9 ms·

Welding of Plutonium (1958) [pdf]

120 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

perihelions 3y ago
Small bit of background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_plutonium#Stabilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_plutonium#Stabil...
uint8_t 3y ago
"Just prior to welding the plutonium surfaces are cleaned in the inert atmosphere of the welding box to remove oxide and foreign material. If the oxide film is light, it can be removed by wire brushing. If this is not satisfactory, sanding or an abrasive wheel can be used." In case you are wondering what you'd do with tools, consumables, entire workspaces and ductwork contaminated by that kind of dust, well, these folks buried it in a trench on a mesa overlooking the Rio Grande [1]. The dump is large enough to contain the Empire State Building and, by one account, whole machines like forklifts were just pushed right in [2]. No "highly esteemed deed" was commemorated there, indeed. 1: https://n3b-la.com/area-g-tru/ https://n3b-la.com/area-g-tru/ 2: Los Alamos, Hidden Colony, Secret Truths by Chuck Montaño (2015)
- justinator 3y ago
  Reminds me of what they did near me at Rocky Flats - well: before it was raided by the FBI, shut down, cleaned up, an reopened as a nature reserve. e
- ramijames 3y ago
  Every single time I come across information like this, I hate humanity just a little bit more.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Near my hometown, an army train depot closed in the 60s. I imagine some sergeant tasked with making shit go away just dumped barrels of TCE and burned various materials in pits. Today, a plume is contaminating groundwater at quite a distance.
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      When I think of Hunters Point I think of Gommer Pyle pouring a bucket of expired radium paint into a hole dug in the base commanders flower garden.
    - dboreham 3y ago
      I think all railroad maintenance facilities have similar groundwater problems.
  - konstmonst 3y ago
    Why hate yourself? Violence is a part that makes us human. Without it we are not human If we will not learn to control it, we will die. But in the end everything does. Also, being prepared is important. Si vis pacem, parabellum.
    - Ma8ee 3y ago
      Most of us manages very well not being violent, and have no desires or urges to be violent. Aren’t we humans then?
      - konstmonst 3y ago
        It is not what I said. I meant violence is part of being Human. If you do not use it does not mean that you do not have it. It is not about blindly applying it. It is not only a negative thing, it is an evolutionary advantage versus species which is not violent. It is just another tool of enforcing you will over the will of others. For example some people have to obey the law because of a threat of violence of the state. I mean if you remove all our societal conditioning and learning, it all boils down to violence, like it was for first humans. I do not advocate violence, I think hating humanity for it is not rational. Clauzewitz said: "War is the continuation of policy with other means". So essentially violence is the continuation of policy when you can not achieve your goals by other means. This is just my view on it, take it or leave it.
      - konstmonst 3y ago
        I just had another thought about this: without violence - you cannot have peace. Sure, you can threaten violence if peace is not kept, but if you are not prepared to use violence to uphold your threat - your threat is useless. I think Putin is a great example for this. He showed us, that violence is actually a valid tool to achieve your goals nowadays. I mean sure I and people like me don't like violence but just because we don't, doesn't mean others somewhere else also don't and won't use it. We cannot avoid being confronted with violence at least at some points in society. We need to understand that it is also part of us and be able to deal with it or channel it. When I read the definition of violence I found on google: "behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something." Is there really any human who at least in some way didn't somehow use force to hurt someone, even as a kid? Don't we actually nurture application of violence in soldiers? I just have a feeling, that there is some insight here, that violence is not all that useless and maybe is a trait that made humans at least in part successful. OK, it make bring our downfall through nuclear war, but what other catastrophes wouldn't? We will fall down one way or another if we will not prepare. Also, what is a benchmark for success here? Is humanity that survived 300,000 years better than the one that survived 400,000 and who will be there to measure it?
  - comboy 3y ago
    Plutonium half life is like 90 years. It wouldn't get to the top 10,000 list of bad things we did in the last 100 years.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      24000 years actually
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium The main reason people believe a nuclear waste dump needs to last a stupendously long time is because of the long lifetime of Plutonium 239 and some related actinides. Reactors with a fast neutron spectrum could consume those actinides, the remaining waste becomes less radioactive than the original uranium in 1000 years which is within the time that we've had buildings last, social structures last, etc. In that scenario you have little fear that carefully buried waste incorporated in glass will leach out. If you are looking 100,000 years down the road like you are with Yucca Mountain it is likely the facility has long been flooded and soluble Uranium will migrate in the direction of Death Valley whereas the Plutonium will not migrate because it is insoluble in water. I think it is sublime that the Pu239 decay chain goes through U235 which retains the nuclear fuel value. In the "once-through" fuel cycle almost all of the waste buried is unburned U and Pu fuel, the fast reactor cycle could consume all of that starting with the waste that is cooling out now.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      That is the Pu238 isotope that is used in thermoelectric generators. Most of the plutonium produced in nuclear reactors is Pu239. This is the isotope that is useful as nuclear fuel and for nuclear bombs. As another poster has already written, it has a half-life of 24 thousand years, so there is no chance to get rid of it easily, unless it is recovered and used as fuel. There exists also the Pu244 isotope, with a half-life of 80 million years. This isotope is produced only in negligible amounts in nuclear reactors, but it is produced in supernova explosions, so the Solar System and the Earth had contained plutonium besides uranium and thorium in the beginning, during the first few hundred million years of their history, but the plutonium has decayed until now.
- a_vanderbilt 3y ago
  The creation of contaminated tooling continues at the Pantex plant in the Texas panhandle. The plutonium pits for the US nuclear arsenal are serviced there. When cores get recycled a ton of nuclear-contaminated waste gets created. Oil, lathes, air filters, etc. The existence of the plant makes the recent musings on secession by the Texas legislature a hilarious thought.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
    I don't understand the connection there
    - TFortunato 3y ago
      I think they are stating the odds of the federal government actually allowing secession to go through would be...minimal at best, given these assets in the state.
      - a_vanderbilt 3y ago
        Bingo. 100-200 physics packages go through the facility annually, and if you think Uncle Sam got mad when someone touched his boats, try touching his nukes.
      - a_gnostic 3y ago
        Nothing a treaty won't solve. Access to West Berlin through the Iron Curtain was a thing.
        samus 3y ago
        West Berlin was of minimal strategic importance though. It had highly symbolic value of course.
        buildsjets 3y ago
        First, we take Manhattan. Then, we take Berlin.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Also look into the glovebox and exhaust duct fires at Rocky Flatts. There is a famous news clip where the DOE representative is denying there is a fire on live TV with a big fire visible behind them. It's also the only time one federal agency (FBI) raided another (DOE). They also had a bunch of the kind of radioactive waste your talking about sitting in 50 gallon oil drums that just rusted away in the open air.
txnf 3y ago
Most of these bizarre properties can be traced to the mixed valent character of plutonium - that is the electrons in the partially filled 5f shell of the plutonium atom hybridize in the solid phase with the valence electrons, and thus for some properties they are valence like and others they are core like. This is quite similar to some lanthanide (4f) elements like cerium, which also show strange variety of allotropes. The mixed valent character causes plutonium to have a variety of exotic physics effects, completely unrelated to it's most notorious use in nuclear weapons. Examples of these include heavy fermion metals, novel superconductivity, etc..
- khuey 3y ago
  It would be extremely funny if the room-temperature superconductor we're searching for is some plutonium-based compound or alloy.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mantle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mantle for a an unusual property of Thorium which must have to with having so many electrons.
    - perihelions 3y ago
      Is it specifically the emissivity that's so unusual and makes it the preferred material? I don't know that "low emissivity in infrared + high emissivity in visible" is a rare property—I recall reading about space satellite thermal engineering and seeing long lists of common materials sorted by visible/infrared emissivity ratios [0]. And there are a lot of them, in every category. I suspect the key thing is ThO2 is a super-refractory with a melting point of (approximately—these are hard to measure!) 3,350° C [1]. (About the same as the tungsten filaments in the old-school type of lightbulbs—something with pretty similar considerations). I suspect "things that maintian structural integrity in hot gas flame" is really the key discriminator here, the rare property that prunes out most candidates. I'm not any sort of expert on this, to make very clear! Just a curious geek. [0] (That's basically a proxy for the radiative equilibrium temperature in space: visible emissivity measuring absorption of sunlight, infrared emissivity measuring emission of waste heat. (To those unfamiliar, absorption and emission are exactly the same, at a specified wavelength: the physics is reversible). ThO2 for example, you'd expect would get extremely hot in space). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_dioxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_dioxide
colordrops 3y ago
Unless I missed it the PDF doesn't explain why you would want to weld plutonium.
- curtis3389 3y ago
  I suppose you would need to weld two hemispheres of plutonium together to make the hollow pit[1] for an implosion device. Or it could be safer to work on smaller pieces and then weld them together. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    My guess is the same: that to add structural integrity during the first phase of implosion, so as to guide the implosion process better (rather than having a piece of the pit fly out, say), you'd want to weld the pieces with little plutonium columns between them. I doubt that's how modern bombs work.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  This seems like the best possible place for me to repeat one of my favorite quotes about technologists: Never ask a geek, "why?", just nod your head and back away slowly.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    Sure, but I think the people that published this were doing the exact opposite of geeking out and had the most deadly serious of intentions with the work.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
posnet 3y ago
What do you mean I can't wear my lucky beryllium welding gloves?
- hinkley 3y ago
  Not so lucky.
- beloch 3y ago
  If what you're working on is close enough to a critical mass, just your body might do. Otto Frisch nearly fried himself by standing too close to a stack of bars when trying to determine the critical mass for enriched uranium. His own body was reflecting neutrons back at the stack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Robert_Frisch#Manhattan_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Robert_Frisch#Manhattan_P...
anon-sre-srm 3y ago
Unfortunately, no. It requires something with a little more kick.
- buildsjets 3y ago
  Take a hike, you shady used pinball machine parts hustler. :)
euroderf 3y ago
Why the heck are we welding plutonium ?
- mike256 3y ago
  Because some people think the world needs nuclear weapons :-(
  - thsksbd 3y ago
    We conceded that part. The question is: What about nuclear weapons needs welding?
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      According to https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-science/2021-winter/pit-production-explained/ https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-sci... Pieces of cast plutonium are then welded together to form a pit Note if the world (ex. Russia) ever gets interested in the fast breeder reactor, or even if we try to get the absolute most out of the LWR https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurean-advanced-fuel-for-lwr-and-smr-designs-11283875/ https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurean-advanced-fuel... there may be revived interest in casting fuel elements out of mixed U, Pu and Zr like so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEfhx5ovuYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEfhx5ovuYk a technology which has been quietly used in marine nuclear reactors for years. This competes with the oxide fuels ordinarily used in civil LWRs and that the French have developed to make mixed-oxide (part U, part Pu) fuels. Problem with that is that quality MOX fuel is made of U and Pu alloyed in a high-energy ball mill but that makes nano particles that are highly effective at getting in your lungs and causing cancer. That is a problem with casting too, but making MOX fuel means you need to pick up fuel pellets with gloves and carefully stuff them in a tube whereas you don’t have to get anywhere near a cast fuel rod.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- danbruc 3y ago
EnigmaFlare 3y ago
Looks like this is the welder they used, for anyone wanted to try it at home: https://hgrinc.com/productDetail/Welding/Used--Welder/02201780005/ https://hgrinc.com/productDetail/Welding/Used--Welder/022017...
- Someone 3y ago
  If you want to try it at home, read this first: https://myaccount.ans.org/s/product-details?id=a1B5f000003nSMqEAM https://myaccount.ans.org/s/product-details?id=a1B5f000003nS... “Topics span the history of the discovery of plutonium, properties of plutonium isotopes, chemistry and properties of plutonium metal and alloys, plutonium aging, thermodynamic trends of plutonium, plutonium in nuclear fuels, waste forms, and heat sources, packaging, storing, and transportation of plutonium, nuclear security and safeguards, and techniques for working with plutonium.” I guess chances are that ordering that product puts you on a few lists.

120 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

Small bit of background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_plutonium#Stabilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_plutonium#Stabil...

uint8_t 3y ago

"Just prior to welding the plutonium surfaces are cleaned in the inert atmosphere of the welding box to remove oxide and foreign material. If the oxide film is light, it can be removed by wire brushing. If this is not satisfactory, sanding or an abrasive wheel can be used." In case you are wondering what you'd do with tools, consumables, entire workspaces and ductwork contaminated by that kind of dust, well, these folks buried it in a trench on a mesa overlooking the Rio Grande [1]. The dump is large enough to contain the Empire State Building and, by one account, whole machines like forklifts were just pushed right in [2]. No "highly esteemed deed" was commemorated there, indeed. 1: https://n3b-la.com/area-g-tru/ https://n3b-la.com/area-g-tru/ 2: Los Alamos, Hidden Colony, Secret Truths by Chuck Montaño (2015)

justinator 3y ago
Reminds me of what they did near me at Rocky Flats - well: before it was raided by the FBI, shut down, cleaned up, an reopened as a nature reserve. e
ramijames 3y ago
Every single time I come across information like this, I hate humanity just a little bit more.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Near my hometown, an army train depot closed in the 60s. I imagine some sergeant tasked with making shit go away just dumped barrels of TCE and burned various materials in pits. Today, a plume is contaminating groundwater at quite a distance.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    When I think of Hunters Point I think of Gommer Pyle pouring a bucket of expired radium paint into a hole dug in the base commanders flower garden.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    I think all railroad maintenance facilities have similar groundwater problems.
- konstmonst 3y ago
  Why hate yourself? Violence is a part that makes us human. Without it we are not human If we will not learn to control it, we will die. But in the end everything does. Also, being prepared is important. Si vis pacem, parabellum.
  - Ma8ee 3y ago
    Most of us manages very well not being violent, and have no desires or urges to be violent. Aren’t we humans then?
    - konstmonst 3y ago
      It is not what I said. I meant violence is part of being Human. If you do not use it does not mean that you do not have it. It is not about blindly applying it. It is not only a negative thing, it is an evolutionary advantage versus species which is not violent. It is just another tool of enforcing you will over the will of others. For example some people have to obey the law because of a threat of violence of the state. I mean if you remove all our societal conditioning and learning, it all boils down to violence, like it was for first humans. I do not advocate violence, I think hating humanity for it is not rational. Clauzewitz said: "War is the continuation of policy with other means". So essentially violence is the continuation of policy when you can not achieve your goals by other means. This is just my view on it, take it or leave it.
    - konstmonst 3y ago
      I just had another thought about this: without violence - you cannot have peace. Sure, you can threaten violence if peace is not kept, but if you are not prepared to use violence to uphold your threat - your threat is useless. I think Putin is a great example for this. He showed us, that violence is actually a valid tool to achieve your goals nowadays. I mean sure I and people like me don't like violence but just because we don't, doesn't mean others somewhere else also don't and won't use it. We cannot avoid being confronted with violence at least at some points in society. We need to understand that it is also part of us and be able to deal with it or channel it. When I read the definition of violence I found on google: "behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something." Is there really any human who at least in some way didn't somehow use force to hurt someone, even as a kid? Don't we actually nurture application of violence in soldiers? I just have a feeling, that there is some insight here, that violence is not all that useless and maybe is a trait that made humans at least in part successful. OK, it make bring our downfall through nuclear war, but what other catastrophes wouldn't? We will fall down one way or another if we will not prepare. Also, what is a benchmark for success here? Is humanity that survived 300,000 years better than the one that survived 400,000 and who will be there to measure it?
- comboy 3y ago
  Plutonium half life is like 90 years. It wouldn't get to the top 10,000 list of bad things we did in the last 100 years.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    24000 years actually
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium The main reason people believe a nuclear waste dump needs to last a stupendously long time is because of the long lifetime of Plutonium 239 and some related actinides. Reactors with a fast neutron spectrum could consume those actinides, the remaining waste becomes less radioactive than the original uranium in 1000 years which is within the time that we've had buildings last, social structures last, etc. In that scenario you have little fear that carefully buried waste incorporated in glass will leach out. If you are looking 100,000 years down the road like you are with Yucca Mountain it is likely the facility has long been flooded and soluble Uranium will migrate in the direction of Death Valley whereas the Plutonium will not migrate because it is insoluble in water. I think it is sublime that the Pu239 decay chain goes through U235 which retains the nuclear fuel value. In the "once-through" fuel cycle almost all of the waste buried is unburned U and Pu fuel, the fast reactor cycle could consume all of that starting with the waste that is cooling out now.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    That is the Pu238 isotope that is used in thermoelectric generators. Most of the plutonium produced in nuclear reactors is Pu239. This is the isotope that is useful as nuclear fuel and for nuclear bombs. As another poster has already written, it has a half-life of 24 thousand years, so there is no chance to get rid of it easily, unless it is recovered and used as fuel. There exists also the Pu244 isotope, with a half-life of 80 million years. This isotope is produced only in negligible amounts in nuclear reactors, but it is produced in supernova explosions, so the Solar System and the Earth had contained plutonium besides uranium and thorium in the beginning, during the first few hundred million years of their history, but the plutonium has decayed until now.
a_vanderbilt 3y ago
The creation of contaminated tooling continues at the Pantex plant in the Texas panhandle. The plutonium pits for the US nuclear arsenal are serviced there. When cores get recycled a ton of nuclear-contaminated waste gets created. Oil, lathes, air filters, etc. The existence of the plant makes the recent musings on secession by the Texas legislature a hilarious thought.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
  I don't understand the connection there
  - TFortunato 3y ago
    I think they are stating the odds of the federal government actually allowing secession to go through would be...minimal at best, given these assets in the state.
    - a_vanderbilt 3y ago
      Bingo. 100-200 physics packages go through the facility annually, and if you think Uncle Sam got mad when someone touched his boats, try touching his nukes.
    - a_gnostic 3y ago
      Nothing a treaty won't solve. Access to West Berlin through the Iron Curtain was a thing.
      - samus 3y ago
        West Berlin was of minimal strategic importance though. It had highly symbolic value of course.
        buildsjets 3y ago
        First, we take Manhattan. Then, we take Berlin.
iancmceachern 3y ago
Also look into the glovebox and exhaust duct fires at Rocky Flatts. There is a famous news clip where the DOE representative is denying there is a fire on live TV with a big fire visible behind them. It's also the only time one federal agency (FBI) raided another (DOE). They also had a bunch of the kind of radioactive waste your talking about sitting in 50 gallon oil drums that just rusted away in the open air.

txnf 3y ago

Most of these bizarre properties can be traced to the mixed valent character of plutonium - that is the electrons in the partially filled 5f shell of the plutonium atom hybridize in the solid phase with the valence electrons, and thus for some properties they are valence like and others they are core like. This is quite similar to some lanthanide (4f) elements like cerium, which also show strange variety of allotropes. The mixed valent character causes plutonium to have a variety of exotic physics effects, completely unrelated to it's most notorious use in nuclear weapons. Examples of these include heavy fermion metals, novel superconductivity, etc..

khuey 3y ago
It would be extremely funny if the room-temperature superconductor we're searching for is some plutonium-based compound or alloy.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mantle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mantle for a an unusual property of Thorium which must have to with having so many electrons.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    Is it specifically the emissivity that's so unusual and makes it the preferred material? I don't know that "low emissivity in infrared + high emissivity in visible" is a rare property—I recall reading about space satellite thermal engineering and seeing long lists of common materials sorted by visible/infrared emissivity ratios [0]. And there are a lot of them, in every category. I suspect the key thing is ThO2 is a super-refractory with a melting point of (approximately—these are hard to measure!) 3,350° C [1]. (About the same as the tungsten filaments in the old-school type of lightbulbs—something with pretty similar considerations). I suspect "things that maintian structural integrity in hot gas flame" is really the key discriminator here, the rare property that prunes out most candidates. I'm not any sort of expert on this, to make very clear! Just a curious geek. [0] (That's basically a proxy for the radiative equilibrium temperature in space: visible emissivity measuring absorption of sunlight, infrared emissivity measuring emission of waste heat. (To those unfamiliar, absorption and emission are exactly the same, at a specified wavelength: the physics is reversible). ThO2 for example, you'd expect would get extremely hot in space). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_dioxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_dioxide

colordrops 3y ago

Unless I missed it the PDF doesn't explain why you would want to weld plutonium.

curtis3389 3y ago
I suppose you would need to weld two hemispheres of plutonium together to make the hollow pit[1] for an implosion device. Or it could be safer to work on smaller pieces and then weld them together. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)
- cryptonector 3y ago
  My guess is the same: that to add structural integrity during the first phase of implosion, so as to guide the implosion process better (rather than having a piece of the pit fly out, say), you'd want to weld the pieces with little plutonium columns between them. I doubt that's how modern bombs work.
cratermoon 3y ago
This seems like the best possible place for me to repeat one of my favorite quotes about technologists: Never ask a geek, "why?", just nod your head and back away slowly.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Sure, but I think the people that published this were doing the exact opposite of geeking out and had the most deadly serious of intentions with the work.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

posnet 3y ago

What do you mean I can't wear my lucky beryllium welding gloves?

hinkley 3y ago
Not so lucky.
beloch 3y ago
If what you're working on is close enough to a critical mass, just your body might do. Otto Frisch nearly fried himself by standing too close to a stack of bars when trying to determine the critical mass for enriched uranium. His own body was reflecting neutrons back at the stack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Robert_Frisch#Manhattan_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Robert_Frisch#Manhattan_P...

anon-sre-srm 3y ago

Unfortunately, no. It requires something with a little more kick.

buildsjets 3y ago
Take a hike, you shady used pinball machine parts hustler. :)

euroderf 3y ago

Why the heck are we welding plutonium ?

mike256 3y ago
Because some people think the world needs nuclear weapons :-(
- thsksbd 3y ago
  We conceded that part. The question is: What about nuclear weapons needs welding?
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    According to https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-science/2021-winter/pit-production-explained/ https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-sci... Pieces of cast plutonium are then welded together to form a pit Note if the world (ex. Russia) ever gets interested in the fast breeder reactor, or even if we try to get the absolute most out of the LWR https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurean-advanced-fuel-for-lwr-and-smr-designs-11283875/ https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurean-advanced-fuel... there may be revived interest in casting fuel elements out of mixed U, Pu and Zr like so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEfhx5ovuYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEfhx5ovuYk a technology which has been quietly used in marine nuclear reactors for years. This competes with the oxide fuels ordinarily used in civil LWRs and that the French have developed to make mixed-oxide (part U, part Pu) fuels. Problem with that is that quality MOX fuel is made of U and Pu alloyed in a high-energy ball mill but that makes nano particles that are highly effective at getting in your lungs and causing cancer. That is a problem with casting too, but making MOX fuel means you need to pick up fuel pellets with gloves and carefully stuff them in a tube whereas you don’t have to get anywhere near a cast fuel rod.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
danbruc 3y ago

EnigmaFlare 3y ago

Looks like this is the welder they used, for anyone wanted to try it at home: https://hgrinc.com/productDetail/Welding/Used--Welder/02201780005/ https://hgrinc.com/productDetail/Welding/Used--Welder/022017...

Someone 3y ago
If you want to try it at home, read this first: https://myaccount.ans.org/s/product-details?id=a1B5f000003nSMqEAM https://myaccount.ans.org/s/product-details?id=a1B5f000003nS... “Topics span the history of the discovery of plutonium, properties of plutonium isotopes, chemistry and properties of plutonium metal and alloys, plutonium aging, thermodynamic trends of plutonium, plutonium in nuclear fuels, waste forms, and heat sources, packaging, storing, and transportation of plutonium, nuclear security and safeguards, and techniques for working with plutonium.” I guess chances are that ordering that product puts you on a few lists.