Highly Enriched Uranium In Chile: Proliferation Danger or Red Herring?
April 9th, 2010
|
| Share |
Chile hands US weapons-grade uranium
SANTIAGO – With United States President Barack Obama shifting his nuclear non-proliferation strategy to rogue states and terrorists, Chile has become an example of how small countries help make the world safer.Vast amounts of highly enriched uranium (HEU) are being stored in relatively unsecured locations globally. Just 25kg of it – the size of a grapefruit – could devastate an entire city if detonated.
At a nonproliferation summit next Monday in Washington, Mr Obama will encourage leaders from 47 countries to work with the US to secure and remove HEU from reactors. Chile did so last month, giving 18kg of HEU from Santiago reactors to the US.
Mr Obama has promised to lead a global effort to recover all of this material within four years.
The US has helped convert or verified the shut down of 67 reactors in 32 countries from HEU to low-enriched uranium that is much harder to weaponise. It also has secured HEU supplies more than 750 vulnerable buildings and removed 2,691kg of weapons-grade nuclear material for safer storage. AP
This news story has been making the rounds and getting a lot of attention. Some press outlets are making quite a big deal about it, such as Time Magazine which ran a story entitled Bomb Chasers: Rescuing a Potential Nuke from the Chile Quake. You can view photos of the uranium removal on the NNSA Flickr site.
This sure sounds like a big step forward toward a safer world where terrorists won’t be able to raid a research reactor for material ton use in a bomb, but is it really? Lets take a closer look.
What is highly enriched uranium:
There is some confusion as to exactly what the term “highly enriched uranium” means, and this has in and of itself been used by politicians to gain support for conversion of reactors to lower enrichment and to scare the public into believing that any material that is considered “highly enriched” is the same as “weapons grade.” In fact, any uranium which is enriched beyond 20% U-235 and/or U-233 is considered to be “highly enriched.” This is considerably less than the level required for a nuclear weapon.
Fission-based weapons generally use uranium that has been enriched to well beyond 85% Bellow about 80%, gun triggered weapons simply will not work, and even advanced implosion-based weapons would be unable to function at levels much lower. Somewhere around 75% is likely the limit for what even the best designs could use for uranium. All known uranium-based nuclear weapons use at least 85% enriched uranium while modern weapons use uranium enriched to more than 90%.
By some definitions, all highly enriched uranium is considered to be “weapons usable.” This definition is deceptive, because it implies that such uranium could be used alone to build a nuclear weapon. This is not the case. However, 20-50% enriched uranium can be used in weapons as an effective secondary initiator or “spark plug” in a multistage H-bomb. Of course, for this to happen, there already needs to be a primary composed of weapons grade uranium or plutonium.
The definition and the confusion it has caused may be attributed to the context under which it was originally used. During the cold war, when the United States or Soviet Union produced uranium of an enrichment level bellow 20%, it was understood that the material had no potential to be used for weapons purposes (except perhaps as the final tamper stage of an H-bomb, which any uranium can be used for) without additional enrichment. However, uranium enriched beyond 20% had the distinct possibility of being incorporated into weapons to increase their power and build larger H-bombs, even if it, in and of itself was not usable as the primary fission fuel. At the time, it went without saying that the US and Soviet Union had plenty of weapons grade material and no shortage of primaries to begin with.
Though outdated, the definition has proven to be great for politicians who want to scare the public and make them believe that they are dealing with a highly dangerous material.
Use of high enrichment uranium in research reactors:
Early research reactors, especially those which were built under the US “Atoms for Peace” program commonly used highly enriched uranium, with many approaching weapons grade uranium levels. In general, the amount of material in the core was not enough to build a bomb from, but the use of HEU had numerous advantages for operating the reactor. For one thing, it offered a very long core lifespan, allowing for research institutions to use the reactor for years on end without having to worry about shutting down the reactor to refuel. The highly enriched fuel also produced a smaller volume of spent fuel and a more uniform neutron flux over the life of the reactor.
HEU fuel allowed cores to be smaller and produce very high neutron economy. This is vital in a research reactor, because the reactor is designed to produce excess neutrons for use in irradiation of experiments. Such high fluxes can be easily achieved with highly enriched uranium.
The use of HEU also allows for the recovery of high purity fission-product isotopes from the fuel. For some isotopes, highly enriched uranium is the only feasible means of production. While most research reactors no longer run on highly enriched uranium, HEU targets are still used to product isotopes such as molybdenum-99.
In the 1970’s political concerns resulted in a great deal of effort to convert research reactors to run on low enrichment uranium. Doing so often meant redesigning the cores of reactors that had run on HEU and almost always resulted in a decrease in performance. In many cases, the HEU cores of reactors built in the 1950’s and 1960’s still had many years of life in them, but they were replaced anyway because of the politics that made nuclear fears more important than reality.
While the idea of a terrorist or rogue nation stealing uranium from a research reactor might make for a good James Bond movie, it’s not a very realistic concern, especially after the fuel has been irradiated for any period of time. Once the fuel has been used for a few years it becomes unusable for weapons much of the U-235 has been fissioned away, leaving highly radioactive fission byproducts. The fuel is difficult to handle and nearly impossible to transport without special containers and equipment. Given enough time, up to 7% of the U-235 will have become U-236, a non-fissile isotope which further reduces the reactivity of the fuel.
Therefore, while the core may have material that could, at least in theory, be used to construct a nuclear weapon, this is not the case after it has been run for any length of time, and by the time the core has reached 50% of its lifespan, it is far beyond usable for any nuclear weapon.
What you need to build a uranium-based nuclear bomb:
Building a “simple, crude gun-triggered” nuclear bomb is not nearly as simple and crude as you might think. By comparison to modern nuclear weapons, a bomb like Little Boy may be crude and simple, but compared to anything a lay person is likely to build it’s pretty damn complicated.
Even the Little Boy bomb was a lot more complex than is commonly believed. The weapon used two pieces of uranium, with one fired into the other to create a critical mass of uranium. This is a technique that is very inefficient and will only work with uranium – it won’t work at all with plutonium. However, the actual weapon, contrary to popular belief, did not fire a small uranium slug into a larger mass of uranium. Instead, it fired a large piece of uranium into a smaller insert. This was necessary to achieve critical mass while keeping the weapon from pre-initiating.
The larger of the two piece of uranium had to be kept away from the polonium-beryllium neutron generator until the last moment before detonation. It also had to be kept outside of the tungsten carbide neutron reflector that helped produce the super-critical reaction. Furthermore, the larger piece of uranium had to be larger than a single critical mass to make the bomb reach supercriticality fast enough. In order to do this, the uranium was fabricated into a cylindrical shape with a hole through the center. This geometry kept the uranium from achieving a chain reaction.
When the bomb was finally detonated, the mass of uranium was rapidly inserted into the neutron reflector, where it joined a smaller piece of uranium. A neutron source assured the mass had plenty of neutrons to start the reaction. The whole thing had to come together very rapidly and with extreme precision. Even the slightest miscalculation could cause the bomb to fail or a criticality accident to occur when it was being fabricated.
Though simple by nuclear weapon standards, a first-generation gun triggered device requires extremely precise measurement and machining of the uranium components. Uranium is a notoriously difficult metal to machine and work with, and any error could cause the bomb to fail to detonate or could result in a criticality accident before the weapon is even complete.
Could a terrorist group ever pull this off? Unlikely. Perhaps with a handful of physicists on their staff and a million dollars or so to spend on the project, but even then, it’s far from a sure thing. Before this could ever happen, they’d need to get the weapons grade uranium and enough of it to make the bomb. The Mk-1 Little Boy bomb is about as simple as nuclear weapons get, but it’s still a complicated device whose inner workings still are partially classified.
Assuming the uranium used is nearly 100% pure U-235, the minimum critical mass for a bare sphere required is going to be 52 kilograms (115 lbs) for a basic sphere of material. This amount may be reduced somewhat by the use of advanced nuclear weapon designs features like neutron reflectors, neutron generators or boosting, but this has its limits. By some estimates, a weapon with a very thick, reflective tamper and a highly advanced assembly could use as little as 15 kilograms of U-235, but this seems a bit extreme, and almost certainly only applies to highly sophisticated weapons with nearly 100% “super grade” U-235. First generation nuclear weapons like the Little Boy bomb needed at least 50 kg, with Little Boy containing a total of 65 kilograms.
Conversely, the use of lower grades of uranium is going to result in a higher minimum critical mass. If the uranium is only 90 or 85% uranium-235, a weapon is going to need more of it, and even with the use of advanced design features, anything much less than that is not going to work at all.
One reason why most modern nuclear weapons use plutonium as the primary fuel is that it can create a weapon with much smaller critical mass. A plutonium weapon only needs only 22 kilograms of pu-239 to achieve critical mass.
Statements that claim that only 25 kilograms of uranium are required and that the core need only be “About the size of a grapefruit” are not accurate. “About the size of a grapefruit” could describe the amount of plutonium needed for a modern weapon, but a uranium based weapon would need more material. 25 kilograms of uranium might be enough to produce a small but significant nuclear reaction in a highly efficient, boosted, implosion-triggered weapon, but it’s not nearly enough for a basic fission weapon.
Reactors in Chile:
RECH-1 – A 5 MWt pool-type research reactor, began operation in 1974.
RECH-2 – A 2 MWt pool-type reactor, began operation in 1977, refurbished to present configuration in 1989. (RECH-2 has a design capability of 10 MWt, but is licensed to run at 2 MWt)
Although RECH-2 is officially considered to be operational, it has not been online in many years and is currently in cold shutdown with no fuel in the core. Both of these reactors were originally provided by the Soviet Union. The reactors are located in Santiago and operated by the Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear.
Both of these reactors were initially designed to use highly enriched uranium at about 80-90% uranium-235. Beginning in 1979, the IAEA and other international entities began to pressure Chile to convert the two reactors to run exclusively on low enrichment uranium. Initial studies of the RECH-1 reactor indicated that conversion to low enrichment uranium would not be feasible. However, conversion to 45% U-235 fuel was considered to be a possibility. Although 45% is nowhere near the level of enrichment needed for a nuclear weapon primary, it is considered to be “Highly Enriched Uranium” by most definitions.
Although the original reactor cores elements were not quite due for replacement, the conversion of the RECH-1 reactor to 45% U-235 began in 1981. The fuel was acquired by agreement with the United Kingdom. Work on converting the reactor to 45% U-235 was completed in 1989 when RECH-1 achieved its first criticality using only 45% enriched uranium. Conversion to 45% U-235 operation required modification of the reactor, with an increase in the number of core fuel elements and a decrease in the performance of the reactor. From 1989 to 1998, the RECH-1 reactor operated using a mixed core containing 45% enriched fuel elements as well as some of the original 80% fuel elements. By 1998, however, all of the 80% enriched HEU had been exhausted and was removed from the core.
The RECH-2 reactor, although licensed for operation is currently shutdown. The reactor operated up to 1986 using a combination of 90% and 45% enriched uranium. Beginning in 1986 the reactor was shut down for a major modification of the core. Of the 31 original fuel assemblies, it was determined that two were damaged beyond repair. The reactor was brought online again in 1989, but only for a short period of time. Problems with the conversion of RECH-2 to use lower enrichment fuel lead to the program being suspended. Any remaining fuel in RECH-2 was removed and transferred to RECH-1 at this time.
Although RECH-2 remains licensed for operation, it has not been online since 1989 and currently no long term decisions have been made as to its future. Use of the reactor in the future hinges on whether it can be converted to use exclusively low enrichment uranium, which would likely require a complete redesign of the reactor core and support systems.
The conversion of the single operational reactor in Chile was not enough to get the IAEA or international community off Chile’s back over the use of “highly enriched fuel.” Due to external pressure, studies to convert the reactor to even lower enrichment fuel had been ongoing since the 1980’s. Beginning in 1998, the reactor began to operate on a combination of 45% U-235 fuel elements and 19.75% U-235 fuel elements. The former of the two qualifying as “Low Enrichment Uranium” by all agreed upon definitions. Complete conversion of the Rech-2 reactor to 19.75% U-235 was achieved in 2006. Since that time, the reactor has run only on “Low Enrichment Uranium.” Not surprisingly, there has been some reduction in performance and capabilities of the single remaining reactor.
What Chile Has For Uranium:
By all accounts the only fresh uranium fuel available in Chile is 19.75% U-235 or less. The original 80%+ U-235 that the country had acquired in the 1970’s has all been heavily irradiated from years of use. Most of the uranium in the fuel elements has been burned up and the fuel now contains high levels of fission byproducts. Extracting any remaining U-235 for use in a weapon is nearly impossible.
The 45% U-235 fuel which was used from the early 1980’s onward has also been mostly burned. There may still be a few fuel assemblies which contain a large amount of their original uranium and have not been heavily irradiated. Of course, the 45% enriched uranium is not directly usable in a weapon to begin with.
Several news sources make reference to 18 kilograms of uranium being in the inventory of Chile. Even if this was very highly enriched uranium it would not be enough to build a weapon. The 18 kilograms described may be remaining 45% enriched fuel that has not been heavily irradiated or it could possibly be some leftover 80%+ fuel, although the former seems less likely. It may also be 80%+ fuel that has been partially irradiated. News reports have been fairly sketchy about the exact nature of the uranium removed. All that is known conclusively is that it was “highly enriched.”
The reactor operations in Chile are conducted by fully competent personnel and there has never been any serious accident or concern over theft of the fresh or spent fuel.
Conclusion:
The removal of uranium from Chile is purely an exercise in public relations and a political windfall for those involved. Chile never had sufficient amounts of weapons grade uranium at any one time to create a nuclear bomb. The weapons grade material the country did once have has been burned in their research reactors years ago. Any 45% U-235 fuel that may remain in the inventory does not present a proliferation risk even if it technically qualifies as “highly enriched.”
This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Nuclear, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
April 9th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
The thing that is not mentioned is that this down-conversion to LEU effectively renders most of these reactors useless for producing medical and industrial isotopes, in any quantity which is usually a big part of their mission. This now forces most of these countries to depend on a very few of-shore suppliers, who quite frankly, have them hostage.
One of the things that falls out from this is that several industries are eventually rendered incapable of effectively competing with those of the very countries that control the isotope market. This is a practice which is little better than that of the old British Empire, that would restrict the importation of certain raw materials into their colonies, (mostly India) to keep them from competing with products manufactured in the UK.
Quote Comment
April 9th, 2010 at 10:14 pm
Of course this is completely overblown. Even if the 18kg of uranium was fresh, non-irradiated 90% enriched uranium that is still far from a bomb. It’s not nearly enough to make a bomb and even if it were, a nuclear bomb is not something any terrorist group could build from scratch. The uranium used in Chile was uranium silicate fuel rods, not a bomb core.
The Little Boy bomb is about as simple as a nuclear weapon gets. It had no advanced features, but it still is not something an amateur could ever hope to build. This all the more so if you are talking about smelting and purifying uranium from the rods and converting it to a metal and then casting the core. This is not beyond the capabilities of a country, of course, but they’d need a lot more material.
The 20% number is arbitrary. Part of it for as far as ‘proliferation’ is the fact that a country that wanted to build a nuclear weapon could do so much easily if they acquired large amounts of 20%+ uranium and enriched it from there. It is a lot easier to go from 20% to 90% than from .7% to 90%. If you are starting at 20% you do not need as advanced or large an enrichment facility to go the rest of the way. Even an inefficient and rudimentary enrichment system can go from 20% to 90%. 20 is just an arbitary number. It would be even easier with 50%
Of course, there is the issue that you’d need a lot of 20% uranium to get enough to make a bomb. Unlikely you could fool the world into selling it to you to run a reactor and really turn it into a bomb.
DV82XL said:
It does, but actually, if the core is made a little larger, then using something like 45% uranium can achieve pretty close to the same results. I personally think that would be a good compromise if it makes some too nervous to have 90% enriched uranium floating around in various countries. A more reasonable place to set the bar for “highly enriched” would be 50%
Putting 45% in a reactor designed for 80-90% is going to compromise performance, but if the reactor was initially designed for 45% it can be almost as good as weapons grade.
The problem with going down all the way to <20% is it means you need substantially more fuel to get a descent neutron flux. This means a lot more elements, a bigger core and ultimately a more powerful reactor in terms of thermal energy. More thermal energy means more cooling, bigger tank, bigger pumps and just a lot more expense.
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 2:37 am
DV82XL said:
Do you think the long life of HEU in a reactor might also be a factor? If you sell someone a reactor that runs on HEU and sell them a core of HEU they don’t have to depend on you and are not going to need to find a new refuler for twenty or thirty years and if they buy some spare fuel at the same time, they might be set for several decades. Also, nobody needs to be hired to dispose of the old or have a contractor to do the fuel change.
If the fuel is lower and they don’t have the technology to make it at home, they need to go back to you every couple years for the servicing.
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 8:34 am
First, it is generally not possible to simply drop in a larger core and upgrade the pumps. Reactors are not so simple that this sort of modification can be done that easily. Frankly I don’t think the life of the core has any real bearing on the matter, however as Canada has found, the ban on HEU extends to the targets as well, making it very difficult to produce many isotopes in significant quantities without a very high flux of neutrons. The inability to source HEU targets has been stated publicly as one of the reasons AECL wants out of the medical isotope business.
The world’s a safer place now that those shiftless Canadians won’t be tempted to make a nuclear weapon.
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 9:06 am
I think non-reactor methods will eventually be the solution to these issues but in the meantime here’s some more reading.
From CMAJ, now irrelevant, but some good links to more papers about this.
cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/179/1/54-a
A non-proliferation paper from Princeton that talks about Canada’s ability to buy HEU.
princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/14_2-3_%20FvH_LK_Radio.pdf
For the nuclear physicists here, a technical paper from ORNL about conversion from HEU to LEU cores.
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/scale/pubs/ORNLTM_2005_269.pdf
enjoy
failed to pass spam check???
put this in front of the links maybe http://www.
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 9:14 am
I think non-reactor methods will eventually be the solution to these issues but in the meantime here’s some more reading.
From CMAJ, now irrelevant, but some good links to more papers about this.
cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/179/1/54-a
A non-proliferation paper from Princeton that talks about Canada’s ability to buy HEU.
princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/14_2-3_%20FvH_LK_Radio.pdf
For the nuclear physicists here, a technical paper from ORNL about conversion from HEU to LEU cores.
ornl.gov/sci/scale/pubs/ORNLTM_2005_269.pdf
enjoy
failed to pass spam check???
Maybe # of links, add your own ‘http://www.’
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 9:55 am
The bottom line is that, at least in the case of Canada, these argument that using LEU would be no different did not convince anyone in the industry or the government, and that before the open insult that was implied by suggesting that Canada cannot be trusted to secure this material. The joke here being that because we do not have a weapons sector, our nuclear activities are fully open to international inspection to a far greater degree than any other country with a major nuclear technology industry.
Not only is it not economic to produce medical Tc-99 with LEU targets, (mostly because of the cost of the recovery process) but the method produces MORE Pu than HEU targets, making a mockery of the proliferation arguments.
What is likely to happen though, is that there will now be more countries looking into enrichment technology, not less, and with laser based processes becoming available, this may not be as costly a route as it is at present, particularly if their needs are a just few Kg a year.
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Just want to point out that it only takes one nuclear bomb to destroy a city and kill millions. Even if one reactor does not have enough robbing two or three could mean more than enough. Maybe it’s unlikely, but the consequences of a terror group blowing up New York City or London or Paris are bad enough to make it a very important thing to stop it from ever happening.
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
David said:
First it takes more than one fission bomb to destroy a city of any reasonable size. Little Boy, had a blast radius of only one mile, and killed only about 150,000. This is not to trivialize this event, but if the BEST anyone could do would be a device on the order of Little Boy, (which seems to be the benchmark in this debate) then your statment is an exaggeration.
Secondly, fuel that has spent any time in a reactor, is so hot that it cannot be handled without special equipment, which itself is large cumbersome and hard to come by. The idea that anyone could serendipitously rob one of these reactors of is fuel charge is just not conceivable. Even if anyone managed to overcome the previous obstacles, they would still have to chemically process this material to remove fission products that would interfere with the explosion.
Thirdly, despite terms like ‘crude weapon’ as was pointed out in the lead article, uranium bombs are not simple devices. Little Boy (and Fat Man, for that matter) were crew-served weapons, which needed last second preparation and assembly before deployment. These are far beyond the capability of any sub-national group.
Fourthly, this is being applied without any real consistency or reason, as I wrote previously, it is insulting at best to claim Canada lacks the security to hold this material while we are one of the top producers of uranium in the world, and the HEU was probably made from metal mined here anyway. Meanwhile countries like Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands, all non-weapon States, have the capability of making HEU independently. To say nothing of the States that do have weapons.
Quote Comment
April 10th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
Brian, the cost of neutrons from the cheapest alternative to a reactor; a LINAC with a spallation target, is slightly below $1 million per gram of neutrons. In a pinch you could probably make do with that but it’d be more practical with a reactor.
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 3:42 am
DV82XL said:
Could the death toll if detonated in (say) Manhattan be far larger though, because of the tall buildings?
(On the other hand, Hiroshima 1945 was considerably more flammable than any contemporary First World city…)
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 8:12 am
George Carty said:
The argument is moot at best. To reiterate: Building a nuclear weapon is not a trivial task. Any detailed analysis of the problem revels at least a dozen points in the process where something could, and very likely would, go wrong that would bring the whole project to an end. It is not a project that can be taken on by a sub-national group, even if pure weapons-grade uranium could be purchased on the open market. The material is the least of the issues facing a clandestine program, operating without the resources of a State.
At any rate, the death estimates at Hiroshima were a combination of initial casualties, and those that perished shortly after from the effects of prompt radiation. Different cities would indeed have different casualty patterns; the Nagasaki device that had almost twice the yield, only claimed around 90,000 victims, despite having a larger blast radius from ground-zero.
The point here being that to claim that an explosion on the order of the Hiroshima attack could destroy a city of the size of London or New York and kill millions is pure exaggeration.
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 8:44 am
DV82XL said:
You’re probably right, but I was just wondering as a though-experiment how today’s cities compared to 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki in terms of vulnerability to fission-bomb attack…
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 8:52 am
Soylent said:
The other methods don’t use neutron beams, even though I agree that’s the simplest and cheapest if you assign some value to having a research facility. Start reading this on page 58 for a desription of other options
http://www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/eneene/////////sources/uranuc/pdf/panrep-rapexp-eng.pdf
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 9:49 am
brian said:
I don’t know where you are from Brian, but that report you linked to is very clear that it is is only concerned with supplying the needs of Canada alone, whereas before we were able to supply the world. It is also a political document, written by a group of professional political hacks, who have all made careers out of serving on government boards, and ministerial councils. It should go without saying that one is not likely to continue to be appointed to these positions if you don’t tell the government of the day what it wants to hear..
The loss of a high-flux research reactor, will also spell the end of CANDU development, especially new fuel research. The NRX and the NRU were the wombs of the CANDU and without them power reactor design in Canada has ended.
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
DV82XL said:
Montreal, and I agree with your comments except I don’t think it’s Canada’s responsibility to supply the world with medical isotopes. I’ve stated before that a new research reactor is my preferred choice but I can understand how politicians might not think it’s the best choice.
People have to realize the world isn’t always the way they want it to be. I like reading this blog and it’s very informative, but it’s nowhere near mainstream. Politics has to deal with the way the world is and that means some crazy things happen sometimes. I don’t know who’s to blame for all the misinformation out there and I wish more people would like to understand these issues instead of just repeating what they hear on the news or somesuch.
A lot of the comments are about how the theft or misplacement of HEU (or even LEU) would be nothing to worry about. In reality it would be a huge deal, the media would play it up as big thing, the politicians would be blamed for screwing up, and people would panic that someone was making a bomb or would poisin the water or something equally weird. Remember, the people in charge just want to get reelected and so they only care what the majority thinks. Until the media starts quoting Depleted Cranium, we’re not it.
I may be cynical because I felt like the research ended in the 80’s after TMI. Back then I got my BSc. in physics and planned on possibly working in the nuclear industry. When the time came to choose the direction of further education it didn’t seem like there would be any future in it.
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
brian said:
It’s certainly not. Canada has been a major supplier of isotopes at government owned and run facilities for decades and the MAPLE reactors were supposed to finally offer the opportunity to make a clean break from it and make it a private operation.
My own opinion, and maybe I should bite my tongue, not being Canadian, is that the best thing for Canada to do is move the operations completely to MDS and thus make it a private and profitable exported product. This would turn it from a burden to a beneficial product. Any time a domestic company can produce something and sell it domestically and internationally, the country benefits both in terms of economic effects and the fact that the profits can be taxed.
Ideally, Canada could provide a large portion of the isotopes and at the same time benefit from it, just like Japan benefits from building cars domestically and selling them around the world and Taiwan benefits from making computer chips and selling them around the world. The difference, of course, is that those countries don’t make these products at their own expense and then sell them at a loss. That’s the problem with the isotope business.
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Well that was the general idea when this whole thing with the MAPLE reactors started: it was to be spun off as a private concern. However, it was not until I started looking into the matter, (inspired by your article) that I realized that without access to HEU these were not going to be as commercially viable as planned, and the current government has no desire to make a stand on the matter.
brian said:
Nowhere did anyone suggest that theft of this material would be no big deal. What we are saying is that once in the core, no one is going to take it. Nor has anyone, because any terrorist group that looks into the matter, (and we can be sure, all of the have) comes to the same conclusion I have making: it is not a doable project. You can kill more people reliably with an aeroplane, or homemade nerve gas, than you would with any amateur nuclear device, and with much less effort.
As for not being able to make a living in nuclear energy in Canada, that is rubbish. Qualified people are in high demand in the industry in Canada and have been for decades. If your a Francophone Hydro Quebec has entrance test sessions every year, and if you pass the nuclear one you are hired. I lost one of my best employees to them a few years ago.
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
brian said:
LEU being stolen or misplaced would not be much of an issue. You can’t poison the water with LEU any more than you can with natural uranium and really it’s no worse than throwing a few rolls of lead-based solder into a reservoir – not noticeable.
As for HEU, if you’re talking about stealing the core of a research reactor, you’re talking about an irradiated and thus highly radioactive material that is going to need to be cooled and handled remotely to get into a shipping cask and then carry away.
Once stolen it would still need to be chemically processed to remove fission products that interfere with the nuclear explosive and to refine it into a metal of the proper geometry.
They would never get this far, however. Of all the materials that could be stolen, radioactive materials are the ones that are the most likely to be tracked down and found. Radioisotopes act as their own tracking beacon. They can be shielded, but with large high sensitivity detectors and spectroscopy it’s possible to detect specific isotopes even through reasonable shielding.
If someone stole a biological material or a chemical weapon there’s no way of detecting it remotely. If it’s in a car rolling down a highway you can only find it by stopping each car and inspecting them individually. Even if you find it, identifying it definitively could take some time. It may be a non-descriptive powder that needs to be cultured and analyzed to definitively determine it is the material you’re looking for.
With a radioisotope you don’t need to do that. Rather than searching every car you can place a high sensitivity gamma analyzer on an overpass and it will screen tens of thousands of cars a day as they roll by. If it is in a house somewhere a survey team on the ground or by helicopter can find it.
How can you tell if someone has smuggled a small amount of anthrax spores or a potent nerve agent out of a lab? It’s not easy. They could have tucked some in a vile and hidden it, even in a body cavity. They could have even put it in a non-digestible container and swallowed it. How can you be sure? Everyone would need to be strip searched, x-rayed and have all their personal effects gone over carefully.
A radioisotope does not present these problems. A portal monitor can assure none “walks out” and is as simple as a metal detector. Actually, it’s simpler because it does not go off when you walk through it with a belt buckle.
The core of a reactor is going to be very radioactive for some time. It contains numerous isotopes with unique energy signatures not found in nature. The radioactivity would take an extreme amount of shielding to be completely undetectable, so much so it’s unlikely it could be effectively transported with so much material covering it.
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Like DV82XL said, it may not have been profitable without government help in the form of protecting markets, both supply and demand. They would also need monopoly pricing power for a considerable time to justify the capex, this means no meaningful competition worldwide for about 40 years. That’s too much of a business risk to assume without some form of government involvement.
DV82XL said:
I never said that. I was explaining that I may be cynical because of choices I made 30 years ago. I certainly had more opportunities working in finance in the last few decades. I’ll admit things have changed in the last year or two that make me wonder if I made the right choice.
drbuzz0 said:
I’m not talking about any of it happening or being a physical risk. I’m only mentioning the political aspect and concurrent political risk. Even if no one could actually pull off a real heist, what about a media spoof where they remove an empty box and go on TV saying this could hold enough materiel to make a bomb? You, of all people know how these things get distorted in the media. It’s not too hard to find one ’scientist’ who wants to be on TV badly enough to pander to peoples fears.
Governments must certainly have some advisors who know how unlikely any of this would be, and yet they still insist that they’re taking every precaution necessary. If this means no HEU or other media sensitive materiel on the loose then so be it. It’s only through education, possibly from sites like this one, that people will accept new ideas. I’m of the opinion that it’s working and the next generation will be more accepting of nuclear power.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
~Max Planck
Quote Comment
April 11th, 2010 at 10:32 pm
brian said:
Did you even read what I wrote there Brian? I clearly stated the issue is with targets and fuel, not government price supports. The Canadian government doesn’t want to rock the boat on the HEU issue. The Canadian government never had the power to protect the isotope market from foreign competition, in foreign markets. The isotope business turned a profit, because we had a very powerful reactor, and could make them cheaper than any one else. This is why they wanted to spin it off to MDS.
Removing HEU from everywhere is not a media exercise – the public didn’t know that these reactors existed in most cases, let alone that they were fueled with HEU – something else is going on here altogether, and anti-proliferation is just an excuse.
BTW, I probably have a fewyears on you, and if you couldn’t get a job back thirty years ago in the nuclear sector in Canada, you weren’t trying too hard, or you didn’t want to leave Quebec.
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 6:17 am
DV82XL said:
That looks more aggressive as a comment than it needs to – the impression Brian had of the state of the industry in the 80s was that there wasn’t much future in it and he made his chioce based on that impression:
brian said:
brian said:
Evidently that’s not happened, but I’m sure you could find just as many chemical engineers of the same generation who looked at the petrochemical industry and thought “Might not offer me career stability in ten years time…”
Hell, that was one of my own motivations for avoiding applying to the big oil drilling concerns, despite Schlumberger offering the best recruitment fair freebie (a well-made aluminium bottle opener keyring).
Hence why I skulk on a pro-nuclear, vaguely anti-fossil fuels crap-science blog rather than a pro-fossil fuels, vaguely anti-nuclear one.
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 7:52 am
I’mnotreallyhere said:
Perhaps. Although Brian, being (as I am) from Montreal, will understand the context. It is a somewhat tiresome excuse that we often hear from Francophones our age, that complain that they could not follow the career they wanted to, and stay in Quebec.
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 8:57 am
DV82XL said:
Ironically, I couldn’t decide what career I wanted to follow, so I’m swiftly becoming a Francophone.
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
drbuzz0, check this out:
Research Reactors Pose Challenge in Push for Nuclear Safety
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/science/13nuke.html?pagewanted=all
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
I don’t care what anyone says: we are not getting the full story on this subject. Too many things don’t add up.
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
uvdiv said:
I am not at all surprised this had come up because it’s been used before and the current administration is trying to make a big todo about nuclear security to gain some political scare-points.
None of these reactors are actually large enough to pose a significant danger even if there were a complete catastrophic failure.
Most use uranium that is far bellow weapons grade. A few do use weapons grade uranium, usually in small amounts in combination with lower enrichment.
The uranium is not as easily turned into a weapon as one might think. For one thing, it’s almost always the wrong form chemically. It’s often a form of uranium alloyed with other metals and in the form of a metallic hydrate. Other cases it’s a nitride or a carbide. In some larger reactors it’s an oxide and in a very very few it’s uranium silicate.
Uranium is a notoriously difficult metal to work with. It’s hard, brittle and when ground the dust has a tendency to catch fire. It’s melting point is 1132.2 °C, 2070 °F.
To get bomb grade material you’d have to get the uranium and reduce it to a metal and fabricate it into the correct shape and size. This is not an easy matter. You’d need a fairly well equipped metalorgy shop just to do that much.
But, that’s easy compared to irradiated uranium. If you have virgin weapons grade uranium, you just have to worry about smelting it. But if it’s been run in the reactor for as little as a few months (and since these cores last a long time, it’s usually a lot more than that) then there are fission byproducts that have built up in it.
These fission byproducts are a big problem to any potential weapon usage. In addition to making the material very very radioactive when it first comes from the reactor, the fission byproducts can interfere with the nuclear reaction in a bomb. Some are neutron absorbers. Others will decay and produce neutrons in the process. Both of these are unacceptable.
Uranium used in weapons must be of a very high purity. Those fission products need to be removed. When uranium is reprocessed for reactor use, it does not need such high purity, so a trace of fission byproducts is no big deal. The process is complicated by the fact that the fission products are of many different elements with different chemical characteristics. Some are more easily separated than others.
So you’re talking about multiple stages of refinement, using electrorefining, liquid-liquid extraction, selective solvents, then followed by smelting, casting and machining of the uranium collected. All of this would have to be done in hot cells.
If that’s not difficult enough, if this is to be done clandestinely, then everything that is extracted or any left over refuse is going to have to be stored. If you discharge or throw out any of the left over solvents or if some of the dust gets vented out then there’s the distinct possibility that the radioactive material will be detected and traced back to you.
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
From uvdiv’s link in comment 25:
In early 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that tracks nuclear issues, petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to set a date by which it would no longer license the civilian use of highly enriched uranium. “The high national security risks,” the group argued, “clearly outweigh the benefits.”
Among other things, the group argued that such a move would set a good example for other countries.
Isn’t that the excuse which the Carter administration used to derail fuel reprocessing? The more things change…
Quote Comment
April 12th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Meanwhile in other news:
Initial success from SILEX test loop
“The initial phase of the test loop program for the SILEX laser enrichment technology has been successfully completed by Global Laser Enrichment (GLE).
GLE – a venture launched by GE-Hitachi and in which Cameco has since taken a stake – began operations of the test loop facility in July 2009 at its facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina. The test loop facility is designed to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of the technology and is intended to advance the design of the equipment and processes for the proposed commercial production facility.”
Naturally, the antinuclear demagogues were quick to start screaming that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission should prevent GE from building the SILEX commercial plant because the GE plant will perfect laser enrichment and allow others to steal the secrets. (Here)
Now I think they are bat-dung crazy – but they do have a point, IF you accept the premise that enriched uranium is a huge proliferation risk.
The stench of hypocrisy is making me sick.
Quote Comment
April 13th, 2010 at 1:56 am
DV82XL said:
Regarding laser enrichment and proliferation, the argument that it should therefore not be developed is idiotic. You can’t stop advancements like that. The cat is out of the bag. It is well known that laser enrichment methods work. They’re a few years away from being viable for use at large scales, but that’s just logistical and technical stuff to be ironed out.
However, as far as proliferation goes, I don’t see how it changes anything. Laser based enrichment and the accompanying chemical processing and smelting of uranium will still be a very large and expensive industrial operation. Perhaps it is a smaller and less energy intensive than gas centrifuges, but it’s still pretty damn big.
Nobody is going to enrich uranium to any significant degree with any laser or plasma based method in their basement.
A gas centrifuge plant to produce enough uranium for a few bombs a year is huge. A laser enrichment plant might be half the size – less huge, but still quite huge.
So where does this leave us? The same place we are now. Proliferation comes down to a matter of choice as to whether a country wants to expend the money and effort on a weapons program. If they do, they build a weapon in a decade or so. The program is generally not easy (or even possible) to hide, and it’s beyond the capabilities of any individual group, but any industrial country can do it
Quote Comment
April 13th, 2010 at 10:32 am
Apparently it’s not only the HEU they want to put an end to:
BusinessWeek
April 13 (Bloomberg) – “A dispute over the recycling of nuclear fuel by reactor suppliers such as France’s Areva SA surfaced in Washington yesterday, as U.S. officials sought to skirt the issue at a summit elsewhere in town.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and former U.S. ambassador-at-large Robert Gallucci called for an end to the fuel-recycling practice at a conference of experts being held in parallel with President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit.
The position of Evans and Gallucci drew a retort from Areva’s former director of non-proliferation and international institutions, who is attending the meeting of experts.”
http://www.nucpros.com/content/nuclear-fuel-recycling-dispute-arises-margin-obama-summit
Quote Comment
April 13th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
DV82XL said:
Crazy. “If you want to kill your dog, say that he got rabies”: I suspect an hidden agenda here, somebody to enlighten me?
By the way, great post (and comments), please keep on like this, Dr Buzzo.
Quote Comment
April 14th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
We shouldn’t take needless risks with this stuff. Especially when there is already an increased risk of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear weapon!
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/04/obama-the-risks-of-a-terrorist-nuke-attack-have-gone-up/1
If the risks of a terrorist nuke attack are going up as Obama points out, then we need to be more strict and more limited in the use of these technologies.
Quote Comment
April 15th, 2010 at 12:55 am
DV82XL said:
Here’s the addition: dumb + dumb = 2 dumb.
Sorry to bring politics into this. But you get what you vote for.
Quote Comment
April 15th, 2010 at 1:56 am
Bruce said:
Well if Mister O says it’s so it must be…
Quote Comment
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:23 am
Here is a news item that came out today. This is from a source that is widely distributed amongst finance professionals.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100421_dirty_bombs_revisited_combating_hype?utm_source=SWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=100422&utm_content=readmore&elq=f266d196123342d280731c94a017a85f
Quote Comment
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:12 am
That was a really good article you linked Brian, very much worth the time I spent reading it. Thank you for pointing it out.
Quote Comment