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The UK had 26 of these Magnox reactors for electricity production. These nuclear reactors were coming out of military technology and some of them were built and
by lispm 9y ago
The UK had 26 of these Magnox reactors for electricity production. These nuclear reactors were coming out of military technology and some of them were built and operated for dual use: Plutonium production and energy production.
The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
- Turing_Machine 9y agoThe UK has about 200 warheads. The US has almost 7,000. The US has never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium, because they simply aren't well-suited for the purpose.
- Retric 9y ago>never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj...
- valuearb 9y agoHow did west valley produce power? Your link is unclear.
- Retric 9y agoNo, it simply reprocessed spent nuclear fuel. It was not economically useful to do so, but we only really learned that by trying.
- DrScump 9y agoI think it is true (in the USA) but rather meaningless. I don't think we want commercial entities producing plutonium unsupervised by the military.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoThat was essentially a demonstration plant. Note that it only ran for six years, only produced 1,926 kg of plutonium over its entire lifespan, and was shut down because producing plutonium from spent fuel from commercial power reactors proved to be uneconomic. 2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.