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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.
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
Easily retrievable there. Why not use it to fuel extraterrestrial spacecraft like NASA did with Curiousity? They said it was the last few grams they had. The several tons DoE has could be put to good use by NASA.
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?
use it to fuel extraterrestrial spacecraft
Wrong isotope. The boom boom kind is Pu239. The kind with the crazy alpha emission is Pu238.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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
Project Orion needs the plutonium for 600000 bomblets for escaping the solar system and then braking at the target system for that ark to escape the neutron star, as National Geographic channel has taught us.
Pu239 can run a reactor in space, though. Pu238 is for radioisotope thermal generators. But both types of power generator can power a long-range spacecraft. Pu239 is better in some ways -- reactors can produce more power than a RiTeG, and also, it's relatively non-radioactive until a reactor is started. Start the reactor after entry into space, and you're much safer from launch mishaps than if you used faster-decaying Pu238,
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.
Billions of energy? ...
Construction of the MOX plant was started a long time back, Google Google... The project started in 2000, construction was started in 2007 under Bush the Younger. I recall that Congress pulled the plug on financing it a couple of times before restoring the funding keeping it limping along, probably for pork reasons -- South Carolina where the plant was being built has two Republican Senators. The project was doomed from the start pretty much.
The 34 tonnes of surplus Pu is US-made, it's not Russian despite what someone further down in the comments suggests/insists. The ex-Soviet highly-enriched uranium downblended and purchased in the Megatonnes to Megawatts project was easy to deal with but there was no intention to buy in weapons-grade Pu from the Russians. The deal with them was that both sides would work to take their stock of surplus weapons-grade Pu out of possible use permanently and making MOX fuel and burning it in commercial reactors was the best option agreed by both sides. The US had no experience with MOX, no facilities to make MOX and no commercial customers for MOX even if it could be produced. They couldn't even give it away...
Yes, "Billions of energy" is short-hand for some billions of dollars in value of energy produced. Try to keep up. I know you're slow.
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.
Reactors are more complicated though - they require feedback control. There have been a few small test reactors in space, but not for a long time, and there are no current designs or information on long-term reliability. An RTG is so simple there's practically nothing to go wrong.
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.
Candu is magic, it can do anything. Making oddball fuel like MOX for a Candu or any light-water reactor is a nightmare of regulatory oversight, delays, cost escalations and regular lightly-enriched fuel which meets current regulations is cheap as chips now and for the forseeable future.
The perfect solution would be a reactor that can be fuelled with metallic weapons-grade plutonium without reprocessing it, downblending it or converting it to an oxide formulation. The BN-800 fast-spectrum reactor the Russians are operating can theoretically use metallic fuels including Pu-239 but it's in Russia, there's only one of them, it could only burn a few dozen kilogrammes of Pu-239 per operating cycle of a few months and did I mention it's in Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Obviously it's physically possible to distribute that much plutonium in the entire volume of the ocean, the question is how? Metallic plutonium has low solubility in water so you'd have to process it to something like plutonium chloride. But even then you wouldn't want to have a big block of the stuff if the isotope is Pu239 -- the critical mass is only 11kg.
Getting rid of that much Pu239 is a major engineering project if you want to do it safely, with no chances it will diverted or accumulate anywhere. There was a time where it might have been safe to put it in a deep ocean trench, but the deepest parts of the ocean are now accessible to even wealthy private individuals and the substance, practically priceless to certain parties.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's funny. I've never been describe as a "Boot Licker". I'm well known as having zero respect for AuthoriTIE!
... 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. . . .
Pu239 can run a reactor in space,
Pu239 can run a reactor pretty much anywhere. Well, not so much a reactor as a single large power excursion. Great if you want to, for example, recharge all your Teslas at once, as well as power the entire world's bitcoin mining at the same time.
Building a reactor to "burn" nuclear fuel easily is actually a hell of a lot easier than building what you speak of, which is a nuclear bomb. Nuclear bomb with Pu needs a bunch of precisely-machined plutonium bits made up into a sphere, compressed with very precisely machined and exactly designed explosives. Getting a nuke to go BOOM! isn't actually all that simple, unless you're talking about a primitive Hiroshima-type U-235 "gun."
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
I wasn't thinking of a bomb, just bringing a critical mass together, thus the "power excursion" comment. If you're Russian, you can do it in a cooking pot (I think it was Krasnoyarsk where that one happened).
The US has had a few interesting moments in this respect too. Google "Louis Slotin" and "Harry Daghlian." Basically, using a handheld screwdriver to keep a critical mass of Pu from going critical is a bad idea. If the air starts to glow blue, run!
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
tWhy? Becuase I might get a bad reputation and nobody will hire me? Cry me a fucking river. I'm not a coward, unlike you. I give two shits about what you think of me.
Cool, I'm an imbecile.
You have x tons of some stuff that is dangerous.
So you bury it/burn it/hide it or whatever.
Cost mucho $$$$
Or you build a reactor (mucho $$$$)
Generate XXX PetaWatts of electricity - mucho mucho $$$$!
Then you have to bury/burn/hide what's left over
Cost mucho $$$$
Same result, except that you've gained XXX PetaWatts of electricity...
Do I have to draw you a picture??
Mac
> The Russians have had nuclear powered radar satellites for a long time.
Oh geez, read about them more. They were a disaster, leaking coolant into orbit, failing constantly, crashing in northern Canada, etc.
If you're going to promote reactors in space, Soviet examples are likely not something you want to mention. Kinda like promoting cars with the Trabant.
Lots of people did things in the 1970s we don't do know. Like smoke, put led in gasoline, drive cars without seatbelts, and build nuclear plants that suck flames into inaccessible wiring conduits.
Now if you compare France's projects in the 1970s with today - Flamanville - you come to a rather different conclusion than the one you're suggesting.
> $48B to build a reactor. WTF. That's absurd.
No, $48B MORE than $7.6B.
More absurd.
France has a gas centrifuge cascade at their Georges Besse II uranium enrichment plant. The USA started one and then cancelled the project. It means the French can enrich uranium an order of magnitude cheaper than the USA. For example. They also manufacture MOX fuel. The French nuclear industry has not degraded quite to the point the USA nuclear industry did.