3 ms·
> Protactinium-233 decays to pure, weapons-grade U-233
by fnord77 7y ago
> Protactinium-233 decays to pure, weapons-grade U-233
- jlhawn 7y agoI thought it was Uranium 235 which was the common weapons material, so I looked up Wikipedia [1]: > ... While it is thus possible to use uranium-233 as the fissile material of a nuclear weapon, speculation[8] aside, there is scant publicly available information on this isotope actually having been weaponized ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- acidburnNSA 7y agoIn the nuclear industry, U-233 is well known as an excellent weapons material [1]. It's simply a matter of its nuclear properties, which are well known. "The fast critical mass of U-233 is almost identical to that for Pu-239 and the spontaneous fission rate is much lower, reducing to negligible levels the problem of a spontaneous fission neutron prematurely initiating the chain reaction -- even in a “gun-type” design such as used for the U-235 Hiroshima bomb (see Table 1)." [1] U-232 and the Proliferation-Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel - http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs09kang.pdf http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs09kang.pdf
- JshWright 7y agoThey're both good options, U-235 is "simpler" to make though.
- baobrien 7y agoU-235 is the only naturally occurring fissile isotope of uranium. In raw uranium out of the ground, it makes up about 0.7%, the rest being U-238. U-233 is also fissile, but only really made in thorium breeder reactors.
- DennisP 7y agoThat's one reason some of the MSR companies are going with uranium fuel. MSRs don't have to be thorium.