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America Finally Abandons Plan To Convert Plutonium Bombs Into Nuclear Fuel (reuters.com)
MOX hoped to convert plutonium from Cold War bombs into fuel for nuclear power plants, but even though the project was about 70% complete, Washington has pulled the plug. Slashdot reader Mr. Dollar Ton shared this story from Reuters:
The Department of Energy told Senate and House of Representatives committees in May that MOX, a type of specialized nuclear recycling plant that has never been built in the United States, would cost about $48 billion more than the $7.6 billion already spent on it. Instead of completing MOX, the Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, wants to blend the 34 tonnes of deadly plutonium -- enough to make about 8,000 nuclear weapons -- with an inert substance and bury it underground in New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Burying the plutonium would cost nearly $20 billion over the next two decades and would require 400 jobs at Savannah River, the Department of Energy has estimated.
Can't we just dump it into the ocean and it's going to slowly dilute away?
I do not think that BN-800 cost more than $200 million...
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
This stuff cost a ton of money and energy to refine. Don't throw it away. Seal it up in ceramic caskets and bury it in the middle of an army base somewhere. There might be a use for it in 50 years.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
My math might be wrong, but I'm coming up with ~700 million to just shoot it into space. 68,000 pounds at 10k per pound. Now maybe I'm off, say due to handling and there being a difference between putting something in orbit and shooting it at the Oort cloud. But even if I'm off by an order of magnitude it's still far cheaper. Maybe?
If the Obama administration really wanted to do this, why were they not the ones to cancel the program?
It seems like Trump deserves credit for that...
I for one am all for nuclear power but that program seems like a giant waste of money and it is well it was cancelled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As likely also means we will be mining more uranium and producing more waste.
This 34 tons is crap Pu we bought from Russia and it's satellite countries, to keep them from selling it to whoever.
Russian Pu is very radioactive, unlike ours.
We swapped the slugs out after a short period, so it made more Pu-239, not Pu-240 and up.
We also purified ours, but I'd bet that classified. :)
You can't stand next to a Russian nuke for long, or all your hair falls out, lol.
That's why we buy Pu244 from russia for spacecraft RTG's.
This needs to be burned (atomically) or buried.
You can't find ours with a Geiger counter. :)
We made over 10,000 tons of Pu at Hanford, btw. It's on record.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
We can spend $48 billion and have how many billions of energy produced? Or we can spend $20 billion and have a waste dump? Are you fucking kidding me? What a bunch of fucking loser pussies this country has become. Like I said on the other thread, take all the fucking useless Managers, Lawyers, Politicians, Sociologists, Scientologists, Religious Nutjobs, SJW's, MAGA Faggas, and throw them in a ditch, put a bullet in their brain pan and dump lye over them. Let's get on with the work of producing energy and things that are useful and shut these fuckers down. Bash their fucking heads in with a hammer. Join the movement! It's HAMMER TIME BITCHES!
I don't think something deserves to be called "70% complete" if they've spent 7.6 billion on it, but need 48 billion more to complete it.
$7.6 billion / ($48 billion + $7.6 billion) = 0.137...
The project is about 14% complete when measured in dollars.
I wasn't aware there was even an attempt to do this. I've always thought that highly enriched fuel could never be turned back into power grade, but if possible, it would be a massive boost to our energy reserves.
The waste will still be a problem. It will leak. It's already leaking in Nevada and only the local papers seem to bother covering it. Tritium has been found outside Wattsbar Nuclear and TVA keeps buying up land to keep it from getting out.
Terrorists make bombs that are Way more dangerous, thankfully, they blow themselves up a lot, so that helps too.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
As a general rule of thumb, when a project is "90% complete" you are at about the halfway point in both time and resources.
After completion of the burial, as usual costing 3X more than expected, a year later, an unanticipated global warming feedback loop kicked in raising global temperatures 5C. The order was given to unbury the plutonium and get it in reactors ASAP.
Costs nothing and then it fetches some money.
Nuclear weapons are the ultimate jobs bill for the MIC: Stupidly expensive, insane profit margins, secrecy. Even never using them make for insane profits. Any country that initiates nuclear weapon usage should be boycotted by the rest of the world's nations until it collapses economically. That's barely suitable for such a horrific crime against the planet and all life on it.
... wants to blend the 34 tonnes of deadly plutonium ... with an inert substance and bury it underground in New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Burying the plutonium would cost nearly $20 billion over the next two decades ...
Ant then someone will discover / invent something super useful -- like warp drive, Mars/Venus terraforming or Earth climate control -- that requires this plutonium and it will cost N times as much to dig it up and separate it out. Even though it would cost twice as much, turning it into fuel seems more productive than burying it, and we might even learn new things while actually doing something with the stuff.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Russia is experienced with handling nuclear material, and they can do nuclear stuff more cheaply than the USA can.
That I must also take into consideration the waste of my future wind- and solar-based electric generators.
Oh, well, I'll just put them in an empty beer can during the first 20 years. When it gets full by then I'll decide what to do with it.
Moral of the story:
If you like nuclear power, you're an imbecile. Wait, it's worse, such guys want everyone to use that sh*t. And lots of fools fall for it!
We'd love to hear what you have to say, vlad. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Real plutonium is a mix of things, depending on how it's made.
All other forms of Pu is More radioactive, and it has a huge cross section for fission, which adds to the radioactivity over time.
In other words, the crappier the Pu, the faster it gets dangerously radioactive.
Pu239 gives off alphas as it's primary decay, but those can cause fission of other Pu atoms, and the cross section for the impurities is Much larger than the 239, making it more likely to happen over time.
Fission gives off many things, which is why it has to be reprocessed to get rid of the fission fragments.
Russia also doesn't do that often, making the product more radioactive over time.
Some of the Test sources on the Civil Defense Radiation Detectors were made of a blend of isotopes, and most are more radioactive than they were when they were made in the 60's. :)
Fission does that to things...
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
France also tried that. The Superphenix reactor was designed to burn plutonium. It was completed in 1981, and abandoned in 1997.
It requires jobs. Not it provides jobs. If the government is taking money to do something that's a net weight on the economy, even when they hire people with the money. They're taking those people's time in return for the money, so that's barely better than break even on the employment side. And the taxes they're using make it into a negative. It's unusual and refreshing to see the proper perspective on government spending. On this topic the percentage completed is irrelevant. It's sunk cost. It could be 99% complete, but if it would cost more than its worth it shouldn't be done.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
First they signed a treaty with Russia that will require both sides to reduce its stocks of military grade plutonium by burning it in reactors. Now that Russians did their part of this deal, US government retracts from it. Exactly the same trick was done with chemical weapons. Russians got rid of their stockpiles and Americans first lied about "lack of funds" which is laughable, when you compare military budgets of both countries, and later along with their UK friends they fabricated Skripal scam and built huge propaganda campaign around it. Exactly the same with ABM treaty and now we have new propaganda campaign that prepares ground for Americans to renege INF treaty. Not to mention some 500 treaties signed with native Indians on and reneged on each and every of these, killing almost all natives in the process. Does it make sense believing in anything those scammers from US govt/oligarchy say or sign ? Or maybe it's time to get rid of dollar and limit business with US wherever possible ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wish I knew more about this stuff, but when I see statements like this..
I think the real question is: why is building the reactor so expensive? Both the reactor build cost and the burying cost are so bewildering, that my little layman mind smells rats everywhere. Maybe the rats are not there, but the costs are so huge that I think it's absurd to blame the public's resistance merely on environmentalists. It's more complicated than that.
$48B to build a reactor. WTF. That's absurd.