was an engineering prototype that pushed the envelope a bit too far in various directions. It broke in interesting ways, some due to the liquid sodium coolant, some because of the very intense neutron flux in a very small volume. The fact that the Greens fired a few RPG-7s at it in its early days had little to do with its eventual shutdown. This is La Belle France, remember -- see what they did to the Rainbow Warrior for what they think of Greenpeace.
The folks pushing next-generation breeders such as the assorted LFTRs, travelling-wave and other IFRs and the like have learned from the failures of the early breeder designs but it's likely they will run into other whoopsies themselves as they try to run productively for decades on end at 5 cents/kWh.
The USA was probably the richest in uranium on earth. Now we have none, it's all gone except for a negligible amount in the grand canyon and the public is opposed to destroying grand canyon to get at it. The USA imports the stuff today.
Yes, we do process it for others; apparently, just a single corporation does, so it's not all ending up used in our own nation. We've sold it for power and weapons for other nations. I'm sure somebody is making a billion being the middleman between India and Pakistan in a nuclear rivalry the US helped create...
Getting the USSR to lessen the ridiculous amounts they had was a major motivation but we didn't need to cut ours down so much in order to do that; we re-purposed our own while decommissioning many of our weapons as well. That wasn't really necessary; like I said, there were other motives besides just the security of Russia.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's about the $$$.
Nobody does "waste reprocessing" because that costs you equivalent of $120/lb uranium from the mine. Since uranium from the mine is $50-$60 on some contracts now, why would you spend 2x as much on fuel?
It costs peanuts to store current "waste". There is simply not that much of it. People that say current "waste" is a problem are ignorant of the future need for such fuel and of what that "waste" represents.
Finally, plutonium bombs are predominantly Pu-238, which is rather stable and very expensive to produce with any purity. So burning it in reactors is A LOT of money "wasted". The MBAs at the Pentagon would have a heart attack and they lobby vehemently to store unused highly pure plutonium instead of disposing it in reactors.
Yes, HEU was mostly converted because it is reasonably cheap to make and not part of any strategic stockpiles.
PS. Personally, I would prefer that the Plutonium be disposed of in reactors. We do not need nuclear weapons in this world. But we sure need clean nuclear power instead of ever increasing *rates* of carbon emission.
There's no shortage of reactor-grade uranium in the US. U.S. Enrichment is planning a bankruptcy due to lack of demand. URENCO's centrifuge plant in New Mexico is in full operation. New centrifuge plants are orders of magnitude cheaper to run than the old gaseous-diffusion plants like K-25 at Oak Ridge. They're also much smaller; K-25 had several mile-long buildings, while URENCO's plant is about the size of two Walmarts.
While I don't think Super-Phenix was a ever going to be a success in making money by generating power. It was never given a chance to succeeded and prove it self, most of its months of inactivity where due to political opposition and administrative problems created by that opposition. Am guessing things like it took five months to get the okay to order the parts we needed six months ago and the manufacture has since gone bankrupt and we need to find and approve a new source who will also face political pressure not to take the contract. Yeah, isn't science fun. Finally, It wasn't restarted due to court order and political opposition. Yes, there were technical problems but it was an envelope pushing experimental design and just as they appeared to have been fixed; it was never allowed to restart(I believe the final shutdown was actually for maintenance.) In short the anti-nuclear crowd was truly terrified of Super-Phenix because it threatened their world view. If Super-Phenix proved that a breeder could be made to run commercially it would open a flood gate of nuclear plants by reducing in one of the biggist problems with nuclear power: waste. In short they had to put all their might behind shutting it down or risk loosing the war.
One thing I will say against the plant was that heavy snow fall caused structural damage...
Leave my fusion bombs alone.
Personally, I would prefer that Plutonium be reserved for RTGs for space power. Outside of the inner solar system, solar-powered probes just don't cut it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We still have many tons of spent fuel to recycle. About enough to power the nation for 500 years.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is a different type of Plutonium. Not the he same thing at all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It is tempting to put that nasty stuff to a civilian use, but such a program could also be an pretext to keep up the production of weapons-grade fissile material. When conservative politicians in the 1970ies were pushing to arm West Germany with its own nuclear weapons, one of the things they did was having a breeder reactor built (thankfully it never was completed). Such a thing should definitely be avoided.
the plutonium 238 used in thermal reactors is a side effect of refining plutonium 239 for fissile material
We are running out of pu-238 because we are not making lots of pu239
Why stop at only 4 melted reactors poisoning a whole ocean, a couple of countries, and half of the atmosphere? With numbers 5 and 6 just waiting on the sidelines. The more the merrier! After all, a couple of dozen reactors in the US alone are similar to the ones that blew. Many others are on fault lines, or more exposed to flooding and other catastrophes than they were supposed to be. And all of them leak 'just a little bit'.
Besides, sinkholes, once weaponized, are much more terrifying than those things.
Never let a good hammer go to waste. They should use them to nuke every earth-grazing asteroid that gets too close. And brighten the skies with their glittering ashes. What could go wrong?
U.S. HEU Disposition Program has been up and running for several years now.
There are even plans for down blending weapons grade Plutonium and burning the resulting MOX fuel in various reactors.
.
Because all your adversaries are completely logical and reasonable robots. Also, infallible. Just like you!
Nobody will EVER use such a weapon in anger, madness of through accident and lack of oversight.
I for one have never ever dropped a hammer on my foot, I'm sure that bureaucracies of the world are perfectly capable of not doing the same only with nukes.
After all... weapons of war and killing are actually tools of peace and love.
Every year people gather in Hiroshima in "thank god for nukes or many people might have died in an invasion" celebration.
Look how happy and peaceful they are. What more proof would anyone need?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
in fact, the cluster bombs and fuel-air explosives we've been using in Iraq and Afghanistan have considerably more explosive power than tactical nuclear weapons.
There is no sensible need to have tactical nuclear weapons. They do nothing for MAD, since they are not all that destructive, and they just encourage proliferation.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The Pentagon's logic is probably that reprocessing would be less expensive that creating new material should they desire new warheads.
That and we have signed treaties saying we won't create new material (but I think reprocessing old material is an allowed loophole)
The Pentagon is right; the US shut down its last nuclear warhead proction facility over 20 years ago, and has no capability to manufacture new weapons anymore.
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/solutions/us-nuclear-weapons/us-nuclear-weapons-facilities.html
Old warheads must be maintained, as we can no longer make new ones.
As a former both commercial and government nuclear worker now "stuck" working at a dirt-burner because of federal and state government regulatory mis-management, it remains my professional opinion that it is PURE political deliberate pig-ignorance which prevents what General President Eisenhower attempted to begin; Atoms for Peace.
As a university degreed STEM graduate, it remains my opinion that the risk of a "Satan Bug" is much greater than ANY terroristic use of special nuclear materials in ANY form. All the rest of this discussion is Gilbert and Sullivan, full of noise and fury - signifying NOTHING!
These programs all all about keeping nuclear version beta alive.
The fact remains that these reactors are unsafe, decrepid, and inefficient.
Even ignoring the cost of dealing with the waste under normal operation, they are not cost effective.
They simply failed to deliver nuclear's promise of cheap power. For a while they were part of a system able to deliver more kWh to the grid per Ton of earth dug up than carbon fuels, but then the all the rich deposits mined out. We've already passed peak Uranium.
Programmes like this are an attempt to avoid the costs of decommissioning these plants for just a little longer, until it can become someone else's problem.
In reality, all plants deriving their fuel from U ought to be decommissioned ASAP.
Note well that LFTR and Thorium fueled reactors do not have this problem. Even at normal background levels, LFTR's are fuel efficient enough that grinding and leeching random rock from anyway is energy efficient, in that you recover much more energy than the extraction process takes to run.
Why are U reactors so bad? Because even before they are fuelled, only 0.7% of natural U is useable fuel, and after the fuel is "depleted", usually much less than 6% of that has actually been consumed.
The reason it can no longer be used, is because it is a solid, and the waste products have no way to escape. These waste products accumulated until they consume enough neutrons to prevent the fuel from sustaining a chain reaction safely. Attempting to increase criticality in the presence of these "reactor poisons" is what blew up Chernobyl.
Thorium, on the other hand, is 100% fertile. Almost all (arbitrarily close to 100%) of it can eventually be converted in an LFTR to U-233 and then consumed. The molten salt form of the fuel makes reprocessing easy, allowing the waste products to be continually removed, and the fuel continually refreshed.
But we couldn't have Thorium first, because we absolutely needed to develop natural U fueled reactors first, in order to kickstart Thorium breeders.
Then there is the misguided idea of breeding natural U-238 into P-239. This is a very bad idea: P undergoes criticality much more easily than U, and so is only good for bombs. The original Th->U breeder program was scrapped to focus on U->P breeders, but the experiment failed - it was simply too unstable to keep under safe control, and to work at all, it required a huge inventory of P to work, so it was also likely to result in a massive mess if it fell over.
LFTR's on the other hand, are unconditionally stable. They automatically slow down when they overheat, resulting in intrinsically safe operation. They also contain no water, and hence do not generate quantities of chemically explosive gasses such as what exploded to breach Fukushima.
The biggest problem is that basically none of the engineering wisdom accrued from building and operating U reactors is applicable to LFTR's.
They have different hazards. They're not pressurized, but they must handle radioactive and highly toxic gasses in large quantities. They can't fail by melting down, but they run at red-hot temperatures all the time. They don't need pressure containment vessels, but they do need attached automatic fuel reprocessing plants.
They don't need the fuel to be manually handled at all - it's all piped around, but they do need their plants to be maintained.
The special metal used for the pipe will last much longer than the pipes in U reactors, yet it must be made of an expensive Nickel alloy.
The only true remaining problem, is that no-one yet knows exactly what shape those pipes should be. Graphite is needed in the core to moderate the neutrons, yet graphite pipes are known to swell and then contract with heavy neutron flux. Perhaps the moderating carbon should be in liquefied form too? It could be ground into a powder and mixed into a separate molten salt, and then possibly pumped through the core separately. This would be an efficient way to harvest heat fr
in fact, the cluster bombs and fuel-air explosives we've been using in Iraq and Afghanistan have considerably more explosive power than tactical nuclear weapons.
There is no sensible need to have tactical nuclear weapons. They do nothing for MAD, since they are not all that destructive, and they just encourage proliferation.
Your position differs with that of some of the best games theorists and strategic thinkers on the planet:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/med...
http://www.brookings.edu/~/med...
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/fi...
I'll trust them, until I see your equivalent credentials.
talking about devaluation...
The US has pretty much given up on tactical nukes.
Even from the first of your links: "Most allies today see U.S. tactical nuclear weapons as being of political rather than military significance".
Russia wants tactical nuclear weapons to handle the fact that their conventional forces are inferior to both NATO and (probably) Chinese forces. They are hoping that they would be able to use those weapons in a conflict without triggering the use of strategic nuclear weapons. This is the very opposite of MAD.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Being a little unhappy here. These people are in bankrupcy. Their tech is 70 years old and they cannot figure out the tech to do better. Their senators just got done raping me and everyone in the Northwest in order to try to keep them afloat.
reactor fuel is easy and cheap to come by. And I am sure if we need some the iranians can supply us.
But we are not even getting close here to the real deal. Damn.
Just in case the corporate bitch run U.S. should grow a pair of balls at some point in this day in age, and I'm not talking about bugging the cabinet of another nation as a passive aggressive corporate bitch response to a valid complaint on part of US allies, nuclear arms will be at some point necessary. The aspect that they took nukes off the table in response to 9/11 contributes to the thinking it was a false flag event when one considers what the response was to Pearl Harbor.
Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Fuel should be handed over to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... for equitable distribution of Nuclear Power among 195 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism
I have nor read the complete list of responses, so this observation may be redundant, but the author seems to be unaware of a modern commercial enrichment plant that has been in operation for about two years. Located outside of Eunice, NM, it is operated by a consortiun headed up by URENCO. It employs contemporary centrifuge enrichment technology, unlike USEC's antiquated, much more energy intensive system. USEC's facility probably ought to be closed down, decontaminated, demolished and the site remediated, it's a dinosaur.
Unexamined is the question of the practicality if nuclear power to begin with. The whole Megatons to Megawatts program was conceived by major and influential backers of nuclear power.
The re-licensing frenzy that followed the 2005 National Energy Policy Act's relaxation of oversight and licensing should be a cause for concern for sensible people. Metals embrittled by years of exposure to highly radioactive activities did, in fact, have a design life, which relicensing ignores. This make sense for plant operators, since the facilities are long since paid for. Continued operation of these plants is highly profitable (practically a license to print money), since the most of the liability for an accident rests with the public, not them.
Absent loan guarantees, tax incentives, and new laws that permit utilities to bill customers for construction expenses prior to plant s going on line, not to forget public insurance because private insurers decline to insure nuclear plants, there would be no nuclear power plants built.
The free market is quite settled on the question of nuclear power, and the verdict is... it is too expensive and too dangerous. If governments would get out of the power business we'd not be having this conversation.
The cost of real renewables halves every few years and that is the future of energy production. Put the Uranium back in the ground where it came from, probably deep geologic disposal, and forget nuclear, it was a seductively interesting idea that turned out to be economically impracticable.
peasegrn