More to-do About Laser-Based Uranium Enrichment
August 13th, 2012
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This time from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a number of anti-nuclear activists are up in arms about the SILEX process. It’s a type of laser-based isotope enrichment which is currently ready to move from the laboratory to industrial-scale pilot plants.
Here are some major points from the article “SILEX and Proliferation” by Scott Kemp, along with my responses.
SILEX is a new enrichment technology that happens to be well suited for making nuclear weapons. The benefits of commercializing SILEX are not yet established, but the proliferation risks are significant.
It is not any more “well suited” to nuclear weapons production than to commercial fuel production nor is the benefit of the process not established. Any method of enrichment can be used to produce highly enriched or low enrichment uranium. It is simply an issue of how many cycles of enrichment the material is subjected to. This is true of gaseous diffusion, gas centrifuge enrichment and all other types. As such, any facility that can produce low levels of enrichment for power reactors can also produce highly enriched uranium, although at lower quantities. SILEX is not unique in its ability to be adapted to any level of enrichment.
The advantage of commercialization is simply that it has the potential to be more efficient when it comes to producing enriched uranium. Enrichment is a necessarily energy intensive process involving high facilities. Laser-based methods are the next step in reducing enrichment costs. Right now, additional enrichment capacity is badly needed. Much of the enriched uranium sold for commercial fuel comes from the down blending of highly enriched uranium from Russian nuclear weapons. However, that stockpile is not going to last forever. The Megatons to Megawatts program, a partnership between the United States and Russia is due to end in 2013, potentially increasing the global need for uranium enrichment dramatically.
The long term solution may be to switch to fuel cycles that do not require uranium enrichment, but for the time being, it is a vital part of the fuel cycle.
Dozens of countries are poised to copy SILEX if a US project demonstrates that the technology can be built on a commercial scale. The technical barriers, to the extent they exist, are not likely to endure the test of time.
This is a silly argument that has been made many times before. The US is not the only game in town and whether or not the US decides to pursue this technology or shoot itself in the foot by not doing so will not change anything. We went through this same thing with gas centrifuge technology. The US failed to fully commercialize gas centrifuges out of similar fears and today we are left using the antiquated method of gaseous diffusion while all other countries switched to the more effective centrifuge method years ago.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has refused to consider the proliferation risk in its decision to issue a license for the first commercial SILEX facility, despite a statutory obligation to do so. Only a few weeks remain for Congress to intervene.
Lasers exist. The technology exists to tune them to the frequencies of uranium isotopes. The theory behind the system is well known. The US is not the only game in town. Whether the US peruses this technology has no bearing on proliferation outside the US. We can only control whether we choose to use it for weapons. I would not expect that the US would, of course, because we already have a massive surplus of weapons materials stockpiled, so even if we were to resume building nuclear weapons, it would be many years before we’d have to worry about making more nuclear weapons materials.
As for other countries and their nuclear aspirations, there’s nothing the NRC can do about that. If we can do anything about that at all, it will be through diplomatic channels.
The proliferation problem. The concern with SILEX is that it is particularly suited for nuclear proliferation — even better than centrifuges. A proliferation-scale centrifuge facility can be housed in a high school gym and run from a diesel generator. According to GLE, an equivalent SILEX plant would be 75 percent smaller and use less energy. SILEX can also enrich fuel-grade uranium to weapons-grade in fewer steps than a gas centrifuge, PDF making Iran-style proliferation easier. Finally, SILEX produces no distinctive chemical or thermal emissions that would reveal a clandestine plant’s location. A 1999 State Department nonproliferation assessment of SILEX stated that such a “facility might be easier to build without detection and could be a more efficient producer of high enriched uranium for a nuclear weapons program.”
Lets be clear on something. Nations that want to acquire nuclear weapons will do so. Using SILEX may well be easier than the gas centrifuge method, or at least it will be in the near future, due to the availability of high quality dye-tuned lasers. That’s just how it is. Nation states can make nuclear weapons if they wish to do so. However, the process will never be “easy” by most standards. Though the facility could be reasonably small (at least by comparison to other enrichment systems) it would still cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It would still require a great deal of technical expertise.
And that’s only part of the problem. Building a nuclear weapon requires complex meteorology, specialized materials and fabrication methods, extreme precision of manufacturing and numerous other technical challenges. These are not impossible things for a nation state to do, but they’re not simple or easy. It requires, and likely will always require, at least a few years and a major technical commitment.
That said, it is easier today than it was in decades past. Today there are high power computers to aid in the process. Rapid prototyping could aid in fabricating some of the components. High quality alloys can be bought on the international market. However, that’s just how it is. Technology advances and makes things easier. You can’t stop that.
However, nearly every major technical SILEX challenge stems from its particularly complicated laser, a technology that is among the most rapidly advancing areas in applied physics. A single breakthrough in, say, high-power diode lasers would eliminate most of the challenge overnight.
Yes, and diode lasers will continue to be improved, because, like it or not, there are numerous areas where they are useful. They have an important roll in industry, data storage and medicine. You can’t force technology like this to stand still.
GLE claims its primary commercial interest in SILEX is its low operating costs. In 2006, Silex Systems set a goal for a cost of $30-$45 per SWU PDF (kilogram separative work units) — a target it now admits was pure conjecture. Compare this with the cost of centrifuge enrichment, which produces at between $10-$60 per SWU, depending on the labor costs and technology-set used. GLE’s Rob Gereghty says the company has been working on a “test loop” since July 2009 but that studies on SILEX’s commercial viability PDF will take “years to complete.” Nonetheless GLE wants a license to build a commercial-scale plant now — without first demonstrating SILEX’s viability or allowing the government to compare the undemonstrated commercial benefits against the inadequately studied proliferation risks.
Unproven benefits? Fine. So let it be privately financed. That’s how most cutting edge technologies get developed. They start off with an uncertain future and some investors are willing to take the risk that they won’t ever become viable in order to profit if they do. Sometimes they don’t and sometimes they do. And when they do, it makes the losses worthwhile. That’s how venture capital works.
I’d be willing to put some risk capital into this technology. I might lose it, and I’d accept that, but it definitely has potential for big returns.
Some American officials fear that, if the technology is not commercialized in the United States, Silex Systems will take its technology elsewhere. That’s a valid concern — but only to the extent that Australia is willing to aggravate the United States by terminating the treaty and that Silex Systems could find new ways to commercialize its technology using information not developed by GLE. Article 16(3) of the US-Australia treaty guarantees that any information developed or learned over the course of the GLE collaboration can never be used for a project located outside US territory, even after the treaty has been terminated.
Fat chance that would ever happen. This is not some kind of secret technology. This is basic physics. You can’t keep that genie in the bottle. It’s known that you can enrich uranium with lasers. It has been known for years. The only issues now are working out some of the procedural issues in making it a reality and producing suitably powerful lasers at a reasonable cost. The US-Australia partnership is not the only game in town. The cat is out of the bag.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2012 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Good Science, Nuclear, 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.
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August 13th, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Several countries have Laser-Based Uranium Enrichment projects running that are not connected with Silex Systems or GLE. This genie is already out of the bottle and there is little anyone can do about it.
As well South Korea is demanding that the terms of its treaty with the US forbidding it to enrich and reprocess be renegotiated and I suspect that they believe that they have a good chance of seeing that happen. Now that India has been let back in to the nuclear club, and on its own terms, much of the US influence in this regard has been weakened.
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August 13th, 2012 at 3:59 pm
No nation has ever been stopped from going nuclear by trying to keep the technology seceret. It’s all based on things that can be acquired. The only workable solution is to use some kind of diplomatic influence or politics to convince them not to. This is not 100% effective, but that’s life.
it has gotten a little easier. In the 1940’s it took a superpower and several years. In the 1950’s, any reasonable world power could do it. In the 1970’s, major industrial world states could. In the 1980’s, minor states and non-industrial nations could.
Still not easy. You sure can’t do it without national level support. But I doubt it ever will be that easy. Technology, none the less, marches forward.
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August 13th, 2012 at 5:30 pm
The best thing the US could do is to take advantage of SILEX technology and become the low-cost supplier of 4% enriched uranium, discouraging other countries from doing so. The only effective way to influence global nuclear policy is to lead it, not throw rocks from the sidelines.
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August 14th, 2012 at 1:10 am
Building a nuclear weapon requires complex meteorology
I think you mean “metallurgy”.
(You can delete this comment once you’ve made the correction…)
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August 14th, 2012 at 1:36 am
If I had specific knowledge of how it works I’d be very tempted to just release it to the public as a protest against the anti-nuclear movement if it weren’t built.
Of course I don’t actually have the ability to do that kind of thing (and even if I did the possibility of jailtime might stop me) but the non-proliferation idiots really do need to be put in line.
PS: Is the RSS feed here going to be fixed?
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August 14th, 2012 at 7:51 am
George Carty said:
add to that…
US decides to peruse => US decides to pursue
has no baring on proliferation => has no bearing on proliferation
seceret technology => secret technology
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August 14th, 2012 at 8:25 am
Shafe said:
Fixed those. Not sure about John’s comment though. That is not *my* type-o, so it’s possible he meant meteorology. Maybe for fallout mitigation in testing?
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August 14th, 2012 at 10:16 am
I don’t understand this issue at all, I am guessing that anti-nuclear advocates have nothing left in their arsenal except the ghost of nuclear weapons and proliferation!?
I mean, if a nation (no, a terror organisation can’t make the bomb) wants to develop nuclear weapons, why the hell are they going to go with HEU-type? When it is so much easier to build a military reactor and radiate lumps of depleated uranium and process the plutonium out of that! Not to mention that implosion type weapons are easier to “get going” not to mention more efficient than the gun type as the North Koreans most surely can confirm after their first fizzle (they are a bit of an embaresment to the nuclear weapons club).
Also if we are going to ban laser technology we had better ban mass spectrometry too, any MS-instrument is capable of enriching uranium, if you knew how to set it up…
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August 14th, 2012 at 11:20 am
Matte said:
That might be part of the reason North Korea is interested in enrichment (using A. Q. Khan technology).
BTW: You might want to include <sarcasm> tags when saying that implosion type bombs are easier.
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August 14th, 2012 at 11:54 am
What Matte said, in his first sentence.
I think the Bulletin is so hidebound that they might well be just going on inertia (or maybe they also have radiophobia in general and oppose nuclear power? Haven’t checked, don’t care).
Any vaguely significant country (that could manage enrichment with A Frickin’ Laser) that just wants A Bomb can make it happen now without the Frickin’ Laser.
It was achievable with 1940s technology, after all.
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August 14th, 2012 at 3:15 pm
Yes, I meant metallurgy. I let the internet explorer autocorrect just change it and didn’t proofread what I typed. I’m at work and this is not a work related website, so I’m not actually supposed to be here. Extra time spent editing the comment only increases the chance that a supervisor will walk by and see what I’m up to
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August 14th, 2012 at 4:02 pm
George Carty said:
Back in the 1960’s- 1970’s the Weathermen made a lot of bombs, so meteorology and bomb making can coincide.
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August 15th, 2012 at 5:03 am
I spent some time in the early 70s working in a very minor role in nuclear weapons R&D before I decided it wasn’t for me and I went back to University. The site’s staff canteen was a free-fire zone in terms of table table and I remember hearing folks speaking about laser enrichment research back then, only ten years after the first optical-frequency lasers were built.
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August 15th, 2012 at 7:46 am
Anon said:
I was not sarcastic, not one bit…
If you want a usable weapon as a final product you need the implosion type. I know that in the Swedish nuclear weapons program there was never any discussions about weoponising anything but an implosion type Pu-device. I do realise that it does require “good” Pu to make it work, but as a chemist I can say that that is the easy part…
Also if I can put together an effective RSV-device (if I wanted to), I am sure an explosives expert can knock up the geometry required for an effective implosion device…the rest is just machining!
If you just want a big bang with a lot of enrichment hassle, sure, go for the gun and slugg type.
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August 15th, 2012 at 3:19 pm
As a mechanical engineer all I can think is, why bother about the proliferation risks of SILEX technology? The Zippe-type centrifuge is already widely known. And even I can probably design one with a couple of fellow engineers, a metallurgist and possibly some electrical engineers for the controls. (And I’ve finished my bachelors only about 2 months ago)
I’ve been to Urenco and know some of the basic design points. Sure I won’t be designing a full height, articulated carbon rotor design like they use. But a simple straight maraging steel rotor is fairly simple. The lower bearing is a “needle floating in oil-film” affair, which is fairly standard for high speed applications like this. (And probably an off the shelf part by now from any of a dozen suppliers).
While silex might be cheaper in the long run, gas centrifuge technology is out there now, much simpler and much easier to build covertly. Ordering a laser with the right wavelength is suspicious. Ordering a oil film bearing for 15.000 RPM applications is not (anymore).
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August 15th, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Matte said:
The issue of implosion versus gun-triggered devices is one that has been discussed in many areas before and many nations have chosen to start off with the gun-triggered uranium type. One thing about that kind of weapon is that it’s so simple and reliable (compared to implosion type) that if it’s correctly made and has suitably enriched uranium it is basically guaranteed to work. It is considered reliable enough that a simple one could be fielded without testing. In that case, you might be off a little on the yeild, but unless you completely bungle the design, it will work.
Implosion is much more efficient, of course. It’s the preferred method for both plutonium and uranium devices and plutonium devices require implosion.
Both routes require some advanced technologies.
Uranium alone requires complex chemical conversion and fluoridation along with enrichment and de-fluoridation and smelting. Uranium is a tough material to work with, requiring vacuum furnaces and machining under inert gas etc.
Plutonium weapons can be done without enrichment, although uranium enrichment still can help, because enriched uranium can give you a reactor with better neutron economy, which means you can irradiate the fuel more effectively and make more plutonium faster. Plutonium requires a suitable reactor. Power reactors don’t work well for this. It should be purpose-designed to have material easily cycled through it relatively quickly.
Then the plutonium must be separated. The chemistry of doing this is straightforward, but any operation doing so must be large, because the yield of weapons grade plutonium from a single cycle of irritation is very low. Hence, large amounts of material need to be processed to get enough plutonium for weapons use.
The radioactivity of plutonium complicates things. The fluids used for extraction need to be cooled from decay heat of plutonium and leftover fission byproducts. Hotcells are required for assembly etc.
Plutonium is notoriously difficult to work with as a metal. It’s much worse than uranium. Plutonium metal can spontaneously combust and it’s very brittle and reactive. Actually, the properties of plutonium make it problematic for weapons use on its own. It needs to be alloyed with a few percent of other metals to make it usable. The exact formulas are secret, but are known to contain mostly gallium.
If you look at what it took the US to create both uranium and plutonium for weapons, neither was a simple task. Uranium enrichment took up much of the Y-12 complex, using electromagnetic separation and gas diffusion.
Plutonium production was done at Hanford Washington. It required a very large reactor and reprocessing complex be built. Uranium slugs were fabricated, irradiated, cooled and then placed in containers to be transported by rail a few miles away to the reprocessing and materials recovery complex. After plutonium concentrate was obtained, it was shipped elsewhere to be converted to metal, alloyed and fabricated.
It’s not especially easy either way. Doable, by state-level standards, but not easy.
BTW: Gun triggered weapons are generally regarded as obsolete by modern nuclear states. The United States used the gun-triggered design for the first uranium bomb, but after that most weapons were implosion-triggered. A few weapons designs in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s were gun triggered (such as the mark 8 and mark 11) Gun triggered devices were used in a few low-yeild and special weapon designs of the 1950’s, such as artillery rounds.
The Soviet Union never really went very far with the gun triggered design either. They may have used it for some low-yeild or special purpose designs, but, like the US, by the time ‘advanced’ designs were being made, in the 1950’s.
I don’t know about the French, Chinese and British (they may have early on, but certainly would be considered obsolete by now)
The South African nuclear weapon program went the route of gun-triggered uranium weapons. It’s rumored that that is how the Israel program produced its first generation of weapons as well (But probably not in use anymore) I don’t know if India or Pakistan did any work on gun triggered weapons.
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August 16th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Both these countries went straight to Pu implosion-type weapons from the start, however Pakistan also manufactured a miniaturized weapon design that could be delivered by fighter aircraft outside the scope of their main program, (that is by another agency) and these may have been HEU fueled gun-type devices. Little has been heard of these after the late 80’s and it is unknown if these weapons are still part of that country’s arsenal.
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August 16th, 2012 at 3:19 pm
As mentioned, both the uranium and plutonium routes have their own unique difficulties and challenges, but also advantages.
A country that is simply trying to produce a nuclear weapon of minimal capabilities might decided that the gun-trigger design (which necessitates HEU and not Pu) is the easiest way to do it because it avoids some engineering challenges and is almost certain to work if the material is obtained.
Any “mature” nuclear power will use implosion triggering (of varying types and sophistication) for all weapons. They may be uranium or plutonium. Actually, a fully matured and fully capable nuclear power will want both the capability to enrich uranium AND produce plutonium.
The advantages being:
plutonium – used for the pits of modern nuclear weapons. Smaller size. Smaller critical mass. More neutrons (for use in irridiating fusion secondary). Therefore plutonium weapons can be smaller and give more “bang for your buck.”
uranium – HEU and uranium of various enrichment levels is used in the secondary to initiate the reaction to create fusion. Also may be used in the tamper to boost the yeild further. A warhead might have a primary with plutonium and a spherical secondary with a HEU ’spark plug’ in the center and then surrounded by a shell of uranium, which could be HEU to further boost the yeild in the small package, since it has a greater fission cross section than LEU or DU (both of which can also be used, as they will fission adequately in the super high flux of hard neutrons)
Enriched uranium is also desirable for the reactor used to make plutonium. A plutonium production reactor can be made with only natural uranium, by just piling it up with graphite or heavy water, but natural uranium is never going to give the kind of neutron flux you’d get with enriched uranium and a reactor using enriched uranium can be much smaller.
A quick aside: No country has ever really “shocked” the world with a nuclear detonation, at least not since 1945. The Soviet Union was a little surprising because it detonated one sooner than expected, but it was known they were working on it.
North Korea’s tests came after a nuclear program that everyone knew existed for decades before.
It was well known that the UK, France and China were all engaged in nuclear weapon development before their first tests occurred.
India tested a weapon in 1974, two years after it became public that it was preparing for a weapons test and having had a development program since the 1940’s.
Also well published that Pakistan was working on nuclear weapons since the 1970’s and their completion of most facilities needed for weapons was known by the 1990’s.
South Africa publicly admitted development starting in the 1960’s. Never tested a weapon, but came close. Was well known they were preparing.
There has never been a circumstance of a country detonating a nuclear weapon and the response of the world being “We had not the slightest idea that they had been developing nuclear weapons or had any intent to test a nuclear weapon any time around now.”
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August 16th, 2012 at 5:17 pm
If some people is concerned about cheap enrichment making fission bombs too easy, perhaps they should be promoting reactors that don’t need enrichment. Eg: CANDU IFR LFTR.
Of course this assumes that bomb proliferation is their real concern & not some ideological or financial investment in the anti-nuclear power position.
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August 16th, 2012 at 5:49 pm
Ray1952 said:
Maybe they didn’t – then again maybe they did
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August 16th, 2012 at 8:14 pm
Jim Baerg said:
I think we all know the chances of that.
DV82XL said:
Maybe a US satellite malfunctioned (with a real test you’d expect other instruments to have confirmed it).
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August 16th, 2012 at 9:53 pm
Anon said:
No its not ever been confirmed, but the potential involvement of Israel, who were rather tight with S.A. at the time (there were suggestions it was a joint test) might have kept some data from coming to light.
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August 17th, 2012 at 10:13 am
Anon said:
DV82XL said:
No, it has not been confirmed. There are some other things that seem to have been recorded by instruments, however, including a magnetic pulse detected by ionospheric observatories and scattered reports of possible fission byproduct detection.
One of the stories that has circulated, coming from some Russian officials is that it was a test of a very small fusion-boosted fission weapon conducted by Israel with possible assistance from South Africa. The intent was to hide the test (which tends to be very hard to do) by making it very small, conducting it in a very remote area and doing it at sea, rather than underground, which would produce detectable seismic disturbances. Also, conducting it under as heavy as possible cloud cover and during daylight would help hide the flash. However, enough cloud cover cleared and a satellite was close enough to detect it.
I can’t say for sure that this is true, but I think it very likely is. The number one thing that makes me think this is that so much is classified. We know the United States flew many missions in the area looking for fallout, and we’re told that they didn’t find anything unusual. But if not, why is the actual data from the sampling flights classified? Routine sampling mission data is usually not classified. Why is the communication between NATO countries, Australia and others still tightly guarded? If there was nothing to it, I would not expect so much would still be unobtainable.
This is what I think might have happened (and this is only a guess, and I can’t say for sure it is true.):
There was an Israeli test, which they had hoped would be undetected, but once it became public that the US had detected it and that the Israelis were forced to go to the US and basically say “Okay, we’ll tell you what happened, but you have to keep this all secret.”
That would have been agreed to for a number of reasons. Whether or not the US was happy about another country entering “the club,” which it probably wasn’t, it still would have good reason to keep the information secret. First, Israel is generally regarded as a friendly nation and an ally, and it was not a good idea to cross your allies during the Cold War. Secondly, it’s very obvious that if it became public that Israel had conducted a nuclear test, it would have been very inflammatory to the Middleeast, and nobody wanted that. Third, politically, relations with Israel are always a hot-button issue in the US. There is a huge pro-Israel lobby and because of this, most US politicians feel very uneasy about saying anything negative about Israel’s actions or policies, and a nuclear test would have really been a political problem.
Even to this day, any countries which might be directly aware of an Israeli test would probably think it’s better not to let that out. One can easily see how the existence of such a test would be seized upon by Iran as reason to justify their own nuclear ambitions.
But again, that’s just my own speculation.
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