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Science

New Russian method to decommission plutonium 34

Posted by sengan from the swords-to-ploughshares dept.
Getting rid of weapons-grade plutonium is expensive, and there's a lot of it around due to the disarmament treaties. According to Itar-Tass, Russian scientists have found a method to convert it into usable reactor fuel to power existing nuclear power stations.
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New Russian method to decommission plutonium More

New Russian method to decommission plutonium

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  • better than other possibility (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    namely selling the stuff to Iran or firing it at people...

  • you don't need to steal that much Pu... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, you need to steal much less Pu to have creative, harmful uses for it ; in its metallic form, Plutonium is extremely cancerigen.

    Put a few *grams* of plutonium metal powder in the ventilation system of your favourite business tower, and suddenly more than a half of people inside catch (and die from) lightning fast cancers.

    A few kilograms are enough to build an A bomb, this is not sufficient, however : you need to [build|find] initiators, a beryllium(*) shielding (or steal _lots_ of plutonium), etc.

    However, there's the poor man's radiologic bomb, a variation on the "deadly powder" theme. Basically, you put your 750g of plutonium into metallic powder form (maybe metal-oxyde powder is good too) around a classic explosive warhead, on top of your favourite 500km-range missile, and let that device explode on your preferred neighbour's capital city. Sit back, relax, and watch the population suffer and die. (you might want to check the wind's direction before letting the device go off ;-) )
    Fortunately, the radiologic bomb doesn't have the sex-appeal of a "real" A-bomb for third-world countries leaders, and those who tried to play with nukes always preffered to invest ten times more money into stuff which does nice mushrooms and can be seen by every single sismograph in the world rather than a cheap but still quite deadly bomb. But a terrorist group with a clue might really make some of our live much less comfortable.

    (*) Beryllium is actually much more controlled than U or Pu proper, because you need much less in a bomb, but if you can cover your fissile materials with Be you can vastly improve the yield. Even the first Los Alamos device had a Be coating. Basically, what this does is reflecting the neutrons which would otherwise escape the device back into the core, so they get another chance to interact with a fuel atom.
  • We've been able to do this for quite some time. They're called Breeder reactors. They produce Plutonium as a byproduct of a slightly altered reaction. This plutonium can then be used in the reactor for power.

    The next advance in nuclear power will be shrinking the reactors to the point that it wouldn't matter even if they did melt down because they would simply use up all of their own power in this melting. No excess energy.
  • No, I was just commenting that we have had a reactor that could use plutonium as its fuel for a while. I'm not sure why these other breeder reactors aren't used for this same purpose. probably because its too damn expensive to transport the relatively unstable plutonium. People are worried about hijacks, train wrecks, car crashes, terrorist activity, radiation leakage and lots of other things that may or may not be realistic. If they can use these in a standard reactor, though, that is probably very different from the way they are used in a breeder. I just claim what I learned in Physics 101 Energy and the Environment, and that was just a side note.
  • On Sept. 13, 1999 a nuclear disposal dump on the Moon explodes, hurling it out of orbit...You can make it happen!

    Get the Russians to use their heavy lift boosters to send all excess nuclear fuels to the moon!

    ttyl
    Farrell
  • Bah...You all loose Geek Points for not knowing SPACE:1999, that almost horrible series that had the best intra-system space craft (The Eagle) of any TV series or Movie...

    ttyl
    Farrell
  • Posted by The [not so] Little Hacker:

    This is not a reactor that uses weapons grade, it's a way to convert weapons grade into fuel rods for other reactors

  • For those who are not in the US, this seems like a big deal here because it is illegal for power plants to recycle their waste. The reasoning is that if a criminal got into the process they could at some point get weapons grade plutonimun in quanities enoguh to make a bomb. Instead of requireing high security for such plants they are illegal here, and so power companies are asking the goverment for a pit they can dumb the waste in. The US military is not subject to these laws, and so they don't have this waste problem, however anouther law makes it illegal to turn civilan waste into military uses including powering a land based reacter they could run.

    I don't agree with any of the above, but that is the way it is.

  • Your military against the US. Okay just against California. Its the only way to prove yourself.

    But seriously, transporting it makes it a target. Storing makes it a target. Me thinks that people simply want to get there hands on it no matter what.
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • I don't expect those soldiers are badly paid. I would expect the US would make sure of that.


  • I hope you're kidding... imagine one of those booser rockets exploding.. now imagine millions of people/animals/plants dying of radiation poisoning from all the radioactive material that just got scattered all over the upper atmosphere and is now coming down everytime it rains.

  • yeah! (Score:1)

    by diakka ( 2281 )
    Save the rats!
    --
  • Hell, get me 100 Kg of weapons grade uranium.

    Then things are gonna change... Oh, yearh ! ;)
  • Excellent idea! Lets have loads of weapons-grade plutonium trundling through a semi-anarchic country, guarded by underpaid soldiers and travelling to dated and dodgy power stations.And if a little goes missing here and there, well who's going to notice anyway?

    You are, when some idiot decides to hasten the second coming by nuking the major city of his choice.
  • I meant in Russia. But even in Canada, a truckload of prime nuke fuel makes a pretty hot target for a terrorist with ambitions.
  • Talk about a bad idea with a good one. Russia is in a major energy crisis, they need to have good clean mass power.

    But, with Russian standards still way below ours... Do we need another possible Chernobyl?

  • Yes, breeder reactors have been around for some time, and we've been using them a lot here in Canada, and selling them to other countries (such as India) for a while too. Modern-day CANDU reactors can handle:

    • slightly enriched uranium (SEU)
    • recovered uranium (RU), a by-product of conventional reprocessing of spent Light Water Reactor (LWR) fuel
    • mixed oxide (MOX) fuels, which dispose of plutonium from nuclear weapons
    • thorium

    This is what I learned from the Internet, more info at the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited [www.aecl.ca] (AECL) website for any interested. It's interesting actually.


    ~Sentry21~
  • Whatever happened to that idea?
    (A sodium-cooled breeder that could use
    metallic fuel rods - it could eat waste
    products from other reactors, weapons-grade
    Pu, you name it).

    K.
    -
  • ..yeah, when my friends from Institute for Nuclear Physics have not seen salaries since June...
  • The point of the article is *not* that the plutonium will be burned up in reactors (which, of course, it will) but that the Russians have an easy process to convert the plutonium from its existing form (weapon components) to a powder that can be used for reactor fuel production.

    For more information on Pu disposition see: http://www.doe-md.com [doe-md.com]

  • Pu-239 can be used as fuel in standard thermal reactors in the form of mixed oxide (MOX). The fuel is 5-15% Pu-239 by weight depending upon the amount of the other Pu isotopes (240, 241, 242).
  • As far as I recall, the reason here had to do with the transport problems: How sure are you that weapons-grade plutonium will move from A to B without mishap? How willing are you to bet on it?
  • Bernard L. Cohen talks about terrorist scenarios regarding Plutonium in his book "The nuclear energy option : an alternative for the 90s." (Previously published as "Before It's Too Late : A Scientist's Case For Nuclear Energy.")

    -Zoyd

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