Nuclear power.

[The Dude]

What are your thoughts on nuclear power? A judge in my state has approved the building of a new nuclear power plant, the first in our state. I personally support it.

 

[Pine Tar]

We need to diversify where we get our power from. As of now, nuclear is the most effective alternative source, so I support nuclear power. I mean, if you look at Chernobyl, how safety standards there were applied made Mr. Burns look like he was looking out for Springfield.

What I'm saying is, the safety concerns over nuclear power in America are overblown.

 

[exball]

Is good. Too bad the waste is gong to stick around.

 

[Watcher]

I have a big power boner for hydro-electric myself

 

[Foulmouth]

Nuclear power is the way to go. Things like Chernobyl only happen when you have people running a power station who only know how to push the buttons, not what is actually going on.
It's dangerous stuff to fuck around with but so is a tank of petrol.

 

[Bob's Fries]

Nuclear power is the way to go. Things like Chernobyl only happen when you have people running a power station who only know how to push the buttons, not what is actually going on.
It's dangerous stuff to fuck around with but so is a tank of petrol.

It is, but the radiation will make the area unusable for several half-lives. So there's more consequence if you dabble with nuclear energy. Look back at Chernobyl.

 

[Foulmouth]

Nuclear power is the way to go. Things like Chernobyl only happen when you have people running a power station who only know how to push the buttons, not what is actually going on.
It's dangerous stuff to fuck around with but so is a tank of petrol.

It is, but the radiation will make the area unusable for several half-lives. So there's more consequence if you dabble with nuclear energy. Look back at Chernobyl.

Sorry, should have phrased that more clearly. What I mean is either is dangerous if you have poorly trained people handling them. At Chernobyl they had barely trained technicians and a culture of "Don't mention problems in case you are blamed" , not good combo in any situation.

 

[Smokedaddy]

Sorry, should have phrased that more clearly. What I mean is either is dangerous if you have poorly trained people handling them. At Chernobyl they had barely trained technicians and a culture of "Don't mention problems in case you are blamed" , not good combo in any situation.

That, and a fast-breeder design that wasn't meant for power production in the first place. Allow me to dig out my physicist hat, which was around here someplace . . . ok, here goes.

(ok forget it, this is impossible to do without a page-long essay which I don't feel like doing so here's the short story)

You need to do two things inside a reactor. You have to cool it, or it'll get hot, stop being a reactor, and turn into a bomb or a pool of molten uranium. You don't want this. So you pump coolant through it, just like what happens in your car's radiator or your refrigerator. The happy side effect is that you can make electricity from the now-hot coolant, either by doing another heat exchange and making steam to spin a turbine, or by using water as the coolant, letting the reactor make steam out of it, and spinning your turbine without the extra heat-exchange step.

The other thing you have to do is calm down the high-energy neutrons coming from your reactor core, because otherwise they're moving too fast to sustain the chain reaction and just fly away. This is called "moderating" the neutrons. Regular old water is a good moderator; the hydrogen atoms don't have any neutrons to begin with and don't mind hanging on to one for a nanosecond or two. Heavy water is not a good moderator, because the heavy hydrogen atoms do have a neutron in them, so they ignore the ones flying past. Carbon (graphite) is a good moderator; there are lots of others.

Now suppose your reactor is moderated with graphite -- the fuel rods all run through blocks of the stuff -- and cooled with regular (light) water. The light water is also moderating the neutron flux, which is ok as long as you keep your (light) water flowing through the core. The reactor is cooled and moderated, whoopee.

Usually. If something screws up and the reactor starts running hot, steam bubbles form in the core, and ho ho, the light-water moderation goes away along with the cooling. There's a lot fewer water molecules in a liter of steam than there are in liquid water, so the neutron flux goes up. The graphite is still doing its job but the reactor is running harder -- which means more heat -- which means more steam -- which means it runs hotter -- which means more heat -- et cetera. This is called a "positive void coefficient," and it's why you don't build reactors like this. In a heavy-water design, you can care less about the steam if you get some because it has the opposite effect. Steam bubbles mean less cooling but the same moderation, so the reaction slows down all on its own. This is a "negative void coefficient." With very rare exceptions, this describes every reactor on Earth. The Soviet RBMK fast-plutonium-breeder design had a positive void coefficient which bit back when they screwed up a test in 1986.

I have to get to the kitchen so I'll STFU except to say that I have some pure uranium metal and a jug of heavy water at home, and you don't. TAKE THAT.

This rather confusing image depicts some uranium glass marbles flourescing under black light, sitting (along with a chunk of some pretty hot uranium ore) atop my Logitech G19 keyboard, whose display is showing a picture of Casey Serin failing to clean his swimming pool. It's pretty funny if you know all the in-jokes, which you don't, but I don't care.

 

[haina]

After reading a good bit about it, I support nuclear power. There are a lot of exciting concepts people are talking about nowadays. The one that is discussed most is LFTR. This concept has a lot of advantages over traditional reactors. The design is inherently fail safe, it operates at low pressure, and it is very difficult to create weapons material with this reactor. However, there are some difficulties associated with this technology. Most of these problems arise from the fact that these experimental reactors haven't been made since the 60s, and engineers know far more about the uranium fuel cycle than the thorium one.

WAMSR is a similar reactor concept that processes nuclear waste. With this, there wouldn't really be a need for deep geological repositories.

[youtube]uK367T7h6ZY[/youtube]
[youtube]AAFWeIp8JT0[/youtube]

 

[hellbound]

Nuclear is the cleanest, safest, most efficient form of power we currently have. If we would allow reprocessing fuel, it would be cleaner, safer, and more efficient by reducing the amount of waste needing to be stored.

Everybody likes to point to Chernobyl as a disaster, and it absolutely was, no argument. But Chernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, bad operation, and bad circumstances. Western reactors, as I understand it, are both physically incapable of a Chernobyl-style failure and vastly better-contained when they fail at all. As an example, containment buildings in the USSR were essentially just an architectural shell. Containment buildings in the US are required to be sufficiently strong to take a direct impact from an airliner without rupture.

A better example of the dangers of modern Western nuclear design would be Fukushima Daiichi in Japan (which is of course Eastern, but their designs follow "Western" paradigms rather than "Eastern" Soviet ones). And one major thing to keep in mind was the systems at Fukushima were only overcome by a combination earthquake/tsunami. America is generally not prone to tsunamis, and new design requirements will likely be made even more robust.

Another problem was the accumulation of hydrogen gas due to residual decay heat which exploded, causing further damage. Most commercial reactors then installed electricity-independent catalytic converters to convert hydrogen to water, removing possibility of explosion. Other new safety mechanisms have been devised and are slated to be installed all over the world.

Remember, even with Chernobyl, 3MI, Fukushima, and assorted noncommercial reactor events, nuclear power is still safer and cleaner than many other sources.

 

[The Hunter]

Nuclear is the cleanest, safest, most efficient form of power we currently have. If we would allow reprocessing fuel, it would be cleaner, safer, and more efficient by reducing the amount of waste needing to be stored.

Everybody likes to point to Chernobyl as a disaster, and it absolutely was, no argument. But Chernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, bad operation, and bad circumstances. Western reactors, as I understand it, are both physically incapable of a Chernobyl-style failure and vastly better-contained when they fail at all. As an example, containment buildings in the USSR were essentially just an architectural shell. Containment buildings in the US are required to be sufficiently strong to take a direct impact from an airliner without rupture.

A better example of the dangers of modern Western nuclear design would be Fukushima Daiichi in Japan (which is of course Eastern, but their designs follow "Western" paradigms rather than "Eastern" Soviet ones). And one major thing to keep in mind was the systems at Fukushima were only overcome by a combination earthquake/tsunami. America is generally not prone to tsunamis, and new design requirements will likely be made even more robust.

Another problem was the accumulation of hydrogen gas due to residual decay heat which exploded, causing further damage. Most commercial reactors then installed electricity-independent catalytic converters to convert hydrogen to water, removing possibility of explosion. Other new safety mechanisms have been devised and are slated to be installed all over the world.

Remember, even with Chernobyl, 3MI, Fukushima, and assorted noncommercial reactor events, nuclear power is still safer and cleaner than many other sources.

I still have my doubts about it being safer or cleaner, but hey, it's definitely interesting stuff. Chernobyl was pure human error, while Fukushima was a natural disaster. However, the latter is actually what makes me skeptical of it. A tornado or hurricane would be bad enough as is. Combine that with a nuclear meltdown? Sounds ten times worse than it needs to be. It still does have the potential to be both good and bad, both results being extremities.

There's actually a program going on in Russia where they're enrolling students into the University of Moscow to study nuclear engineering or something because of an expected surge in interest in nuclear energy. Russia is also selling power plants to various countries with expectations to have these facilities established by 2030. That sounds like way more fun than my boring degree in biology...

In the end, however, I'm still conflicted when it comes to nuclear energy. It seems like something we shouldn't be messing with, yet it could yield some amazing results.

 

[Marvin]

Nuclear is the cleanest, safest, most efficient form of power we currently have. If we would allow reprocessing fuel, it would be cleaner, safer, and more efficient by reducing the amount of waste needing to be stored.

Everybody likes to point to Chernobyl as a disaster, and it absolutely was, no argument. But Chernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, bad operation, and bad circumstances. Western reactors, as I understand it, are both physically incapable of a Chernobyl-style failure and vastly better-contained when they fail at all. As an example, containment buildings in the USSR were essentially just an architectural shell. Containment buildings in the US are required to be sufficiently strong to take a direct impact from an airliner without rupture.

A better example of the dangers of modern Western nuclear design would be Fukushima Daiichi in Japan (which is of course Eastern, but their designs follow "Western" paradigms rather than "Eastern" Soviet ones). And one major thing to keep in mind was the systems at Fukushima were only overcome by a combination earthquake/tsunami. America is generally not prone to tsunamis, and new design requirements will likely be made even more robust.

Another problem was the accumulation of hydrogen gas due to residual decay heat which exploded, causing further damage. Most commercial reactors then installed electricity-independent catalytic converters to convert hydrogen to water, removing possibility of explosion. Other new safety mechanisms have been devised and are slated to be installed all over the world.

Remember, even with Chernobyl, 3MI, Fukushima, and assorted noncommercial reactor events, nuclear power is still safer and cleaner than many other sources.

I still have my doubts about it being safer or cleaner, but hey, it's definitely interesting stuff. Chernobyl was pure human error, while Fukushima was a natural disaster. However, the latter is actually what makes me skeptical of it. A tornado or hurricane would be bad enough as is. Combine that with a nuclear meltdown? Sounds ten times worse than it needs to be. It still does have the potential to be both good and bad, both results being extremities.

There's actually a program going on in Russia where they're enrolling students into the University of Moscow to study nuclear engineering or something because of an expected surge in interest in nuclear energy. Russia is also selling power plants to various countries with expectations to have these facilities established by 2030. That sounds like way more fun than my boring degree in biology...

In the end, however, I'm still conflicted when it comes to nuclear energy. It seems like something we shouldn't be messing with, yet it could yield some amazing results.

It might not be purely safer or cleaner that every competing type of electricity generation, like hydroelectricity, but it's a lot more practical than hydroelectricity because it could be available more widely.

Plus, it's possible to build tornado resistant buildings.

 

[hellbound]

[...]

I still have my doubts about it being safer or cleaner, but hey, it's definitely interesting stuff. Chernobyl was pure human error, while Fukushima was a natural disaster. However, the latter is actually what makes me skeptical of it. A tornado or hurricane would be bad enough as is. Combine that with a nuclear meltdown? Sounds ten times worse than it needs to be. It still does have the potential to be both good and bad, both results being extremities.

There's actually a program going on in Russia where they're enrolling students into the University of Moscow to study nuclear engineering or something because of an expected surge in interest in nuclear energy. Russia is also selling power plants to various countries with expectations to have these facilities established by 2030. That sounds like way more fun than my boring degree in biology...

In the end, however, I'm still conflicted when it comes to nuclear energy. It seems like something we shouldn't be messing with, yet it could yield some amazing results.

In terms of statistics, nuclear IS the safest currently-feasible power generation technology we have*. You can doubt it will remain that way (I don't know why though, safety measures are constantly improving), but you cannot deny the history.

Waterford Nuclear Generating Station in St. Charles Parish, LA is about twenty miles from New Orleans. It shut down for Katrina, but was entirely undamaged and restarted not long after. Katrina was the sixth-strongest hurricane to ever hit the US, and the one that caused the most and costliest infrastructure damage.

The highest prediction for deaths resulting from Chernobyl, to include any future latent cancer deaths, is about 25,000. Coal-burning plants release pollution that kills that many people, every year, in the US alone.

Interestingly, in terms of immediate deaths, hydroelectric leads the pack, but mainly due to one incident: the failure of Shimantan Dam in 1975, killing about 171,000 in one go, or about 95% of all immediate deaths due to power plant accidents.

As far as cleanliness, I suppose it would have to depend on your definition of clean, but outside Chernobyl (which, as we discussed, is impossible with US nuclear technology) there have been no significant releases of radiological material in commercial power. Wind turbines are notorious for killing birds. Solar panels require large amounts of rare earth metals, for which there is a serious supply concern as well as the environmental impact of mining (which, granted, uranium mining also has, but it seems to be better-controlled due to radiation concerns). Damming for hydroelectric plants generally seriously alters ecosystems. Meanwhile, most of the impact from nuclear is theoretical possibility of rupture of spent fuel containers (hasn't happened and is unlikely to happen), and this would be further mitigated with waste reprocessing.

*solar and wind don't have any MAJOR accidents as far as I can find, but 1. they aren't feasibly for widespread generation yet and 2. there are a number of small accidents like rooftop panels falling on somebody or technicians falling off a turbine.

 

[Hollywood Hulk Hogan]

Ya know something, brother? Nuclear power is as American as the Hulkster. That said, brother, the Hulkster is currently working with scientists to see if there is a way to harness the power of Hulkamania for all of the world's energy needs.

 

[wheat pasta]

I personally feel uneasy about nuclear power because of the potential it has to screw us all over (I know, there are all kinds of precautions and safety measures), and the fact that all the spent rods aren't going to just go nowhere. Where I live (Oregon) they actually just kind of half-assedly bury their spent rods near a river that (fucking crazy) people swim in and catch fish from. I heard they're working on ways to more efficiently dispose of waste and make it safer, which is good, but.. part of me wishes it hadn't been discovered just because the terrible things it's brought about (bombs in particular, because I'm of the attitude that every country should just keep to themselves and bombing is a horrible, if sometimes necessary measure). Even if it's done a lot of good, it's done a lot of bad as well and it's really kind of a mixed bag.
***just my opinion***

 

[UnwiseKhan]

In terms of statistics, nuclear IS the safest currently-feasible power generation technology we have*. You can doubt it will remain that way (I don't know why though, safety measures are constantly improving), but you cannot deny the history.

Waterford Nuclear Generating Station in St. Charles Parish, LA is about twenty miles from New Orleans. It shut down for Katrina, but was entirely undamaged and restarted not long after. Katrina was the sixth-strongest hurricane to ever hit the US, and the one that caused the most and costliest infrastructure damage.

The highest prediction for deaths resulting from Chernobyl, to include any future latent cancer deaths, is about 25,000. Coal-burning plants release pollution that kills that many people, every year, in the US alone.

Interestingly, in terms of immediate deaths, hydroelectric leads the pack, but mainly due to one incident: the failure of Shimantan Dam in 1975, killing about 171,000 in one go, or about 95% of all immediate deaths due to power plant accidents.

As far as cleanliness, I suppose it would have to depend on your definition of clean, but outside Chernobyl (which, as we discussed, is impossible with US nuclear technology) there have been no significant releases of radiological material in commercial power. Wind turbines are notorious for killing birds. Solar panels require large amounts of rare earth metals, for which there is a serious supply concern as well as the environmental impact of mining (which, granted, uranium mining also has, but it seems to be better-controlled due to radiation concerns). Damming for hydroelectric plants generally seriously alters ecosystems. Meanwhile, most of the impact from nuclear is theoretical possibility of rupture of spent fuel containers (hasn't happened and is unlikely to happen), and this would be further mitigated with waste reprocessing.

*solar and wind don't have any MAJOR accidents as far as I can find, but 1. they aren't feasibly for widespread generation yet and 2. there are a number of small accidents like rooftop panels falling on somebody or technicians falling off a turbine.

The safety measures in particular are something I want to call attention to. The reactors that melted down in Fukushima were nearly 50 years old and woefully outdated designs. This is true in the united states as well, a huge percentage of the reactors used in power plants are based very old designs, and due to anti-nuclear sentiment and lack of funding, very little work is being done to upgrade or improve them, just to maintain what is already there. It's like claiming that cars are dangerous and then refusing to fund research into seatbelts.

 

[The Dude]

American reactor designs tend to be the most reliable and safest. The US Navy has been using nuclear reactors on it's submarines and aircraft carriers for several decades with an excellent track record. Soviet/Russian designs...not so much because that's what happens when you make anyone who reports problems disappear from the world.

 

[Smokedaddy]

American reactor designs tend to be the most reliable and safest. The US Navy has been using nuclear reactors on it's submarines and aircraft carriers for several decades with an excellent track record. Soviet/Russian designs...not so much because that's what happens when you make anyone who reports problems disappear from the world.

Little-known factoids about reactors, bombs, and enrichment follow herein -- WARNING: it's as long as my dick is hair used to be, and could easily be mistaken for the Great Text Wall of China. Spoiler tags are because your monitor would have to be ten feet tall to see the whole thing at once, and its horrible bulk would spoil the aesthetics of our forum. No, actually, I did it as a service for some of or more sensitive members who would run screaming from the room if they caught so much of a glimpse. Imagine that you were chasing what you thought was a small frog so you could take him home and let him hang out in your backyard frog-pond, but when you got finally got close enough for a good look it wasn't a frog at all, and even if you could catch him you couldn't get Godzilla home unless he wanted to be there, and then you couldn't keep him away. It'd suck. i did it as a favor to you, a sort of adminstrateiere oblige thing. You have been warned! Proceed at your own risk, but only if you are truly Internet-valorous and want to prove it. Gird up your loins and slap your face-down monster, O courageous forumgoer!

You're Welcome.

Spoiler

I TOLD YOU IT WAS LONG, FOOLS. DID YOU LISTEN? NO, YOU DID NOT. HOPE YOU'RE NOT BUSY UNTIL NEXT TUESDAY. HA, HA, HA, HA, HA.

The only naturally occurring fissionable isotope of anything, practically speaking, is Uranium 235. Uranium is element 92 (meaning it's got 92 protons in the nucleus), the different isotopes (i.e. atomic weights) come from varying numbers of neutrons. You can change the weight, a.k.a. the isotope, by adding or subtracting neutrons and it's all still uranium. Change the number of protons, however, and now you have a different element. Forexample, lose a proton from one of your uranium atoms. Your atomic number is now 91 (92 protons minus one proton equals 91 protons -- even third graders can do atomic physics!) so your uranium has turned into protoactinium. Lose two protons from one of your uranium nucleii and higher mathematics tells us that 92 - 2 = 90, so you've got some thorium. Different elements are different chemicals, and they behave differently. Different isotopes of the same element are all the same chemical, and usually the only way to separate isotopes is by the tiny, tiny difference in weight. It gets harder as the weight increases. I have a jug of deuterium oxide on a shelf about three feet from me -- deuterium is code for "hydrogen" (as is tritium), so it's just water, H two Oh. The difference is the hydrogen isotope. It's got a neutron, but the ordinary hydrogen you can buy at 7-11 that we use to make regular water doesn't. Since hydrogen is element 1, it's got one proton, and the atomic weight is very close to 1. Stuff a neutron in there and it's still element 1, but the atomic weight has nearly doubled. You'll usually hear of the stuff in my jug called "heavy water" because it weighs twice as much. A 100% weight difference makes it easy peasy to separate the two isotopes. The water on Earth is about 99.3% hydrogen 1, with hydrogen 2 (the heavy kind) making up the last 0.07%. In other words, a thousand gallons of water will have about three quarts of heavy water stirred in. OK so far?

(There is another hydrogen isotope with a second neutron (usually called tritium), but it's radioactive, doesn't occur in nature, and has to be synthesized in a reactor core. It's what makes the front sight of a Glock pistol glow, and is sometimes used in movie-theater "EXIT" signs when some quirk of the buildig's construction makes it impossibly difficult to run electrical wiring to where a sign has to be. THE MOAR YOU KNOW)

By a strange coincidence (and it really is just coincidence) about 99.3% of all the uranium on Earth is U-238, which is so stable its half-life is over 4 billion years. That's about as radioactive as lettuce. U-235, on the other hand, has a half-life of only 25,000 years give or take a week or two. There's not enough U-235 in natural uranium to do anything interesting, you have to have lots of the nucleii close together before it gets weird and blow-uppy. The weight ratio of the two hydrogen isotopes is 1 (regular) divided by 2 (premium "heavy" with extra cleaning power), or 0.5. One isotope weighs twice as much as the other. But you want to make bombs or reactors and to do that, you've got to step up the ratio of U-235 to U-238 by quite a bit, and the weight ratio now is 235 / 238 or 0.987 and change -- in other words, the difference in weight isn't two to one, it's 0.013 to one. Thirteen parts in a thousand is not very much difference at all. What the Iranians have been doing that has everyone excited is building the centrifuges that spin uranium hexaflouride gas (at about 650 degrees C) at speeds approaching 100,000 RPM, which separates the two weights ever so slightly. A typical setup is to take what comes out of one centrifuge and run it into another to refine it just a little more, the lather/rinse/repeat for as long as you can stand it. A typical installation is about three thousand centrifuges in a long chain, and the final output gets funneled all the way back to the beginning and runs through it all again multiple times! If you want reactor-grade stuff, the U-235 content has to be bumped up from the usual 0.07% to around 10%, so there'll be fifteen hundred times more U-235 in the mix as there was when you dug the stuff up! Your thousand tons of natural uranium have now become about 3/4 of one ton of reactor fuel, with a bonus 1499.25 tons of almost pure U-238 that you have to put somewhere or do something with. It's mostly useless except for sitting around in piles corroding, though a little bit is used for the horizontal stabilizer counterweights of Boeing 747 airplanes, and some gets used for projectiles (since it's real heavy stuff -- lead has nothing on uranium) which work pretty well if you have some tanks you want to shoot at with you A-10. The bottom line is woo hoo, "depleted" uranium is almost 99.9% exactly like the natural kind you dig out of the ground. (Disclosure: my jug of heavy water is sitting on top of a jug of sheet-metal uranium shards, stored under argon gas 'cause it corrodes very quickly in air.) The upshot is that It costs about a billion times as much to separate uranium isotopes vs. hydrogen isotopes, but when you can make people pay taxes you can afford darn near anything.

Reactors? Pah! We want to make fireworks. Unfortunately, now the mix has to run towards 70% U-235, so it has to have the living shit refined out of it if you really want a bomb. This is why being able to brew your own automatically makes you the envy of other major governments. You can get enough for one bomb by merely running fifty tons of uranium through your three billion dollars of centrifuges about twenty times. It costs more if you have to haul it in and out by camel.

(Side note: kitchen countertops made of granite are in vogue these days, and most of the granite used for them is is quarried in the deep African jungles of the Congo. I have no idea why, but that's where most granite countertops come from. Go figure. Anyway, the Congo granite often makes your kitchen more radioactive than it would be if your countertops were made of sheet uranium. I was curious about a house about half a block from here that had been extensively remodeled before being put up for sale -- it looked really cool in there, judging from what little I could see from outside. The realtor had an open house one weekend, and I pretended to be an interested buyer so I could get a look. Yes, it was really freaking nice and they'd done a real good job. But the kitchen had Congolese granite countertops, and I'd just heard about the radio-granite thing a few days before. i excused myself saying I had to go lock my car and I'd be right back, which was a foul lie (the part about the car, not the part about being right back.) I toddled home and returned five minutes later with my Geiger counter concealed in a pocket. Sho 'nuff, the kitchen was really beautiful -- but I wouldn't set a roll of film on the counters in there 'cause they'd fog the holy crap out of it in no time. "Hotter than hell" is the technical description.)

It was predicted by the physics that in a high neutron flux environment, a.k.a. a reactor core, every once in a while a U-238 nucleus will absorb one of the neutrons that's flying around, thereby turning in U-239. Unlike U-238, U-239 is unstable as all hell; it's half-life is something like five and a half minutes vs. 4.2 billion years. The numbers work out to U-239 being 2.2 quintillion times more radioactive than our original U-238 was. Interestingly, it emits a beta particle -- that means one of the neutrons has lost its neutrality and turned into a proton. Ho ho, we've got element 93 now! The extras proton has turned our U-239 into Np (neptunium) 239. The atomic number has changed, the weight hasn't. Compared to U-239, Np-239 is nice and stable. it has a leisurely half life of less than six days. OK, seriously, that's radioactive as all fuck by any standard and not something you'd want around without a hundred feet of lead separating you from it, but it's not going to eat everything in your fridge before starting on the family like the U-239 wanted to. After sufficient time has elapsed, our Np-239 does a beta decay just like the U-239 did. One of its neutrons turns into a proton, the atomic number (proton count) goes up by 1, the weight stays at 239. This is now a synthetic element that does not occur in nature! it was predicted and the properties were worked out during the Manhattan project, so they set about trying to make a little of it. (They were successful.) Glenn Seaborg realized how awful this stuff was going to be, and as a joke tried to slip the atomic symbol Pu (as in Pee-Yew, that smells terrible!) past the international committee that decides what name gets slapped on new elements, but most of the people on said committee weren't Americans and didn't get the joke so they let it stick, and nobody noticed a bunch of physicists snickering in the New Mexico desert. The isotope of element 92 with weight 239 is about as stable as U-235, with a half life in the tens of thousands of years, so it's not going to fry you by looking at it. But it's a lot more fissionable. You only need about six kilograms for a critical mass, vs. about 70 kg of U-235. Your bomb just got a lot smaller. Six kg - a.k.a. 13.2 lb - of the stuff would make a sphere about the size of a golf ball, except that you can't make it into a sphere the size of a golf ball without an unfortunately large chain reaction. What they usually do is make a hollow sphere, so there's not too much of it too close together, then use explosives to compress the sphere into a solid lump. The "assembly" of the critical mass has to happen very quickly, as in a few microseconds. Uranium 235, on the other hand, can be assembled much more slowly -- if you had a critical mass of it cut into two pieces (say, a hollow cylinder and a plug that fits neatly in the hollow space) you could just drop it about nine feet and it'll be moving fast enough to go bang.

(Side note: heavy metals tend to be chemically toxic. Lead, arsenic, cobalt, mercury, thallium and that sort of thing are not good for you and should not be used in cooking. It is theorized that Pu-239 is horribly, awfully chemically toxic, but no one can prove it; the radiotoxicity kills any test animal (or person) long before any chemical effects can even be observed. It's generally thought to be the most toxic substance to ever exist, though some people disagree.)

(Side note: Roughly equal amounts of U-235 and U-238 are thought to have been made in the supernova explosion of the Sun's parent star. The reason there's so much more U-238 present is precisely because of the half-lives. The Earth is only old enough for about one half-life of U-238 (i.e. half of it has decayed since the planet condensed out of the presolar nebula), but there's been time enough for 168,000 of the piddly 25,000 year half-lives of U-235. Another way to think of it is that we have roughly 0.5 of our original U-238 left, but only 5.92 millionths of the original U-235 stockpile is still around. Uranium is more common on Earth than silver or tungsten. Last I checkerd, U-238 was selling for about $2.50 / lb (two and a half dollars per pound, multiply that by 2.2 if you want kilograms -- anyway, it's cheaper by weight than a decent grade of hamburger), while a pound of U-235 would set you back about two million bucks, more expensive by weight than anything I can think of except plutonium. But then, nobody is going to sell you any because you're not the government and they check ID like you were trying to buy beer in Utah. A fake driver's license that says you are the government wouldn't fool them for a nanosecond, so forget about even trying.)

A bomb made from element 92 (ok, I'll come out and say it: plutonium) is a very complicated device because the assembly has to happen so fast. This was the Gadget, and the Nagasaki bomb. Hiroshima was a U-235 bomb, and was so simple they didn't even bother to test it. Nagasaki was the second plutonium bomb ever detonated, because, despite the expense, they weren't at all sure the explosive trickery would work and so they did have to test that design, done early one morning in New Mexico while Richard Feynman sat on the hood of his pickup truck playing bongo drums and Oppenheimer started having queasy thoughts about how letting genies out of their bottles might not be all that great of an idea. You all know the story.

(Side note: Many years after the war, J. R. Oppenheimer visited the main facility of an outfit that manufactured solid rocket motors. While there, he had dinner at the with the family of a young engineer who had just been promoted to VP of Advanced Technologies. There weren't any reasonably good restaurants in town, so the menu was home-cooked dinner at the family dining table. At that time the family consisted of the engineer husband, his wife, their little daugher (who coincidentally is now the senior engineer in ballistics at that same rocket engine company -- go figure), and her infant little brother. The brother was far too young to remember anything about it and was about 30 years old when he first learned that he once sat at the table while J. R. Oppenheimer and his dad talked shop and ate Mom's cooking. As an adult, he's not only unusually notorious for his objectivity, but is also profound, witty, debonair, and (above all) devilishly handsome. (The parents later concocted yet another brother, but wisely decided not to inflict society with any more versions 'cause the kid was irritating.)

I had a punch line that all this was supposed to set up but I don't remember where I put it . . . crap . . . Oh yeh, now I do. Nuclear reactors tend to be unfortunately large buildings with two-million-ton steel plates on top of gigantic lead cords weighing up to twenty million pounds, with lots of plumbing and often sited a handy river for cooling water, and it's depressingly full of people wearing white coats pressing buttons and occasionally making notes on their clipboard. "Light and Portable" is not a good description, even if you could stand having those people around. You won't grab a power reactor one with a chain hoist and swap it for your Honda Civic's gasoline engine anytime soon. You would get a few more horsepower and spend precisely zero on gasoline for thousands of years, but no matter how you slice it or how many people you have to help push, a nuclear power plant ain't gonna fit in your engine compartment, ever. It's the same principle that won't let you take a baseball stadium home in your shirt pocket so you can set it up in the backyard, no matter how much you'd like to.

Or, for that matter, one of them won't fit in your submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, destroyer, or battleship either. Several people really, really wanted to make it work, and they had the advantage of having your taxes to play with. So how do you make a reactor small and light enough that you can stick it in a boat (without sinking said boat? Well, the obvious thing to do is make it use a lot less mass and bulk for the fuel rods. Get rid of the damned uranium and go to plutonium -- you'll save 99% of the weight and 95% of the size, if your good engineers ever sober up. And no silly 4% Pu-239 mix for the fuel rods, either. If you want small and light, that comes with "hot" attached. All rise please -- the punch line follows: Naval reactor fuel is 70% to 95% Pu-239 -- lots better than bomb-grade.

Not terribly funny, you say? Ahh, there is real humor to be found. If someone had told this joke to al'Queda or some nutbag like Saddam Hussein at the right time, they'd still be laughing their asses off. Imagine a few reactors all nicely packed with fuel, just kind of lying around. And we're talking USDA Prime Naval Reactor beef, not hamburger. This is gourmet stuff. Let's define a "few" as, oh, three hundred and fifty of them. And by "just kind of lying around," we mean ungaurded, unsupervised, and packaged in convenient submarines conveniently rusting away tied to docks in the Arctic Ocean where nobody ever goes if they can help it. This is exactly what was happening in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. None of the ex-Soviet states and their people who were now Russians, Ukranians, Chechnayans, Borat, and the like wanted a huge submarine fleet, didn't have anyone they wanted to attack, and couldn't afford it anyway. So they decommissioned most of the submarines and towed them to obscure, deserted ports in the farthest north places where Asia meets the Arctic Ocean where it snows all the time, and the temperature never cracks above forty below six months out of the year. Anybody want to go up there for the scenery and recreational opportunities, consisting mainly of vodka and trying not to fall asleep (not that anyone would know, the nearest human being is your next door neighbor a more than a thousand kilometers away. Sound like fun? It didn't to anyone their, either, so the subs were left to rot in the dark and cold. Some places had watchmen or guard patrols, but some were entirely deserted and completely open. You wouldn't have to even climb a fence to get in. There was an incident (a major factor in what caused the Western powers to prick up their ears and realize that maybe we have a little problem up there) where someone found a shed that was unlocked, unlit, unguarded, and chock full of super-high-grade plutonium.

Who would want a reactor, especially one that you can only get by sneaking a largish ship into some awful Arctic hell-hole, throwing some chains around a sub, and sneaking away with it? That's a lot of trouble when you could just call somebody that has a few spare subs and just buy one. Aha, yes, you're correct. The answer is "nobody." No one wants a used naval reactor built out of wood and duct tape in the first place, and especially not one that's been rusting in cold salt water for a few years for that extra flavor only found in dangerous high-tech equipment in very dubious shape. That's one reason the ex-Sovs thought they could just let them sit there -- if anyone wanted a shitty reactor, they could just go buy one somewhere.

No, nobody wanted one of their reactors. Governments today are not worried because they think the Iranians might be able to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with their nifty new centrifuge array. Osama bin Ladin was not all giggly over the thought of an al'Queda navy. But get hold of one of those subs, and you can make a tidy profit by selling 99% of it for scrap metal. You get to keep the other 1%, which happens to be extremely high-grade plutonium, useful in other things besides reactors. it'd take a great deal of expense and infrastructure -- for starters, you have to park it somewhere the CIA won't find it (or find OUT about it), then you have to pry the thing open, you'd better know how to get the fuel out of it, and you'll need to be able to melt it down, cast it, plate it, et nauseating cetera -- it's rather tricky to handle because it wants to kill you. But for someone like bin Ladin with deep connections to a vast Saudi oil fortune, could free up the capital to get the job done. You could use it to make a Statement if you were bored some weekend. The Statement would go something like "BANG!" You stick it to the Israelis by hitting them where it hurts -- the tourism industry. Tourism would drop off heavily if the most interesting thing to see in Tel Aviv was greenish glassy sand. You don't need to go all high-tech and develop ICBMs or B-2 bombers to deliver the message. A rental truck would work just fine. i'm actually a little surprised that nobody made a truly serious effort to pilfer one of those subs. A single fuel rod could net you ten or fifteen bombs, and you'd have hundreds of fuel rods. Pack lithium-6 deuteride around an interior U-238 casing that holds the bomb core, then put the whole thing in a depleted uranium shell -- that'll get you a fusion-boosted weapon that might be able to hit the hundred-kiloton range. Mount it in the back of a tractor-trailer rig (like a ten-wheeler semi truck) and treat the tourists to an extra-special finale of Disney World's New Year's fireworks show. Some of those loons were (and are) sufficiently loony that if they did get hold of a bomb, the possibility that they just might use it is around 100%. Give one of your suicide bombers a weekend of vacation and sit back in your mansion to watch CNN and chortle.

There were attempts made to nab a couple of them, and some plutonium did go missing. Not enough to make a bomb, but an unarguable proof-of-concept demo. By the time Nutjobs for Allah found out about the post-holiday plutonium giveaway and could have begun putting the people and equipment together, the Western governments knew all about it too, and they were all over that shit. A deserted, icebound joke used to rust submarines is a lot less of a visitor-friendly place to visit when the U.S. Navy has rudely stolen your parking space because they wanted their battle group right by the front door. It can't even be thought of today, no matter how crazy this week's dictator is, but there was a period of about three years when it could absolutely have been done. It would have been dangerous, difficult, expensive, and very, very, tricky, but if the bad guys had found out in time someone might have pulled it off. The bright side is that nobody anywhere would have been bored for one second, because besides being tragic, deadly, and generally the awfulest thing that ever happened in the history of history you have to admit that life would have been wildly interesting. You can't buy that kind of entertainment, but I'm glad no one did.

 

[PvtRichardCranium]

I like nuclear power because I love it when hippies bitch.

 

[Pikimon]

I like nuclear power because I love it when hippies bitch.

Hippy here, I am behind the idea of nuclear energy as long as we withhold safety regulations and never ever weaken our watch on nuclear power plants to see if they are in optimal function. I am however a great proponent that we diversify our energy production with all alternative energy sources that don't create significant pollution, which means solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear along with heavy investments in research that fine-tunes this technology.