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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, are you talking about creating a thirtyfour ton plutonium ingot? Because that would be a good band name.
You forgot several 1000 tons of armor shielding to make sure it does not make the US uninhabitable if a rocket blows up on launch.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Am I the only one to notice the irony of wanting to have a substance that was created to be the payload of a rocket be the payload of a bigger rocket?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
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,
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...
It is also a metal that corrodes into a fine powder with Oxygen and humidity.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
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
Milk and lemon juice taste very different, though I suppose you can combine them to make paneer. :D
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!
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.