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Ehhh, everyone (relevant) already knows the general process for making highly enriched uranium or Pu-239, and how to make a bomb with it once they get it. The i

Ehhh, everyone (relevant) already knows the general process for making highly enriched uranium or Pu-239, and how to make a bomb with it once they get it. The issue is that actually implementing those things takes a ton of infrastructure, and until relatively recently that infrastructure was extremely visible. As gas centrifuges have replaced gaseous diffusion as the primary method of enrichment, though, the amount of - and visibility of - required infrastructure to refine uranium has decreased dramatically. 20 years ago enriching uranium in a cave would have been incredibly impractical, as the machines were just too large and required too much power. But today... :(

Animats 7y ago
You need a nuclear reactor to supply the neutrons for transmutation into plutonium, so this isn't something you can do at home. That video just shows the preliminary step of making neptunium slugs to be irradiated. The processes are all difficult from a chemical engineering standpoint. Most of the materials involved are toxic or radioactive or corrosive or flammable or several of the above. Enrichment plants are smaller now. They used to be city-sized; now they're the size of a large WalMart.[1] But not garage-sized. Incidentally, there's a huge glut of depleted uranium in uranium hexaflouride solution form. Hundreds of thousands of tons. This is what uranium enrichment plants have left over after they've separated out the good stuff, which is under 1%. There's not enough demand for depleted uranium to run it through the chemical process to get metallic uranium out. Potentially it could be used in breeder reactors, if there were any that worked well. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041.7473604a,875.8466207d,35.00000098y,-0.77948261h,52.75406436t,0r?beta=1 https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041...
- jabl 7y ago
  > You need a nuclear reactor to supply the neutrons for transmutation into plutonium, so this isn't something you can do at home. Sure, but a simple graphite reactor for Pu production, like what most current nuclear weapons states have used, isn't particularly complex. As you mention, the difficult and expensive part is apparently separating the Pu from the rest (PUREX). In the West, those plants go for $20 billion a pop, or about, although a would-be-proliferant could probably make do with something substantially cheaper. AFAICS the current thinking is that thanks to centrifuges, nowadays the easiest path for a rogue state to develop it's own weapon is to use enriched uranium. And yes, there's a lot of DU around. Except for kinetic warheads, counterweights in aircrafts, and such, there's not much use for it. Waiting for breeder reactors to be deployed on a large scale is the plan in practice, I suppose.
  - Animats 7y ago
    ... Thanks to centrifuges, nowadays the easiest path for a rogue state to develop its own weapon is to use enriched uranium. Maybe. South Africa used electromagnetic separation. Slow, but it works for a small number of weapons. Pakistan has both a plutonium and a uranium program, and they've been plugging away at it since the 1970s. North Korea seems to have taken the plutonium route first. So did Israel.

Animats 7y ago

You need a nuclear reactor to supply the neutrons for transmutation into plutonium, so this isn't something you can do at home. That video just shows the preliminary step of making neptunium slugs to be irradiated. The processes are all difficult from a chemical engineering standpoint. Most of the materials involved are toxic or radioactive or corrosive or flammable or several of the above. Enrichment plants are smaller now. They used to be city-sized; now they're the size of a large WalMart.[1] But not garage-sized. Incidentally, there's a huge glut of depleted uranium in uranium hexaflouride solution form. Hundreds of thousands of tons. This is what uranium enrichment plants have left over after they've separated out the good stuff, which is under 1%. There's not enough demand for depleted uranium to run it through the chemical process to get metallic uranium out. Potentially it could be used in breeder reactors, if there were any that worked well. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041.7473604a,875.8466207d,35.00000098y,-0.77948261h,52.75406436t,0r?beta=1 https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041...

jabl 7y ago
> You need a nuclear reactor to supply the neutrons for transmutation into plutonium, so this isn't something you can do at home. Sure, but a simple graphite reactor for Pu production, like what most current nuclear weapons states have used, isn't particularly complex. As you mention, the difficult and expensive part is apparently separating the Pu from the rest (PUREX). In the West, those plants go for $20 billion a pop, or about, although a would-be-proliferant could probably make do with something substantially cheaper. AFAICS the current thinking is that thanks to centrifuges, nowadays the easiest path for a rogue state to develop it's own weapon is to use enriched uranium. And yes, there's a lot of DU around. Except for kinetic warheads, counterweights in aircrafts, and such, there's not much use for it. Waiting for breeder reactors to be deployed on a large scale is the plan in practice, I suppose.
- Animats 7y ago
  ... Thanks to centrifuges, nowadays the easiest path for a rogue state to develop its own weapon is to use enriched uranium. Maybe. South Africa used electromagnetic separation. Slow, but it works for a small number of weapons. Pakistan has both a plutonium and a uranium program, and they've been plugging away at it since the 1970s. North Korea seems to have taken the plutonium route first. So did Israel.