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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.
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?
This would never be approved. It would be very dangerous to put nuclear material on a rocket. Our rockets are not near reliable enough and it would be very hard to prevent something like this from crashing back to earth if the rocket exploded. Even if you could put it in a explosive proof container, the politics of it would likely never let it happen not to mention that an explosive proof container would greatly increase both the weight and the expense.
What a fucking waste. Just give it to the French so they convert it into MOX. Since apparently they can afford to do what the USA has failed to do.