New Jupiter Impact Scar Pictures From Hubble
July 31st, 2009
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Jupiter apparently took quite a hit from an asteroid, comet fragment or something else in space. Nobody saw it coming, but we certainly can see the spectacular scar it has left on the planet. The first signs of the impact were spotted just about a week ago, and since then there have been a number of photos taken by earth-based observatories.
The spectacular photo bellow was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The fact that this photo was taken goes to show how important NASA deemed this event. Hubble was visited by the Space Shuttle this past may for an extensive servicing and systems upgrade. Since that mission, NASA has been going through the lengthy process of systems checks, calibration and testing the new sensors onboard Hubble. Although they have not yet finished, NASA took a break from the calibration and testing schedule to take a few stunning images.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Good Science, Misc, Space. 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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July 31st, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Can you imagine the effect of an impact like that on Earth? If anyone needs a ‘practical’ reason to maintain a space program, even the smallest possibility that we could fly a mission to a potential planet-killer and knock it of course enough to miss us should be justification enough.
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August 1st, 2009 at 12:10 am
I wrote it up in my blog last week and used it to segue into a discussion of the Tunguska event of 1908? Do you know that scientists are still arguing if that a comet or an asteroid? It looked very much like an airburst of a 15 megaton nuclear weapon. Do you think the Soviets would have launched if it had happened 50 years later?
http://www.anupchurchchrestomathy.com/2009/07/large-object-hits-jupiter-without.html
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August 1st, 2009 at 12:27 am
Joel Upchurch said:
A fascinating and disturbing subject. I think one thing we’ve learned in the past few years is that the line between asteroid and comet blurs. Comets can be quite rocky and can produce fragments that can end up in orbits like asteroids.
Some distant asteroids can be icy.
Anyway, whichever category it falls into, it was a space rock or space ice ball of some type. That’s my take on it. I don’t think much of the claims that it was some kind of UFO exploding or some exotic space effect or the recoil of Nicola Tesla’s death ray on the other side of the world
Joel Upchurch said:
Considering it happened in deep Siberia in the Tunguska River region, I think probably not.. maybe, but I’d say probably not. Even today there is almost nothing there in terms of civilization and it is quite some ways from the nearest settlement, except for some very small and isolated villages that are still not really connected to the outside.
I think even if it happened in the 70’s or 80’s, it’s likely that it would not be known that such a major explosion had happened right away. They’d know *something* had happened. Seismometers and weather stations would alert them immediately, but it might take hours to assess exactly what had happened. Hopefully by then it would have been clear that they were not under nuclear attack.
But I don’t know. It might cause a nuclear response.
Now, if it happened anywhere near Moscow or any military installation or anything… that would be a different story. I think the same in the US. If a Tunguska-like event happened near Washington DC or New York it could have triggered a nuclear response against the Soviet Union.
DV82XL said:
Indeed. If we happen to see something coming at earth, I like the nuclear response (as in nuclear explosions). I don’t say this just because I like nuclear energy and like the idea of putting nuclear explosives to work in space.
What I mean by this is a standoff nuclear explosion or a series of them. They would produce a powerful burst of radiation to vaporize material on one side of the body and thus push it in the opposite direction.
For one thing, it’s a simple idea. We have nukes, we have them armored to survive in a space enviornment. We can do it without developing much new and could probably do it relatively fast.
If the bomb gets there and goes off, then the basics of the plan work. It’s relatively fast. If it fails to push it far enough we know right away and could mount a contingency mission.
Also, nuclear explosives are the most energetic things we have. If there is anything headed to earth, I want to push it away as hard as we can. I’m not worried that it will be pushed further off course than it needs to be. In fact, I don’t want to push it off course so it misses earth by a hair. I want to take the most liberal reasonable estimate of how much it would take to push it safely away from the earth and then double it.
Yes, it’s a brute force approach, but I consider it a lot more realistic than some idea to deploy massive mylar reflectors to shine light on it or to have a series of ion-engine powered “gravity tugs” hovering near it.
I don’t want to find out half way into the mission that we underestimated the mass or that one of the grids on one of the ion engines shorted out. I don’t want to find out that the mylar sails didn’t deploy completely or that some other fanciful and long time table plan has a glitch. I want to whack that thing as hard as we can and be over with it!
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August 1st, 2009 at 1:05 am
drbuzz0 said:
The nice thing about the Teller-Ulam design is that one can multi-stage a device to any arbitrary size very easily once you have the primary in hand. It would be little trouble to make 1000Mt explosives that would still be launchable.
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August 1st, 2009 at 1:56 am
DV82XL said:
It would certainly require a large launch platform.
It it were up to me, though, I’d go with a barge of several explosives. That would increase the chances of success even if one or more of them somehow did not make it or did not explode in the proper position for one reason or another.
There is a nuclear weapon design which I favor for such use. The W-71 warhead. The W-71 is a very unique design. It’s a hydrogen bomb with a nominal yield of around 5 megatons. There are a few things that make the design uniquely suitable, in my humble opinion. It was designed for use in outer space, as part of the Safeguard missile defense program. It was the warhead for the Spartan missile interceptor. The weapon was specialy designed by Lawrence Livermore Labs. It is a radiation enhanced weapon. It produces an enormous neutron flux, and an extremely large x-ray flux. The X-ray flux of the weapon may very well be the highest of any nuclear weapon built.
The reason for this is that the anti-missile system was intended to create a large area of outer space where any incoming missiles and warheads would be destroyed by the sheer energy of the x-rays and the other radiation produced. It was envisioned that any incoming nuclear weapons with in a fairly large radius would have their outer material vaporized, causing them to implode. Weapons at a much larger radius could possibly be effected by frying their electronics or other systems.
(honestly, in a nuclear attack, I’d be all for such a defensive strategy. It’s a little bit of a hail mary, because you throw a bunch of these up in the path of the missiles and hope none get through, but at the very least, it will almost certainly defeat a large portion of them. I’ll take a geomagnetic storm, a communications blackout and a lot of satellites fried over the destruction of a whole bunch of cities. If it created orbital conditions that made space flight by humans impossible for a few years, that’s a small price to pay in my humble opinion.)
The design is reportedly farily unique, although secret, so how it departs from a conventional Teller-Ulam design is not clear.
The W-71’s were all dismantled after their retirement in 1992. They had spent some time in storage after the short lives Spartan was taken out of action.
How fast a W-71 based design could be reassembled, I really don’t know. The issue with “dismantling” nuclear weapons is that by current treaties, it can mean anything from complete destruction of them to taking them apart but keeping all the parts together for possible rapid reassembly.
In any case, we certainly have the weapons pits for them still, as none of the pits have been remelted. We likely still have the tampers and we may even still have the secondaries. Much of that stuff is still in storage as no official policy has been made for its final fate. We certainly have the basic designs, so I would think a W-71 based design should be producible in a short period.
That would be my choice. A whole bunch of W-71’s. Mount them on Centaur rocket stages. The Centaur is an off the shelf stage which would make a good kick stage to get them there fast, especially if it were used exclusively for the outer space orbital escape part.
My plan would be to take some instruments and communications and control items and hook it up to a W-71 derived warhead and then put a bunch of them on top of Centaurs and launch them on Delta rockets, or for that matter, Russian Proton rockets or European Adrian rockets. (Hell, if earth is in danger, I really don’t think that the international politics of a joint US-Russian program involving nuclear weapons would really matter that much. And if the Russians have anything like the W-71, I’d be for using that too)
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August 1st, 2009 at 2:17 am
Well being able to respond to an asteroid or something is worthwhile. I support funding that. But all this money for going back to the moon, mars and sending probe after probe to mars is, in my opinion, a poor way of spending money when we have so many problems back on earth.
I wonder, do we have delivery vehicles capable of launching a nuclear weapon into space? ICBMs can go anywhere in the world, escaping earths gravity is a lot more miles away. A better goal is dis-arming our nuclear weapons stockpiles since we are our own biggest threat.
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August 1st, 2009 at 2:29 am
drbuzz0 said:
I don’t know, but obama did make a big re-commitment to strategic arms reduction (1). He made comments also about recycling the material from nuclear weapons so they can’t be re-used in a weapon, but I don’t know if that pertained to our stockpile or not. He also stopped re-processing though so I think he is very commited.
(1): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7252/full/460152b.html
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August 1st, 2009 at 3:24 am
drbuzz0 said:
Not really – a modern multistage device of that yield would be about the size of a communications satellite. The multiplying effect is huge, far beyond what would be needed for a weapon on Earth. But for this sort of demolition job it would be just the ticket.
drbuzz0 said:
The biggest man made nuclear explosion was done by the USSR with the ‘Tsar Bomba’ (officially the RDS-220) Khrushchev initiated the project on July 10, 1961, demanding that the test take place in late October, to advance some political agenda of his own, so the device was built from of the shelf parts in a space of a few months. I don’t think construction would be an issue.
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August 1st, 2009 at 3:57 am
DV82XL said:
It would depend on the circumstances, I suppose. The way I’ve generally envisioned it is that you use whatever very large rocket you have, such as a Delta or something and you max out the capacity of the rocket by adding as much fuel to the upper stage as possible, thus getting it to the target as fast as possible. I’d want it to get there as quickly as possible to allow for a second shot if it somehow failed and also because the quicker the thing is deflected the sooner you can breathe a sigh of relief.
How large a weapon you’d want would also depend on the circumstances. I’d really like to use a reasonably large one, because I’m not worried about deflecting it further than it needs to be. Also, as stated, I’d consider more than one to be a good idea.
But as far as using an ICBM, the current generation of ICBM’s like the Minuteman don’t carry a huge payload. They were developed after there had been considerable progress with the miniaturization of nuclear weapons and thus don’t have to be that large.
The Minotaur rocket is the satellite launch version of the Minuteman. (or to be more acurate, it’s a rocket built out of the same primary stages as the minuteman family and in many cases uses decommissioned minuteman I and II stages). It’s a real pea-shooter of a launch platform. It can deliver only about 400 kg to orbit. That’s not enough for a descent size warhead and a kick stage.
The old Titan ICBM’s could launch a fairly descent payload into orbit, but they were designed to carry the W-53 warhead, a very large and heavy nuke. 9 megatons and very heavy. Also, the older reentry vehicles for the warhead were large and heavy.
The minuteman III was activated in 1970. By that time, big ICBM’s were becoming obsolete.
DV82XL said:
The Tsar bomba was huge in yield, but in terms of effeciency of yield/weight, it wasn’t that great. Even if the tamper had been replaced with a uranium one, thus doubling the yield, it was still damn heavy for the yield. In terms of power per kilogram it’s only mediocre.
At the time, the US was ahead of the Soviet Union in terms of scaling the weapons. I think a better weapon to send would be based on the B-41 bomb. The B-41 was the highest yeild weapon the US ever fielded. Although never tested at full yield, it had a design yield of 25 megatons. The B-41 was only about five short tons.
The maximum yield per kilogram for a nuclear weapon is said to be around 6 Kt/kg. (that’s a rule of thumb approximation, but there is a physical limit). The B-41 approaches the limit. Of course, it’s a little more with the parachute and the arming authorization circuitry and all that incidental stuff. But it’s about as effecient as a nuke gets for its weight.
Of course, it depends on the size and the velocity, it might turn out half a megaton would be enough, but I still like the W-71 design. Not only reasonably high yield, but I think it would be especially effective because of the enhanced radiation features, which were purpose designed to toast things in outer space.
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August 1st, 2009 at 4:02 am
Bruce said:
No, I’m sure it hasn’t. He may have commented on that, but as it stands, the weapons pits are all just sitting in storage at Pantex or Oak Ridge. It would be more than a comment. It would take some legislation to do that and also a while to work out what they would do and the logistics.
As it stands now, there’s not much that could be done with them. There are only a couple of TVA plants that are licensed to burn MOX fuel. The TVA being a federal agency can do that easier than other reactor owners. Apparently getting a license amendment to burn MOX from the NRC is not an easy thing and since conventional fuel is so cheap, nobody is real interested.
For the few MOX-authorized reactors we have, they only burn a partial MOX core, and we have a backlog of the stuff to use in them. I believe it was imported from russia or something. I don’t know, but that’s the other problem: We don’t reprocess our fuel so that makes it basically impossible to make MOX fuel out of weapons plutonium.
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August 1st, 2009 at 4:28 am
MOX fuel is okay, and the French certainly have been successful with it. They’ve shown it can be economical and they also have great national energy security because they can reprocess what they have for many years and reduce waste. However, if you’re only using thermal spectrum reactors and the systems we have in place now, MOX is only so-so.
What really would be the way to go (and hopefully eventually), would be to use the spent fuel from our reactors (and maybe weapons plutonium too) in some really effecient high-burnup fast spectrum reactors and an integrated fuel cycle. Some of the advanced designs for gas cooled reactors are really nifty and they can extract lots of energy from that kind of fuel. The metal cooled ones have potential too.
I know Buzz likes the lead cooled reactors. The Soviets did some pretty interesting stuff with that. They had some production ones for submarines that showed good viability. There is renewed interest there and there are some designs where the reactor maintains a high breed ratio and good burnup at the same time, and that allows it to really get a lot of energy out of the fuel before it needs reprocessing. They have some interesting core designs. Of course the issue of high in-situ conversion and extended burnup also brings up the issue of fuel integrity, but there are some interesting solutions to that too.
Oh, but I’m getting WAY off topic so sorry.
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August 1st, 2009 at 6:25 am
Makes me wonder how often this kind of thing happens, one of the gas giants getting hit by something. A few years back Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter and caused a big scar like that.
I wonder how far back this could happen and be noticed. It seems that the descent ground based telescopes can pick up on it, so how far back would we have had the ability to notice this kind of thing happening? 50 years? More? maybe back to the days of the Lowell Observatory’s hayday? But then the other issue is whether good enough telescopes would happen to be pointed at the planet.
I wonder if there are any records of other impacts over the years and just how far back we could expect the good observations that would pick this out to go.
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August 1st, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Here is a picture of the instrument Anthony Wesley used to detect the Wesley Impact.
http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00222/pg-2-wesley_222806c.jpg
It doesn’t take that large an instrument, but someone has to be looking in the right direction at the right time.
Also digital photography makes a huge difference, since you don’t need to be looking through the eyepiece to know something happened. Even 35mm film is pretty expensive compared to that. We have had good telescope for a long time, but cheap digital high quality photography has only been around for a little over ten years. If we want to, we could probably set up an automated Jupiter watch and just review the take the next day.
Also any asteroid interceptor should be mounted on the ISS, where it can be under joint US-Russian control and would have a favorable delta-v compared to a ground based system.
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August 1st, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Joel Upchurch said:
I have thought about getting more involved in some backyard astronomy. I used to have a pretty good telescope when I was a lot younger – nothing hugely expensive, but it could provide some fairly good views of Jupiter and Saturn.
I really think that the digital imaging revolution has made amateur astronomy a much different and better experience than it was years ago. I’ve fooled around with some friend’s equipment and it’s a lot of fun and easier. I really love dispensing with the eyepiece and having a digital camera that substitutes for the eyepiece. You can see the images on a small television or a laptop computer or something like that. It’s great, because there’s no squinting and you can gather around it with other friends and point at things and such.
You can also take pictures easily. Older telescopes generally didn’t do that and you have to go to a lot of trouble to rig a clunky 35mm camera to it. You see it on the monitor and when it’s lined up and in focus, just hit a button and take the picture. Depending on what you have, pictures can range from interesting to spectacular. There are good adapters for high resolution DSLR cameras, but even a two megapixel eyepiece camera that’s a glorified webcam beats squinting in the eyepiece, in my book.
You can do other things on the screen, like jack up the contrast or color saturation or add a sharpening filter, to make things more viewable. Also, I’ve seen some programs that can do a time exposure of several seconds or more and track objects in the frame, compensating for motion to get a good time exposure without motion trails. Previously that would have required a very expensive continuous mechanical tracking mount for the telescope.
Then there’s also the fact that electronically steered telescopes are a joy to position. I don’t have the steadiest hands in the world, and using the little arrow buttons, like on the Mead telescopes, along with the automated positioning just makes it so much easier than trying to put it in the general area by hand and then mess with the thumb screws. I had experiences where they were not tight and my firehead bumped the eyepiece and knocked the object I wanted to see completely out of frame.
Really, it’s all just come so far and some of this stuff is so affordable, while not long ago having precision digital electronics to steer the telescope and a video feed from the eyepiece was the domain of real professional grade stuff. I’s a great time for the hobby. Some might complain that it’s more distant when you’re looking at planets and stars on a computer screen or a video monitor and steering the scope with arrow keys, but I absolutely love it.
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August 1st, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Astronomy is not really my primary scientific interest or hobby, although it is definitely cool and interesting. I have used the new digital imaging telescopes and the motion tracking and the electronic adjustment. It’s awesome. If I ever bought a telescope, there’s no way I’d buy one with the thumb screws and stuff. Even if it meant my budget got me less intensive optics in favor of the electronic mount. It is just a joy to use them. There’s no hassle or messing with it. It’s great.
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August 1st, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Bruce said:
I think I’ve asked this before, but please ONCE AGAIN, I ASK, explain what fuel reprocessing has to do with nuclear weapons, proliferation or the price of pickles in Brooklyn.
Nuclear reprocessing of recycling spent fuel into new fuel by separating it into its components, and reusing the fissile material to produce new fuel. It can also yeild useful isotopes for industrial purposes.
NONE of the countries with nuclear weapons fielded in the world used reprocessing of the fuel from light water power reactors to produce those weapons. If you separated out the fissile material from spent fuel and went to use it in a weapon, you would find it wholly unsuitable for a weapon. If it were from the current reactors with their burnup cycle, chances are it would not work at all.
There are countries with reprocessing programs that do not have nuclear weapons and never had any kind of proliferation arise from reprocessing, such as Japan and South Korea. There are countries which are currently reprocessing their fuel to one extent or another or recently have. These include France, the UK, Russia. In all cases, they never used their reprocessing program to make materials for weapons. NEVER. They never would. Why would they want to use such poorly suited material for their weapons? We never did, even back when we reprocessed fuel, we never used it for weapons and never had any reason to.
Having a reprocessing program does not mean you have weapons grades materials. Reprocessing does not produce them. Some of the systems can be used for producing weapons grade materials, but alone they can’t. To do that you need a reactor operated in a capacity to produce weapons grade plutonium. These are reactors with short irradiation cycles. They do not use high burn up fuel for making weapons grade materials because it’s all but useless for that.
Power reactors are not designed to do this and in their normal operations they don’t. Back when we were producing weapons grade plutonium, we used dedicated reactors that were wholly seperate from the civilian electricity generating program. They were located at Savanah River and Hanford.
If we suddenly decided we wanted to make more nuclear weapons, we would not need to make more plutonium nor would we ever even consider using reprocessing to get it. We have a large surplus of plutonium pits. In the highly unlikely situation that we decided to make new nuclear weapons and so many of them that it exhausted our sizable stockpile, then we would not use fuel reprocessing to produce more weapons grade plutonium. That would be pointless. Instead we would restart the mothballed reactors at Hanford and Savanah River.
If you want to get rid of that surplus by burning it as fuel then you need to have a plutonium recycling program and start allowing for plutonium based fuels in our reactors. Normally MOX fuel which comes from weapons grade material is denatured by reprocessing it with reactor grade spent fuel. Thus, you effectively need a reprocessing program to do so.
Our spent fuel, for all intents and purposes, can’t be used to make weapons. The spent fuel from certain reactors can be used, although it’s not optimal. The only spent fuel that could be used as the source of a weapon is the spent fuel from a reactor like the early fuel cycles of the Magox, which had a very low burnup refueling interval or possibly from the RBMK, but only if operated on a shortened interval cycle. We don’t use those. We use primarily PWR’s and also BWR’s. Those just won’t do for nuclear weapons.
So again, please explain to me how exactly being against reprocessing is in any way going to reduce weapons proliferation.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 12:04 am
An Actual Scientist said:
The only link is that the PUREX process is used for both spent fuel reprocessing and for refining Pu from breeder reactors – it’s the so called ‘dual-use’ meme that started to infect the nonproliferation discussion starting in the mid Seventies. The theory was that nations should move to dismantle all parts of the nuclear cycle that could be used to make weapons. Reprocessing was one of them and there were moves towards limiting enrichment and stopping the non-warhead use of HEU. Research reactors were refueled with 20% cores even though there were several decades left to burn on the HEU cores they had in them.
The U.S. started to push for these changes internationally and so as not to look like hypocrites they started with themselves. In the States that meant they went after such potential proliferators as the University of Missouri-Rolla, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Laboratory École Polytechnique (Que) and forced them to derate their research reactors.
The other area was to stop reprocessing spent fuel so as to take the moral high ground and set a good example to the rest of the world.
That’s the link such as it is. Of course the antinuclear movement has been playing the reprocessing=bombs tune since then and idiots like our Bruce lap it up.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 12:56 am
DV82XL said:
Sorry if I lost my temper a little, but you’re right that the PUREX process is used in both cases (or some equivalent uranium separation process). As I said, this is not in and of itself, sufficient to produce weapons grade materials. You also need a suitable breeder and that’s a much more difficult part of the equation to provide.
Separating the plutonium is not a terribly complicated chemical process. The reactor and fuel cycle are the largest issue, along with, of course, the design and fabrication facilities. Even as we stopped reprocessing spent fuel, however, we continued to maintain the capability to process weapons grade plutonium, well into the 1980’s. That is what is so insane about this argument. We stopped using the PUREX process for producing non-weapons grade material, even as at other facilities, we maintained it for weapons production and this is supposed to somehow reduce weapons proliferation?
The other thing to consider is that plutonium is not necessary for a weapon. You can also make a weapon out of highly enriched uranium. We continue to enrich uranium, of course, as we always have to produce reactor fuel. An enrichment facility is far more “dual use” because it can be used to make weapons material without modification. The only difference is the mode of operation, which is to have more cycles of the uranium hexadecimal until it reaches greater enrichment.
DV82XL said:
What a bunch of bologna. How does reducing waste and providing clean energy come out as being morally inferior?
The technology of reprocessing can be used to make nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons also require other technologies. We need to have the ability to solder to make their internal electronics. Shall we ban soldering because it can be used in the fabrication of weapons? We need screw drivers to put them together, so shall we ban screw drivers? Is that the idea? To ban every tool or technology that could be used in producing a nuclear weapon? Maybe we should ban the delivery systems as well. Lets stop flying and building airplanes, since airplanes can deliver the weapons.
Sorry if this gets me a little hot under the collar. It’s been a long day.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 1:42 am
An Actual Scientist said:
You are not alone. This is a subject that has always made me see red, I guess because coming from a nation that has a lively nuclear sector and doesn’t have a weapons program, I can hardly believe it when my own countrymen blithely offer this worn out adage that nuclear power leads inevitably to nuclear weapons. I have had several very animated discussions on this subject over the years, to the point where now I can feel my long-suffering wife’s stare boring into the back of my head from across a room full of people if the conversation strays into that territory.
The unfortunate thing is this myth of nuclear energy being the handmaiden of nuclear weapons, not just in reference to Canada, but as a generally accepted truth has become so entrenched that it is now assumed to be a given even by most on the pronuclear side. Nuclear energy is in and of itself, not a proliferation risk. No more than a fertilizer production industry necessarily means that a nation also manufactures high explosives, although both use the same basic chemistry. The conceived need for the latter, does not depend on the existence of the former, which is in essence what is being implied.
No country has ever proceeded with a nuclear weapons program, just because it was able to. There has to be a really strong perceived need for this capability, that when present is enough to carry the task through as much international pressure as can be applied short of military.
Look at those countries that have acquired the Bomb after the US did, even England and France were under a great deal of pressure not to arm, but did so despite both being very economically and politically in debt to the US at the time, and both were rebuilding after having been damned near burnt to the ground. Much of the friction between DeGaul and the Americans was rooted in the French pursuing nuclear weapons against American pressure not to.
Israel and South Africa mounted programs because they recognized they were vulnerable to invasion, India needed a deterrent against Chinese incursions into Kashmir and to draw a line in the sand with Pakistan, who in turn looked at India to the East, Communists to the North, and Fundamentalists to the West and knew their armed forces could not successfully defend the country with conventional weapons alone. All of these States faced sanctions, that truly hurt domestically, India in particular was desperate for more nuclear energy, and found itself cut off from the world in this matter at a very critical time. Even North Korea’s program is motivated more by fear than by self aggrandizement, irregardless of propaganda to the contrary.
Meanwhile countries like Canada, Japan, Germany, Brazil, South Korea could build a deliverable weapon inside a year should they want to, and Australia, and several European nations could mount programs which could do the same within five if pushed, yet they don’t. Even South Africa dismantled their weapons as soon as the threat diminished. The reason is because this is a cripplingly expensive capability to acquire and maintain and no nation will do so without its back to the wall. Even the Big Five are effected by this and most of the push for nuclear arms reduction is motivated by financial pressure more than ideological.
The point here is that the pursuit of these programs, if there is a perceived need, will be carried out with or without the existence of anti-proliferation measures. A.Q. Khan did not depend on the domestic nuclear program, Pakistan’s two nuclear power reactors were under international safeguards during the time Khan was building their weapons.
Hand wringing over the issue of weapons proliferation seems to be locked in theories first put forward in the 1960’s which events since that time has proven wrong. If you recall, it was assumed by those theories there would be more than a dozen new nuclear weapons States by the turn of the century – is is obviously just not so. Even if the question of suppling weapon-grade fissile material is removed, it still requires a sizable technological infrastructure and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to make a weapon. The costs of a more ambitious program aimed at producing a militarily significant number of weapons can easily run into the billions of dollars, and the idea that such a project could be carried out by surreptitiously stripping power reactors of their fuel belongs in pulp novels, not in any rational discussion of the issue.
This whole idea that proliferation is some sort of accident waiting to happen, and that unchecked will lead to a domino effect is pure fantasy based on the overactive imaginations of Cold War strategists like Herman Kahn who were working in a vacuum. Events, real events on the ground have proven their theories short-sighted, and they should not be applied to the current situation. It is time to re-evaluate the whole foundation of proliferation risk based on historical fact rather than inductive reasoning.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 am
In general most countries that have developed nuclear weapons did so for pretty strong reasons and not just because they felt like it.
That being said, I’m starting to wonder about what is going on with North Korea. The argument was made that they were trying to keep pressure up in order to maintain forign military presence in the area and thus keep themselves stable and to use the power of the US along with South Korea and Japan to balance China.
That may have been a valid explanation when they tested their intercontinental rocket a few months back. However, that test alone, combined with their 2006 nuclear test was enough saber rattling to keep tensions up and the military presence in the area for the time being.
If they wanted to do that a good strategy would be to pull off one of these stunts like a missile test or something every year or two, just to keep anyone from forgetting.
However, since then, they have conducted another nuclear test followed by a number of missile “tests” where they fired a variety of short and medium range ballistic missiles in Japan’s general direction. Then they made some statements implying firing a large missile in the general vicinity of Hawaii, on July 4th no less. This is a very clear and very thinly veiled threat of direct aggression. This didn’t happen, but instead on July 4th, just so it wasn’t a complete let down, they fired a bunch of modified long range SCUD type missiles in the general direction of Japan.
Even as this is happening, they are saying that they’re enriching uranium. They’re not even doing what Iran does and saying it’s for a peaceful power program. They’re candid that it’s for nuclear weapons and they openly and proudly announce that they’re working feverishly to produce as many nuclear warheads and missiles to carry them as soon as possible.
Given all this, I’m starting to think less and less that there is a good stratigic reason for this. Quite honestly, I am more and more convinced that Kim Jong Il has his personal reasons. He is reported in poor health and he has always lived in a strange kind of world, as dictator of an isolated country and with some very clear grudges against his neighbors. It would not be the first time a dictator started to feel they were not getting enough attention or believed that their days were numbered and started to do some really irrational and destructive things.
I’m starting to think more and more that there’s turmoil at the top in North Korea and Kim Jong Il is getting erratic and starting to call things based on his own need for attention and power.
I know it can be naive to just assume that things are run by a wacko on the top and in the past, that assumption has failed and the leaders have turned out to be crazy like a fox. I don’t know in this case though.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 4:10 am
DV82XL said:
We have to be very careful about declaring any international player’s motivations irrational.
North Korea has gained much from their program in the way of concessions that they probably wouldn’t have got otherwise. Since the fall of Communism in China and Russia the attitude of all the previous stakeholders has been to starve NK into submission by neglect. By embarking on the pursuit of nuclear weapons Kim Jong Il has made his nation impossible to ignore, and has basically been paid-off after every display. Off-hand one could say it is one of the more successful uses of nuclear weapons since the Americans ended the war with Japan.
Quoting, from Stuart Slade’s, The Nuclear Game – An Essay on Nuclear Policy Making:
Again it is overly simplistic to think that leaders like Kim Jong Il work in a vacuum, like all kleptocrats they hold power because they are kept there by other criminals, criminals that lead a very comfortable life. If one individual doesn’t understand the implications of holding nuclear weapons, others do. If Kim’s actions pose a risk to them he can and will be deposed in an instant. The fact remains we have yet to see a “madman with an A-bomb” show up outside of the movies, nor are we likely to.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 5:10 am
DV82XL said:
I think that Kim Jong ill is being rational. Look what happened another member of Bush’s “axis of evil” that failed to get nuclear weapons, Iraq was occupied by the US for seven years, essentially. Also, North Korea and Iran both say they are building their missiles for a space program, as well as military use.
And about re-processing, yes, the point is that we need to denounce such technologies and lead by example. It would be hypocritical for us to maintain these capabilities and tell others they shouldn’t. And to the pro-nuke people who thought Obama’s shutting down Yucca made re-processing more likely, think again. Re-processing is not about to start in the US anytime soon, back on June 29 the administration directed that the review of re-processing not more forward, so the financial boondoggle of re-processing is killed for the time being.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 5:14 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Nuclear_Energy_Partnership
What a disaster of a program. Thanks for nothing, George W.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 11:06 am
Bruce said:
I really had a lot of enthusiasm for that program but it has not turned out to be much. I wouldn’t call it a disaster so much as a disappointment. It has been under funded and hasn’t been given the attention or had the real motivation it should have.
The GNEP still has potential, but it’s going to need a bigger commitment. A bigger follow through.
The fact that the DOE has announced they won’t be following through with research on alternative reprocessing cycles is a HUGE disipointment. At least they managed to get some R&D done before the program was killed. It looks like we’re going to have to rely on France and Japan to produce innovations in that area.
Bruce said:
Did you not bother reading what the Actual Scientist posted or did you just not care?
Reprocessing of fuel has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Sure, they share some of the same technologies, but that doesn’t make reprocessing at all capable of producing nuclear weapons. The places where reprocessing is done are also illuminated by electric lighting, as are weapons development centers, I suppose you denounce that too?
Also, we still have the capacity to produce weapons grade materials. We never lost that. It’s generally in mothballs, but it was never dismantled. We continued to process weapons grade materials into the 1980’s, even long after we stopped reprocessing fuel.
The two are not the same thing. Denouncing such technology is a boneheaded lie.
Please read the comments and information. Some of the people who comment here are extremely knowledgeable on this matter.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 11:16 am
DV82XL said:
Yes, but as I was saying, their program was producing the results of international attention even before they started lopping a whole bunch of missiles at Japan or threatening Hawaii. That’s not just overkill in terms of projects that will produce tension, it borders on suicidal.
Some of the threats made by their government and some of the things they’ve done, that are directly and unveiled threats to their neighbors and to the US are the kind of thing that goes beyond making others take notice. It would not surprise me entirely if the statements and actions lead to the US (or for that matter Japan or someone else) to decide to go and completely destroy the North Korean launch facilities by sending in a number of cruise missiles. We’ve done that kind of thing over less. And really, I don’t even think it would solicit international outrage. If a country is saying that they’re planning on sending a missile “test” in your direction and they have already been very aggressive about their nuclear weapons and missile policy, then a preemptive strike is going to be seen as a legitimate action to protect your own interests.
The missile test this year would have done nicely to keep them noticed and keep up tensions. They could have done that and then had another missile test in a few months and maybe a nuclear test in two years and that kind of thing would have kept up things up. But the level of activity of a missile test, announcements of nuclear ambitions and uranium enriching, threatening Hawaii, a nuclear weapons test all in a matter of a couple of months goes beyond keeping themselves noticed.
China is not happy about the nuclear testing. They would prefer not to have anyone in the region rock the boat and potentially cause them economic problems by sending the area into any kind of uncertainly or conflict. I would not put it above China to get impatient and decide they’d really like a real world trial of their newest precision missiles and thus give a good hard wack to the major North Korean nuclear research sites with a series of missile strikes. They could justify it pretty easily in the given situation and I really don’t think at this point the US or others would really be all that upset over it.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I understand it doesn’t have anything to do with our nuclear stockpile, but there are dual purpose aspects of it and in that sense I think it’s better for us to lead by example and not do it. Also, the current administration cancelled that program so I’m not alone on that.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Bruce, I would respond to your comments about reprocessing, except it’s Sunday morning and slept in and have only just taken my blood pressure medication. I want to be sure that the pill is completely dissolved and has gotten into my blood stream completely before I tackle this one because I don’t want to pop a vein.
If I am uncharacteristically irritated about this it’s because this is an area which I’ve grown especially tried of hearing about. Sorry if that’s unprofessional, but the fact that some people just won’t listen to the facts about this and are so confident in their own false information is a potent annoyance.
I know quite a lot about spent fuel and fuel cycles, Bruce. I’ve spent many years working directly in that area. You don’t have to listen to me if you don’t want to, but without sounding like I’m tooting my own horn, you won’t find very many people out there who are more knowledgeable or have more information in this particular area.
I have gotten paid a good amount of money as a consultant. Companies will pay someone like me good money to provide them information and answer their questions. Not here, however. Here I do it for free. I’ve always been happy to engage anyone in the public in a discussion over these kind of things becasue I think people should know about it and I enjoy relating my experiences and informing others.
It’s a pet peeve of mine when people say they care about the issues and then will completely ignore the facts which are presented to them, sometimes repeatedly. I can’t help that it gets under my skin a little at times.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Well, I do appreciate that you have a background in the industry. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that you have a real in depth knowledge of all this, specifically, reprocessing. You’re probably right that the processes you’re addressing – that they don’t present a proliferation risk. Of course, the risk is not that [i]we[/i] will get enriched nuclear material, instead it’s the question of setting a good example, like I said before.
So the PUREX process can be used to extract the plutonium from spent fuel. Is there some other version of re-processing, that does not have this dual use aspect?
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August 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Bruce said:
You have no idea what you’re talking about and can only support your stand by providing examples of others who are equally misguided or have bowed to political pressure by those who are equally misguided or just want to advance their own interest.
It’s not as dual use as you think. Enrichment is far more capable of being turned into a weapons producing method. The extraction chemistry is the same. That is where it ends. Making weapons grade material and making fuel rods is not the same. Making weapons grade plutonium requires additional refining steps not used in fuel production and it requires smelting the material and usually alloying it. Fuel production is limited to reducing the plutonium to an oxide and rod fabrication is different than weapons core fabrication.
In the US, reprocessing of civilian nuclear fuel for power reactors was done until the 1970’s. There was research on the subject at national laboratories. The sites where it was done on a comercial scale were West Valley New York and Hope River Rhode Island.
Nuclear weapon material production was never done at these sites and they had only the ability to do a small portion of the process anyway. Nuclear fuel production was accomplished by reactors at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Hanford Site in Washington State. Some of the materials extraction was done at both Hanford and Savanah River. (Mostly Hanford, which also did materials processing on site when it first opened for the Manhattan project and was the primary site for this for a few years after) There was a major plutonium processing plant at Hanford when it first started making the material but this scaled back and was closed. During most of the cold war, the processing and smelting of plutonium and the fabrication of weapons components was done at the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado. From its opening in 1952 to the time the facility stopped component production in 1992, the Rocky Flats plant was the primary location for all plutonium smelting and chemical processing and for the fabrication of weapons pits. The materials produced at the Rocky Flats plant or any other plutonium or HEU components were assembled into weapons at the Pantex plant in Texas. The assembly of experimental weapons and the development of production methods was carried out at the Sandia National Laboratory, so some assembly was done there.
These are the sites that did the materials processing for weapons plutonium:
Hanford
Savannah River
Rocky Flats
Pantex
Sandia
Oak Ridge also did materials processing (but mostly just for HEU)
These sites were not the same for reprocessing. Closing reprocessing sites in no way affected the sites that produced weapons material. They were never the same. They were different and completely unrelated projects.
The claim otherwise was made up by politicians and groups who care less about honesty than they do their own interests.
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August 6th, 2009 at 2:49 am
Why does every post on here turn into a debate over the history of the US in the area of nuclear weapons and whether or not it was the big bad bringer of evil to the world?
I was hoping to talk about Jupiter and astronomy, but I think that would be off topic now.
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