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Inspections, subcritical testing, and computer simulation. The Russian solution is much simpler: when their bombs reach their shelf life, they're recycled into
by gamble 16y ago
Inspections, subcritical testing, and computer simulation.
The Russian solution is much simpler: when their bombs reach their shelf life, they're recycled into new weapons. Like the Soyuz versus the Space Shuttle, it's a lot easier to just rebuild a complex system then to predict how it will age. Of course, it does have the tiny drawback of generating enormous amounts of highly toxic waste, but in Mother Russia you can simply dump the waste in a lake.
- kijuhygtyujikol 16y agoRecycling a nuke doesn't create much waste. The main components of a nuke are the fissionable material = reused as is (plutonium has a rather long shelf-life), the chemical explosive = reused ( a lot of the explosive used in gulf-war-1 was WW11 surplus stuff, baritol and compB explosives can be remelted and recast continually), and possibly a neutron trigger which does decay - but into a less radioactive isotope. The only waste is irradiated casings, but since Pu isn't really that radioactive it's a lot less of a problem than a used cancer therapy machine.