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.

Comments

Re: hmm 34 tons is nothing

[MightyYar]

use it to fuel extraterrestrial spacecraft

Wrong isotope. The boom boom kind is Pu239. The kind with the crazy alpha emission is Pu238.

Sapphire Project Pu is crap.

[Grog6]

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.