One does not simply destroy a nuclear weapon

https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/nuclear-weapon-disposal/

by loteck • 4 years ago

168 153 4 years ago

loteck• 4 years ago

The author of the post is replying to an NYT article [0] complaining that the US doesn't actually destroy nukes, but rather aims to recycle materials and so stores those materials in the meantime while awaiting need for those materials. This makes it seem like maybe the US is just being opportunisitic and not actually disarming.

Exceprt from the blog:

Second, it's extremely difficult to destroy plutonium effectively (some weapons are built out of highly enriched uranium and that can just be diluted in U-238 and used for reactors). Obviously, you can melt it down, but that just leaves you with a chunk of subcritical plutonium which someone can re-form into a new weapon. The plutonium is highly toxic, so you can't just grind it up and scatter it around without causing huge environmental impacts (watch Chernobyl if you want to get a sense of what I'm talking about here). You can't burn it because then you're going to have oxidized plutonium in the air, which you don't want people inhaling, and while you can of course use chemicals to dissolve it, vitrify it, etc. you're still left with an equivalent amount of plutonium, just bonded to some other stuff, and so it's just a matter of (potentially highly unpleasant) chemistry to get it back out again. In other words, it's precisely the properties of plutonium that make it attractive to build nuclear weapons out of that make it so hard to dispose of.

It's also very difficult to store because while an individual weapon may not be a critical mass, if you have tens or hundreds of weapons you have to worry about them getting close enough to worry about accidentally assembling a critical mass just from proximity, which, would of course, be bad.

[0] https://archive.ph/QCaov

xxpor2• 4 years ago

Now obviously this would cost a shitload of cash, but could you dispose of it by building a reactor? Said reactor would consume it as the fuel, and so you'd end up with fission products instead of plutonium. The costs, security, and the fact that reactors don't use up 100% of their fuel would of course be an issue...

ekr____• 4 years ago

OP here. Yes, this seems to be the best available approach. You apparently can burn it in regular reactors if you mix it with uranium in what's called "mixed oxide fuel" (MOX). However, there are a bunch of logistical hiccups that make all of this a giant pain.

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

MSR MSR MSR aka LFTR LFTR LFTR

see my comment below.

Hint: MSRs use 99-100% of fuel.

adql• 4 years ago

It's mostly political problem of "it's safer to store it in some bunker than to literally ship nuclear bomb material to power plants". At least according to wikipedia there are reactors in US that were built to also take MOX but it's just not done. And process of production/reprocessing also is harder.

I'm sure it would be far cheaper to burn it than store otherwise.

rootusrootus2• 4 years ago

Given the difficulty and expense of building a reactor, I wonder if it would be cheaper to just start firing it into outer space. I'm guessing we could engineer a nigh indestructible container capable of surviving rocket malfunctions [without leaking]. How many Falcon 9 launches would it take...

implements• 4 years ago

It's also very difficult to store because while an individual weapon may not be a critical mass, if you have tens or hundreds of weapons you have to worry about them getting close enough to worry about accidentally assembling a critical mass just from proximity, which, would of course, be bad.

Plutonium is an alpha emitter, and I believe the pits are plutonium alloyed with gallium and plated with gold to manage that and reduce chemical interactions with their immediate environment - there’s no “critical mass” storage problem, I think.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)#Material_...]

smaddox• 4 years ago

Plutonium is definitely able to go critical: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

A plutonium sphere of roughly 10 kg is sufficient.

kennend38• 4 years ago

there’s no “critical mass” storage problem,

These accidental criticality accidents indicate otherwise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident

Accidentally going "critical" is a very real risk, especially with plutonium and it allotropes

skorpeon872• 4 years ago

Pu-239 is an alpha emitter, but that's not the end of the story. All plutonium weapon cores are also neutron emitters because all weapons grade plutonium is impure and contains 2-7% Pu-240. Pu-240 is very prone to undergoing spontaneous fission which emits neutrons. So the presence of neutron radiation around a plutonium weapon core is unavoidable.

Furthermore, when Pu-239 is struck by neutrons (from the Pu-240 contaminant, for instance), it has a chance of undergoing fission and that results in the release of more neutrons which can cause additional Pu-239 to undergo fission. This chain reaction is how Pu-239 bombs work. A properly stored core will not sustain this chain reaction because the core is in a sub-critical configuration.

So there is in fact a very serious critical mass concern with plutonium bomb cores.

not2b2• 4 years ago

The alpha particles don't cause the chain reaction. Neutrons do, and they are a good deal harder to shield than alpha particles. The rate of spontaneous fission is very low but once it gets started, in a critical mass it will keep growing.

Victerius2• 4 years ago

This raises a tricky question: Should the United States open or reopen a production line for nuclear weapons in order to avoid losing their manufacturing know-how, the way we do with M1A2 Abrams tanks? The United States once produced thousands of tanks per year. Today, there is only one tank plant left open in the nation, the Lima Army Tank Plant. For years, US Army leaders have asked Congress to stop purchasing new tanks because they didn't need them, but Congress kept ordering the Department of Defense to buy tanks anyway. They did this for two reasons. First, because the tank plant is a source of jobs in Ohio. Second, because tanks, especially modern, 21st century tanks, are specialized tools, and we wouldn't want to forget how to build them. An argument is made than it is cheaper to keep producing tanks that are not needed than it would be to restart a tank production line if one didn't exist. The argument is sensible and most likely true. After the US Air Force ordered an early end to the production of the F-22 Raptor in the early 2010s, the production line was dismantled. A report in the last few years estimated the cost to restart the production line in the billions, if not the low tens of billions.

So, back to nuclear weapons. The United States manufactured tens of thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Most of these weapons have been decommissioned and the production lines have been shut down. The United States no longer manufactures nuclear weapons. Now, the incoming Ground Based Strategic Deterrent will be built by Northrop Grumman in the next few years to start replacing the aging Minuteman III ICBMs, but the warheads and the nuclear cores will be recycled from existing ICBMs.

Which raises a question: How would the United States replenish its nuclear weapons if the need arose? For example, after a nuclear war, where the US lost or expended 80% of its arsenal? The question of what to do after a nuclear war may sound absurd to some, but it's a worthwhile and interesting one. More on point, what if the nuclear cores degrade to a point where they may no longer work? This is essentially what the Department of Energy's Nuclear Stewardship Program is for. It's a program that costs billions of dollars a year and uses supercomputers to model the slow degradation of the nuclear cores in the stockpile.

But here's where it gets trickier. The New START treaty will expire in 2026. If it is not extended or replaced by a new treaty, there will be nothing stopping Russia from expanding its nuclear arsenal. China is also expanding its nuclear arsenal as we speak. Last week's report by the Department of Defense claims that China will have 1,500 nuclear weapons within a decade or so. China is building new nuclear weapons. The United States is not. And China is not bound by any arms control treaty.

Now, the US also happens to have about 1,400-1,500 nuclear weapons deployed, plus a few thousand more in storage, disassembled.

But what if China decides at some point to push past 1,500? To 2,000? 5,000?

A country with 5,000 nuclear weapons could conduct a first strike against a country with 1,500 nuclear weapons, on a 2:1 ratio, and still have 2,000 nukes in reserve for further strikes. This is why the nuclear arms race happened between the US and the Soviet Union in the first place. Any disparity in the deployed arsenals gives the side with more the advantage. So if China ever decides to expand beyond 1,500, the strategically sound move for the US would be to start building more, to match the Chinese production. It would be tragic, but it's not impossible.

But the US no longer manufactures nukes, so the old production lines would need to be reopened.

mikeyouse5• 4 years ago

There is no world in which the US "lost or expended 80% of its arsenal" that it would matter at all whether we could produce more. I can't even think of a good analogy. "Should I store a box of extra smoke detectors in my attic in case I have a house fire and my current ones are destroyed?"

Victerius2• 4 years ago

I respectfully disagree. In the 12 months following a nuclear war, Americans would still need to file their taxes before the April 15 deadline, the federal and state governments would still have to pass annual budgets, software vendors like Microsoft and Apple would still need to push updates to their products, homeowners would still need to pay their annual property tax bill, people would still need to refill their drug prescriptions.... life could recover and go on. I'm not convinced that a nuclear war would be so destructive that civilization wouldn't survive. Most nuclear attacks would probably target missile silos in rural North Dakota and airbases anyway, not cities.

But, as I outlined in my comment, there are situations other than nuclear war where the US might want to restart nuke production.

mauvehaus3• 4 years ago

I think the more realistic need to produce new nuclear weapons is that for some reason parts availability for the existing ones becomes a maintenance problem. If Warhead A requires Part B which must be produced via an industrial process that was last widely used in the '70s, you no longer have a credible warhead.

It may not even be possible to spin that process back up even on a bespoke basis because it may depend on yet further now-outdated processes. Even if that's not the case, executing to a high enough degree of precision for the application may depend on a lot of now-lost trade knowledge.

But yeah, apart from the sustainment problem, there's definitely no way that replacing 80% of the US nuclear arsenal matters if the warheads were expended in anger or destroyed on the ground by nuclear weapons.

philipkglass7• 4 years ago

Submarine launched ballistic missiles and mobile missiles on land (train or truck based) break this race. If you don't know where all the enemy launchers are, having enough weapons to hit them all in a first strike doesn't matter much. That's why the US has a strong deterrent even though Russia has more warheads than it does [1]. The mobile weapons can't be guaranteed destroyed and a retaliatory strike from them will still be devastating. The US's mobile deterrent is based on submarine launched ballistic missiles but it has designed mobile land based weapons in the past, and other countries (e.g. Russia) still have mobile land based weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_des...

PeterisP• 4 years ago

It does mean that a change in intelligence (whether technical or human) that reveals the location of enemy launchers can suddenly enable this first strike - for example, if someone develops some technology capable of sensing where the US missile submarines are located, then you can't rapidly increase the size of nuclear arsenal fix the issue, you have to have the reserves pre-built.

H8crilA• 4 years ago

I think your concern is valid, but the answer would be something like "we can reopen production lines when someone else ramps up their production first". In other words - do not escalate, but respond to foreign escalation. This is a much better approach, notice that if you escalate first you leave everyone worse off, including yourself. Perhaps others are worse off than you, but you are still worse off than you were before.

If you're wondering how would you know that someone is ramping up production (can be underground, etc.) the answer is detecting underground testing via seismographs.

About the tanks, it is indeed a problem. Just look at Germany, their military industrial complex used to be one of the best in the world (I'm talking post WW2, for example Leopard tanks) but they effectively killed it. Luckily there's always another modernization behind the corner, so as long as you don't reduce the vehicle count there's enough production. Which is what Germans (and not only them) did.

Tangurena2• 4 years ago

There was a substance called FOGBANK. This is an aerogel used in thermonuclear bombs. It used acetonitrile in its construction. When absorbed into the body, acetonitrile metabolizes into hydrogen cyanide.

All of the records for making FOGBANK were destroyed. Too many workers were being poisoned by the stuff, so rather than pay out worker's comp and wrongful death lawsuits, the records were eliminated. As an aerogel, the stuff is brittle, crumbles and fractures. When the warheads needed to be reconditioned, it turned out that the limiting factor was the lack of FOGBANK. It turned out that some mysterious contaminant was needed to give it the exact properties necessary. So it had to be re-invented.

To address your other points, China's nuclear position has never been Mutually Assured Destruction - they've only wanted enough warheads to deter the opponent. In the past, this has meant about 200 warheads. Since the US has been developing anti-ballistic missile technology, that means China needs more warheads and more missiles to guarantee a sufficient deterrent. Only the US & USSR built so many nukes that the START treaties were even necessary.

But the US no longer manufactures nukes

Yes we do.

Final assembly (and disassembly) is at Pantex in Amarillo, TX. Parts are made elsewhere, some in Kansas City, some at Lawrence Livermore, some at Y2. There have never been "production lines". All of them were built as individual projects. All of them authorized and approved by Congressional oversight.

But what if?

But what if I get a pony?

How many countries has China invaded? How many have the US invaded? How many has Russia invaded? China may be run by buttheads, but I don't see them attacking others. Not like We The People have attacked and invaded.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetonitrile

themaninthedark• 4 years ago

They are quite willing to attack others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Peo...

Just looking at the number of wars that the PRC has been involved in:

1950 : Invades and Annexes Tibet

1950 - 1953 : Assists North Korea and invades South Korea

1954 : Attempted to invade Taiwan

1958 : Attempted to invade Taiwan

1962 : Sino-Indian War

1967 : Nathu La and Cho La clashes

1979 : Sino-Vietnam War

2017 : China-India border standoff

2020-2021: China-India clashes

You also claim that FOGBANK records were destroyed to cover up for lawsuits, Wikipedia does not have anything relating to that. >Manufacture involves the moderately toxic, highly volatile solvent acetonitrile, which presents a hazard for workers (causing three evacuations in March 2006 alone).

Acetonitrile may be poison but has been used in public product very recently: >It has been used in formulations for nail polish remover, despite its toxicity. At least two cases have been reported of accidental poisoning of young children by acetonitrile-based nail polish remover, one of which was fatal.[23] Acetone and ethyl acetate are often preferred as safer for domestic use, and acetonitrile has been banned in cosmetic products in the European Economic Area since March 2000.[24]

throwaway894345• 4 years ago

I mean, China basically said it would go to war to conquer Taiwan. China just fired missiles over Taiwan and into Japanese territory a few months ago. Seems like they're advertising a willingness to attack; why don't you believe them?

LetsGetTechnicl• 4 years ago

This reminds me of a recent NYT op-ed where the premise was "a little nuclear war is okay." The reality is that any amount of nuclear war is the end of humanity, there is no post-nuclear war civilization, at least not for very long.

simonh• 4 years ago

The reality is that any amount of nuclear war is the end of humanity…

Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean, but on the face of it that’s absurd. If N Korea nuked S Korea and the US nuked them back, or if Pakistan and India decided to toast a few of each others cities, the impact on the rest of the world would be mostly economic.

adventured3• 4 years ago

The reality is that any amount of nuclear war is the end of humanity

One of the more absurd myths still going. It's not remotely close to being true.

You could detonate all the globe's nuclear weapons simultaneously within the territory of Texas and you'd fail to kill everyone in Texas. It's also not an argument that nuclear war is acceptable obviously. Pretending humanity and or civilization will cease due to nuclear war is very outlandish.

We detonated five hundred nuclear weapons above ground over half a century, and two thousand total. You could nuke the biggest 100 cities and humanity would pick itself up and promptly keep going.

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

Well if the US government ran a LFTR / MSR they'd have both power for the facility and something to process a lot of the isotopes and a means for extraction.

The core contention of the article is that plutonium disposal is an issue. Not in an MSR! (at least from my reading). I can see how solid fuel rods are precisely designed in old crappy fuel rod designs, since you need to design the rods to avoid them melting down.

MSRs are meltdown proof, owing to the fluid nature of the fuel. If the fuel is overheating/overfissioning, then a "plug" that is artificially cooled will melt, and the fluid pours into a shallow pool. Since the shallow pool distributes the fissile material in a way that stops the chain reaction (since effectively a volume is reduced to a sheet, so all the neutrons in the vast majority of directions don't run into another fissionable/fissile nucleus, the reaction stops)

Aside from the plutonium, IIRC molten salt reactors can "burn" a lot of "waste" isotopes since if it isn't fissile, let it hang around in the salt and a couple absorbed neutrons will make it something that can.

The fission products are in a liquid, so the fluid can be chemically processed more easily to extract products. Yeah, there's a LOT of handwaving there, but fundamentally if you have a breeder reactor you can "process" waste into a usable form.

The best thing about MSRs is that they scale to smaller sizes: the ORNL research reactor was closet-sized. A general MSR for fission product processing would have a lot more stuff for processing the salt for waste, yeah.

As for replacement parts and the associated dangers for weapons construction, that's not really a nuclear issue once the nuclear material is separated.

The inherent chemical toxicity of all this is a problem, but fundamentally what you are doing is containing the salts and processing them. Toxic stuff will eventually get transmuted to something else, so you just need to keep the core thorium -> uranium cycle going and "work on" all the rest of it to get it to a usable or more stable element.

Yeah it's expensive, but TFA mentions billions for disposal/processing. Well, we could have had a usable MSR design and tons of knowhow to go with a good disposal method.

Havoc• 4 years ago

There is a pic somewhere showing south africa destroying theirs literally with angle grinders.

Seems to have vanished from the internet though. Weird

philipkglass7• 4 years ago

South Africa's weapons were made with enriched uranium [1]. Blending highly enriched uranium into power reactor fuel is relatively straightforward. The weapons discussed in this article are made with plutonium. There are a few facilities in the world for blending plutonium with uranium for power reactor fuel, but none that are designed to handle weapons grade plutonium. The US tried to build such a facility but it went badly over budget and over schedule and was cancelled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33868375

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...

acidburnNSA• 4 years ago

I can't believe this doesn't mention Megatons to Megawatts!? [1]

For 20 years between 1993 and 2013, fully 10% of all US electricity came directly from dismantled ex-soviet nuclear weapons. We bought downblended highly-enriched uranium from the warheads and put it in our peaceful nuclear reactors. The bombs that were once aimed at cities then powered them. This was a beautiful and true destruction of nuclear weapons.

Same can be done with plutonium using MOX fuel (as briefly mentioned at the end of the post).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

Thanks very much for posting this. I never knew about it, and always great to see a well-executed, purposeful government program that pretty much accomplished all of its goals.

godelski• 4 years ago

For added context, this program led to the destruction of (effectively) over 20k soviet warheads. It is BY FAR the most successful deproliferation program.

sandworm1013• 4 years ago

For greater context, Russia and America maintain their nukes very differently. The US DOE studies them and works hard at maintaining existing stocks without building many new warheads. Russia does it differently. Their nukes have a finite lifespan. Once past, they are torn down, fuel reprocessed, and rebuilt from scratch. So pulling "20k" nukes out of the Russian system had a very different impact than pulling 20k would have from the US system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak

slicktux• 4 years ago

Interesting piece of history! Thank you for sharing!

Apofis• 4 years ago

Pretty curious how the anti-nuclear reactor movement went after shutting down all nuclear reactors when we badly need them, they lead to actually dismantling nuclear weapons, and at the same time coal power plants spew a ton of radioactive smoke into the atmosphere.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

There's also this:

"Design of an accelerator-driven system for the destruction of nuclear waste" Y Kadi, JP Revol - 2003 - osti.gov

"Progress in particle accelerator technology makes it possible to use a proton accelerator to produce energy and to destroy nuclear waste efficiently. The Energy Amplifier (EA) proposed by Carlo Rubbia and his group is a sub-critical fast neutron system driven by a proton accelerator. It is particularly attractive for destroying, through fission, transuranic elements produced by present nuclear reactors. "

Not much seems to have happened since then other than simulations, however. It might be more applicable for the minor actinides that contaminte 'spent' nuclear fuel, maybe, and which tend to have very long half-lives, but it should work for plutonium as well, though maybe MOX fuel is the better option:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_actinide

"The most important isotopes of these elements in spent nuclear fuel are neptunium-237, americium-241, americium-243, curium-242 through -248, and californium-249 through -252."

trenchgun3• 4 years ago

I think it does not mention it, because the blog post is just slightly edited GPT-3 generated garbage.

tuhriel• 4 years ago

That is a pretty strong accusation, for which you surely be able to show some evidence

Joel_Mckay• 4 years ago

It literally takes 2 minutes to look up Plutonium disposition in CANDU reactors.

The US has done a lot of messed up things, but is not going to risk global escalation over silly paranoia.

If clowns are going to create defamatory mythologies about people, than at least don't use easily disproved FUD.

kennend38• 4 years ago

I"'m really shocked it doesn't mention CANDU's plutonium destruction.

https://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/bp461-e.ht...

"The Canadian CANDU reactors appear to be well suited to MOX fuel; they would not require physical modification and MOX fuel could be burned within existing operating and licensing envelopes. Furthermore, it is anticipated that existing safety standards governing the exposure of workers to radiation could be met or exceeded. The most significant change would be the implementation of enhanced security for the storage of new fuel prior to loading it in the reactors."

HyperSane3• 4 years ago

It is strange how much the unique capabilities of CANDU reactors are ignored. It can run on unenriched uranium.

selectodude• 4 years ago

Heavy water is really, really expensive.

aidenn0• 4 years ago

FWIW, any fast-neutron reactor can use MOX fuel, and extracts more energy from the fuel. However unlike CANDU they need fairly highly enriched fuels which is a proliferation concern.

sandworm1013• 4 years ago

It's the name. "Canada" in a name is marketing poison. The public just wouldn't like seeing US strategic weapons dismantled in a Canadian reactor. They need a rebranding as "Texacan Freedom Reactors".

Take Sea Doo jet skis. You have to dig deep in their website to find a reference to their Canadian origins, even harder on Ski Doo's website. And one would expect that Canadian heritage would be a plus for a snowmobile.

walrus012• 4 years ago

I'm really shocked that nobody mentioned that the CANDU reactors sold to Pakistan were used in their bomb development program. Thanks, AQ Khan and crew.

jojobas• 4 years ago

That 100% helped stave off another all-out Indo-Pakistan war.

craig_s_bell• 4 years ago

Good piece. IMHO the introductory narrative might be slightly enhanced by briefly pointing out that synthesis of plutonium was not achieved until several years after Szilard's brainstorm. Something like, "Researchers predicted that Pu would offer such-and-so advantages; however, nobody had quite yet come up with the recipe."

In other words: As described with the high-level bomb design, every material and component therein was concurrently being developed, improvised or straight-up invented to meet existing theory.

Thank you for recommending Rhodes' books; they are excellent. I may be alone in this; however I wish he had split 'Dark Sun' into two distinct volumes: One about the development of thermonuclear technology; and another for all of the spy stuff.

Finnucane2• 4 years ago

Plutonium pits can be stored and reused, but not forever. Eventually enough decay products build up to make them unreliable. It's a big problem for long-term maintenance.

rootusrootus2• 4 years ago

Relative to human timespans, the half life of plutonium is still pretty long. How long would it take to build up enough decay products to matter?

Finnucane2• 4 years ago

A few decades. Those pits are supposed to be pretty pure plutonium. Though it is something like the 'sell by' date on your milk. You open it up and think, is it really gone bad?

stackedinserter2• 4 years ago

the FAS report I linked above is from 1993 and states that "There is almost 1000 MT of reactor Pu (R-Pu) in existence now, with the amount growing by about 100 MT per year."

Why couldn't we find a few kg for NASA missions? IIRC for Juno mission the DoE said "plutonium is out of stock for now, come later", so they had to use these oversized solar panels.

philipkglass7• 4 years ago

Those deep space missions use plutonium 238 to power radioisotope thermoelectric generators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-238#Use_in_radioisot...

Surplus weapons plutonium is plutonium 239: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239

Since plutonium 239 decays 275 times slower than plutonium 238, it also generates 275 times less decay heat and is therefore not useful in RTGs.

avar• 4 years ago

Why couldn't we find a few kg for NASA missions?

It's not a technical problem, but a bureaucratic dispute. NASA has been getting the Pu essentially for free, but the DoD/AEC made it as a byproduct.

Now they don't anymore, and would like NASA's budget to pay for its manufacturing.

NASA has decided it's not worth the money, and as a result is only using Pu power for missions that really need it, such as the large Mars rovers.

stackedinserter2• 4 years ago

Didn't know it, thanks!

cryptonector2• 4 years ago

The fusion component also seems to involve some isotopes of hydrogen (tritium and deuterium), so it would be modestly helpful to have that but my understanding is that it's not that hard to get your hands on these isotopes.

Tritium is the most expensive thing on the planet that any of us can buy, by weight. Only exotic matter (non-naturally occurring elements, anti-matter) is more expensive, and that you basically can't buy. Tritium is not easy to make or get. And it has a half-life of 12 years. Deuterium can't be used instead of tritium.

chasil• 4 years ago

...and you can buy a keychain with some of it.

Don't break it. If you break it, don't breathe it.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/03/18/atomic_keyring_bright...

762236• 4 years ago

That's wild that people would engineer something so dangerous if broken, particularly if the people using it are unaware that it contains tritium.

somat2• 4 years ago

The rest of that "fun fact"(tm) usually goes There are a number of things more expensive than tritium, for example: I think plutonium is more expensive than tritium. but you can't buy plutonium.

philipkglass7• 4 years ago

The post by cryptonector is correct: gram for gram, tritium for weapons is even more expensive to manufacture than plutonium for weapons.

It takes one neutron to convert an atom of uranium 238 into an atom of plutonium 239. It also takes one neutron to convert an atom of lithium 6 into an atom of tritium and an atom of helium [1]. However, the plutonium 239 atom has a mass nearly 80 times as great as the tritium atom, so the manufacturing cost per gram is much higher. The US has always produced tritium for weapons by irradiation of lithium 6; the excess neutrons above and beyond that needed to support reactor criticality could be used to produce either tritium or plutonium. The competing uses for excess neutrons were a major issue early in the American development of thermonuclear weapons, when it looked like a thermonuclear weapon might need a lot of tritium (and therefore curtail the production of a lot more plutonium).

Heavy water reactors like Canada's CANDU produce some tritium "for free" as a natural byproduct of neutron capture by deuterium. This gets removed [2] periodically from the heavy water moderator to reduce its radioactivity, and some of the surplus tritium gets sold. But by law Canadian tritium cannot be sold for weapons applications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Lithium

[2] https://www.opg.com/powering-ontario/our-generation/nuclear/...

chasd00• 4 years ago

The easiest thing to do would probably be to deform the pit so it can't be used in a warhead without re-processing. Then store them in a box using the same policy/procedures as weapon storage. They don't take up a lot of space and it's not like they're being manufactured like crazy.

Wikipedia says they're about 10cm in diameter which sounds about right, i thought they were around the size of a softball. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)#Pit_shari...

no-dr-onboard• 4 years ago

You wouldn't even have to do that. Command disablement systems (CDS) were purpose built for this.

moloch-hai• 4 years ago

The tone of this article resembles that in http://cantrip.org/bomb.html , by the brilliant Mark O'Donnell: "matter can be neither created nor destroyed, though it can get very discouraged."

Also: "A little stray grime or margarine in your hairs-breadth mechanisms and you may find yourself festooning several square miles of nearby woodland."

GartzenDeHaes• 4 years ago

This is a little more complicated than what you can learn from wikipedia.

Many thousands of US and Soviet nuclear weapons were demilitarized under the START treaties, mostly at the PANTEX plant in Texas. Demilitarized means that they were disassembled and/or damaged in such a way that they cannot be used for military purposes without extensive reprocessing or re-manufacturing. The demilled components are still radioactive, toxic, and/or classified, so they have to be securely stored somewhere.

The parts from old weapons that have completely or partially been dismantled are also held in storage. Some of the non-fissionable materials can be recycled, but the uranium would require reprocessing and re-manufacturing to be used in a weapon. It may be possible to reassemble old weapons from these components, but for what purpose? These weapons were retired for practical reasons such as being replaced by newer, better, and safer weapons (from the point of view of the DOE and DOD).

There are also complete weapons in storage that are no longer in active service. Inactive weapons are unmaintained, but could be returned to service with field level maintenance. Some of these are kept to support war plans for contingencies or capabilities that are not a current priority. For the majority though, there's a significant cost to dismantle them and no pressing need to do so.

birdyrooster• 4 years ago

I don't think there is a better use of Mordor meme

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

“… confiscate bitcoin” was the first one I saw and is my favourite. Although it is not really true.

User23• 4 years ago

“It’s important to keep these parts around,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear expert who held federal posts for three decades before leaving government service in 2005. “If we had the manufacturing complex we once did, we wouldn’t have to rely on the old parts.” He added that other nuclear powers can and do make new atomic parts.

This is depressing. It’s much like the F-22, we’ve lost the capability to make those too. It’s remarkable how rapidly the USA has declined in the past couple decades. Pretty much the only thing we have going for us is a stranglehold on international payments, and that won’t last.

w10-1• 4 years ago

Whether we can reprocess the fuel I think misses a larger point.

We disassemble and save parts because we don't - can't - build more.

I'm told by Livermore nuclear weapons engineers (admittedly anecdotal hearsay) that it's crazy not to test these weapons. They degrade and fail in ways and at speeds not unanticipated, and computer modeling could not replace actual testing (at least back in ~2000-2005).

So we built a bunch in a rush, found they might last 3 years or 7 years or some other random number, and now... we hold on to them and hope they work, or hope they'll work with scavenged replacement parts.

I'm sure a few carefully curated ones work, but the failure rate could be closer to 90% than 10%.

Perhaps our negligence will save us all.

actionfromafar• 4 years ago

Perhaps our negligence will save enough many to keep civilization going after most large cities are burnt husks.

trenchgun3• 4 years ago

Was this whole article generated by GPT-3?

One does not simply destroy a nuclear weapon

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