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It’s only useful for dirty bomb style weapons that a terrorist might make. You can’t make weapons grade plutonium from it. All plutonium used in US weapons was
by erentz 8y ago
It’s only useful for dirty bomb style weapons that a terrorist might make. You can’t make weapons grade plutonium from it. All plutonium used in US weapons was made in special purpose reactors at Hanford, WA. We made so much of it and have enough stockpiled to build all the bombs we’d ever need that we shut down the production there in 1987.
It may be a useful resource for other types of nuclear plants though.
Ideally we could bury this really deep (as you propose) and forget about it. Or buy out Nevada’s opposition and reopen Yucca.
- cladari 8y agoSpent fuel can be repossessed into weapons grade material and into commercial fuel. Europe, Russia and Japan all reprocessed spent fuel into commercial fuel.
- erentz 8y agoSort of. These reactors produce too much of the wrong isotopes of plutonium to make a good bomb. It’ll turn out to have about 100th the yield or so. But that assumes we’d ever want to give out spent fuel to Europe, Russia, Japan for them to process it for that purpose anyway? And if we did why wouldn’t we just outright give them the pure stuff that we made specifically for the purpose. Reprocessing into fuel for power plants is the only option that could make sense. But my understanding is reprocessing hasn’t ever proved to be economically worthwhile (I may be wrong on that though). Burying this stuff is the best option unless someone can come up with a reactor design that burns up used fuel without reprocessing. (Wasn’t that company Gates backed proposing to do that?)
- owenversteeg 8y ago> All plutonium used in US weapons was made in special purpose reactors at Hanford, WA Do you have a source for that? Wikipedia says "the majority" of the US arsenal, but the source is hidden behind a NYT subscriber paywall (article is from 1987.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#Cold_War_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#Cold_War_expansio...
- HillRat 8y agoDOE also enriched weapons-grade plutonium at the Savannah River (SC) site, built after Hanford and thus somewhat less environmentally catastrophic. It’s still an operating facility, but for tritium, not plutonium.