4 ms·

With accidents like Chernobyl that vaporized enormous amounts of radioactive material and deposited it all over nearby forests, roads, etc. as I understand they

With accidents like Chernobyl that vaporized enormous amounts of radioactive material and deposited it all over nearby forests, roads, etc. as I understand they sprayed the areas with a sticky tar-like substance to keep dust clouds from kicking up, then brought it bulldozers and removed the top few inches of soil and moved it to a dedicated waste disposal area (packed it up in sandbags and buried it). For a non-critical bomb exploding the bomb material actually has a pretty short half life on the order of a few decades or so I believe, so even if you did nothing at all the debris would naturally decay down to background levels fairly quickly (i.e. it would not be some catastrophic thing that ruins a part of the planet for centuries).

sokoloff 4y ago
Does this imply that we have to constantly re-enrich and replace the warhead materials every few decades as well?
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Yep, all of the nuclear weapons in the world are slowly decaying into obsolescence. They actually used to test fire them underground up until the early 90s to make sure older weapons were still working as expected. But underground weapon testing was banned and as I understand they just rely on computer simulations and non explosive tests to verify the weapons still in the active stockpile are working. I'm not sure what the plans are for making new weapons in a few decades as the current ones decay into uselessness--there's likely some kinda provision in nuclear weapon treaties.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    The US is already rebuilding many of its warheads. The process is ongoing but is estimated to take 30 years or so and cost about $1tn. It will presumably not require actual weapons tests, just component tests and simulations. I would assume that other nuclear-armed nations are doing the same things, if they have the financial resources (not all of them necessarily do.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_weapon_arsenal_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_we...
  - killjoywashere 4y ago
    Indeed, this is actually the motivation for the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore. The accomplishment of demonstrating net-positive fusion was announced with an "atoms for peace" spin, but it really signaled to other nuclear powers we can do quite a bit of R&D without mesoscale detonations.
caf 4y ago
The fission primary of all the bombs in the US arsenal is mostly Pu-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years, and a small but substantial fraction of Pu-240, which has a half-life of 6,500 years. They're both alpha-emitters, but Pu-240 also spontaneously fissions. Spreading a bunch of those around would not be great. You are probably thinking of the tritium neutron trigger, which has a half-life of 12 years and has to be replenished to keep the warhead operational.

sokoloff 4y ago

Does this imply that we have to constantly re-enrich and replace the warhead materials every few decades as well?

qbasic_forever 4y ago
Yep, all of the nuclear weapons in the world are slowly decaying into obsolescence. They actually used to test fire them underground up until the early 90s to make sure older weapons were still working as expected. But underground weapon testing was banned and as I understand they just rely on computer simulations and non explosive tests to verify the weapons still in the active stockpile are working. I'm not sure what the plans are for making new weapons in a few decades as the current ones decay into uselessness--there's likely some kinda provision in nuclear weapon treaties.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  The US is already rebuilding many of its warheads. The process is ongoing but is estimated to take 30 years or so and cost about $1tn. It will presumably not require actual weapons tests, just component tests and simulations. I would assume that other nuclear-armed nations are doing the same things, if they have the financial resources (not all of them necessarily do.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_weapon_arsenal_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_we...
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  Indeed, this is actually the motivation for the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore. The accomplishment of demonstrating net-positive fusion was announced with an "atoms for peace" spin, but it really signaled to other nuclear powers we can do quite a bit of R&D without mesoscale detonations.

caf 4y ago

The fission primary of all the bombs in the US arsenal is mostly Pu-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years, and a small but substantial fraction of Pu-240, which has a half-life of 6,500 years. They're both alpha-emitters, but Pu-240 also spontaneously fissions. Spreading a bunch of those around would not be great. You are probably thinking of the tritium neutron trigger, which has a half-life of 12 years and has to be replenished to keep the warhead operational.