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 Post subject: Buyers Scarce for Converted Weapons Plutonium, GAO Says
PostPosted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 9:17 pm 
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The United States has struggled to interest nuclear power suppliers in buying mixed-oxide fuel it plans to produce using nuclear-weapon material, even though the National Nuclear Security Administration intends to offer the MOX fuel at a lower price than standard low-enriched uranium, congressional investigators said in a report made public last week (see GSN, Feb. 26).


The United States intends to reformat no less than 34 metric tons of plutonium into nuclear fuel, as part of a deal that requires Russia to eliminate an equal amount of bomb material.

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 Post subject: Keeping Pandoras box shut
PostPosted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 10:42 pm 
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The US and Russia have sealed a deal on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in Washington which would see both sides disposing of 68 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium beginning in 2018.

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 Post subject: FYI: What Happens to Disarmed Nuclear Warheads?
PostPosted: Wed May 19, 2010 3:49 pm 
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Handle with Care Highly enriched uranium on its way to a storage facility. National Nuclear Security Administration

To conform to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the U.S. must cull its deployed nuclear strategic warheads by roughly 700. Once the National Nuclear Security Administration"s scientists inspect each warhead to determine the best way to take it apart, it goes to Pantex Plant in Texas, the only facility cleared to disassemble nukes.


The conventional explosive used to trigger the nuclear reaction is the most volatile part of the bomb, so it is removed first and burned. Plutonium and highly enriched uranium are removed and shipped to other facilities, where they are later converted into fuel rods for use in nuclear-power plants.


One might suspect that a person who handles nuclear bombs would need a steady supply of antacids. But bombs are recycled in the same slow, reliable, boring sort of way as other technologies-only, while wearing a radiation suit. "That said, you can never lose respect of the material you"re handling," says Bron Johnston, the dismantlement manager at the Y-12 facility at the National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium is handled. "Safety is paramount. It"s not like you"re working in a bread factory."


Have a science question you"ve always wondered about? Send a tweet to *** or email to ***.com




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 Post subject: Development of Tiny Thorium Reactors Could Wean the World Of
PostPosted: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:35 am 
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Development of Tiny Thorium Reactors Could Wean the World Off Oil In Just Five Years

Thorium One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium and 3.5 million tons of coal, according to the former director of CERN. via Telegraph

An abundant metal with vast energy potential could quickly wean the world off oil, if only Western political leaders would muster the will to do it, a UK newspaper says today. The Telegraph makes the case for thorium reactors as the key to a fossil-fuel-free world within five years, and puts the ball firmly in President Barack Obama"s court.


Thorium, named for the Norse god of thunder, is much more abundant than uranium and has 200 times that metal"s energy potential. Thorium is also a more efficient fuel source -- unlike natural uranium, which must be highly refined before it can be used in nuclear reactors, all thorium is potentially usable as fuel.


The Telegraph says thorium could be used as an energy amplifier in next-generation nuclear power plants, an idea conceived by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, former director of CERN.


Known as an accelerator-driven system, it would use a particle accelerator to produce a proton beam and aim it at lump of heavy metal, producing excess neutrons. Thorium is a good choice because it has a high neutron yield per neutron absorbed.


Thorium nuclei would absorb the excess neutrons, resulting in uranium-233, a fissile isotope that is not found in nature. Moderated neutrons would produce fissioned U-233, which releases enough energy to power the particle accelerator, plus an excess that can drive a power plant. Rubbia says a fistful of thorium could light up London for a week.


The idea needs refining, but is so promising that at least one private firm is getting involved. The Norwegian firm Aker Solutions bought Rubbia"s patent for this thorium fuel cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator.


The Telegraph says this $1.8 billion (1.2 billion) project could lead to a network of tiny underground nuclear reactors, producing about 600 MW each. Their wee size would negate the enormous security apparatus required of full-size nuclear power plants.


After a three-decade lull, nuclear power is enjoying a slow renaissance in the U.S. The 2005 energy bill included $2 billion for six new nuclear power plants, and this past February, Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear plants.


But nuclear plants need fuel, which means building controversial uranium mines. Thorium, on the other hand, is so abundant that it"s almost an annoyance. It"s considered a waste product when mining for rare-earth metals.


Thorium also solves the non-proliferation problem. Nuclear non-proliferation treaties (NPT) prohibit processes that can yield atomic bomb ingredients, making it difficult to refine highly radioactive isotopes. But thorium-based accelerator-driven plants only produce a small amount of plutonium, which could allow the U.S. and other nations to skirt NPT.


The Telegraph says Obama needs a Roosevelt moment, recalling the famous breakfast meeting when Albert Einstein convinced the president to start the Manhattan Project. A thorium stimulus could be just what the lagging economy needs.


[The Telegraph]




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 Post subject: The Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly Solved at Last
PostPosted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 8:45 am 
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Pioneer 10 Don Davis

A scientific detective story if there ever was one, Slava Turyshev of JPL and his colleagues have spent years tracking down their villain, the Pioneer Anomaly: an unexplained acceleration in the motion of Pioneer 10 and 11, twin spacecraft that were launched by NASA in the 1970s and radar-tracked for over 30 years. Turyshev and his team have recovered files from NASA dumpsters, converted 1970s punch card data to digital, and spent untold man hours crunching numbers beamed to Earth decades ago from spacecraft billions of miles away.


Finally, the case is solved, and the villain is dead.


As the two spacecraft retreated into the distance, the data they beamed back showed that they were slowing down a little more than they should have been. Long vaunted as evidence that something was amiss in physics - perhaps that Einsteins theory of gravity was wrong - the anomaly spawned entire academic conferences and thousands of papers.


But, as explained in our coverage of an earlier stage of Turyshev et al.s labor, some scientists believed that the anomaly had a much more mundane explanation. Namely, the scientists suspected that heat was being emitted by the spacecrafts generators anisotropically - more in one direction than the other. If this were the case, the heat would exert an unbalanced recoil force on the spacecraft, causing them to change speed. Indeed, in April, a group of researchers in Portugal came up with just such a model for how the Pioneers heaters could have created a recoil force.


But many have argued that the data itself ruled out this explanation for the Pioneer Anomaly. As the plutonium-238 that served as the Pioneers onboard heat source radioactively decayed, it would have emitted less heat over time. Thus, if heat were the source of the Pioneer Anomaly, the anomaly should have lessened with time as well. But the data seemed to suggest that the Pioneer Anomaly was lasting - an undying force - and thus much more fundamental.


But for their new analysis [PDF], Turyshev et. al. compiled a lot more data than had ever been analyzed before, spanning a much longer period of the Pioneers flight times. They studied 23 years of data from Pioneer 10 instead of just 11, and 11 years of data from Pioneer 11 instead of 3. As explained in their new paper, the more complete data sets announce that the spacecrafts anomalous acceleration did indeed seem to decrease with time. In concise, the undying force had been dying after all, just like the decaying plutonium. In that case, it was most likely just a consequence of wonky heaters - mystery solved.


[Arvix]




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 Post subject: Plutonium in soil latest sign of leaky reactors
PostPosted: Fri Nov 11, 2011 7:35 pm 
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Radiation continues to leak from damaged Fukushima plant as workers race to pump out contaminated water   More coverage




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 Post subject: Japan on "maximum alert" as radiation leaks
PostPosted: Sun Mar 18, 2012 3:24 am 
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Somber prime minister addresses nation after officials find toxic plutonium pools around stricken reactor   Complete coverage




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 Post subject: NASA Resumes Production Of Plutonium-238 Space Fuel After 25
PostPosted: Thu Mar 14, 2013 11:53 pm 
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NASA Resumes Production Of Plutonium-238 Space Fuel After 25 Years

Looks Like Jell-O, Tastes Like Space Fuel A pellet of plutonium-238, the fuel source used in much of NASAs space exploration. Los Alamos National Laboratory
Our dangerously depleted supply of spacecraft fuel just got a little bump from the Department of Energy.

For the first time in more than two decades, the United States can put a "Made in the USA" stamp on non-weapons grade plutonium, Discovery News reports.


Plutonium-238 is an distinctive fuel source for the radioisotope power systems that are used in spacecraft like the Mars Curiosity Rover and the New Horizon spacecraft thats on its way to Pluto. As plutonium-238 decays, it gives off enough heat to generate electricity and detain all the expensive parts of a spacecraft warm in the cold, dark nether regions of deep space.


Until 1988, the U.S. produced its plutonium-238 (not to be confused with plutonium-239, the isotope in nuclear weapons) as part of its Cold War nuclear shenanigans. After the Savannah River Site, a major contributor of plutonium-238, shut down because of environmental issues, we turned to Russia for our plutonium needs, but that supply has run out as well.


Since 2009, weve been wringing our hands over how to get enough of the fuel to power our future space exploration. Congress threw NASA $10 million of its requested $30 million allot to start production, but denied the Department of Energys funding requests three years in a row.


In April, officials at the DOE finally announced production was underway, but getting supplies up to snuff could take up to eight years.


That process seems to be off to a good start, luckily. Jim Green, director of NASAs Planetary Science Category, announced at a Mars exploration planning meeting that the DOE has successfully generated plutonium at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, according to Discovery News.


Green said he expects a little more than three pounds of plutonium to be generated per year. New supplies of plutonium could be mixed with the small existing supply of U.S. plutonium to bring the depleted plutonium up to the mandatory energy density.


[Discovery News]




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 Post subject: Work under way at N. Korea reactor, U.S. institute says
PostPosted: Fri Apr 05, 2013 11:05 pm 
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U.S. research institute analyzes satellite imagery of closed plutonium reactor, says it could be back in operation sooner than expected




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 Post subject: Endless Fukushima catastrophe: 2020 Olympics under contamina
PostPosted: Sun Sep 15, 2013 3:27 pm 
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Endless Fukushima catastrophe: 2020 Olympics under contamination threat

AFP Photo / TEPCO

Scientific estimates predict that the radioactive plume travelling east across the Pacific will likely hit the shores of Oregon, Washington State and Canada early next year. California will probably be impacted later that year. Because the ongoing flow of water from the reactor site will be virtually impossible to stop, a radioactive plume will continue to migrate across the Pacific affecting Hawaii, North America, South America and eventually Australia for many decades.

We are only talking about ocean currents, however, fish swim thousands of miles and dont necessarily follow the currents. As noted in Part I, big fish concentrate radiation most efficiently, and tuna have already been caught off the coast of California containing cesium from Fukushima. Seaweed also efficiently concentrates radioactive elements.

As I contemplate the future at Fukushima, it seems that the escape of radiation is virtually unstoppable. The levels of radiation in buildings 1, 2 and 3 are now so high that no human can enter or get close to the molten cores. It will therefore be impossible to remove these cores for hundreds of years if ever.

Buildings 1, 2 & 3

If one of these buildings collapses, the targeted flow of cooling water to the pools and cores would cease, the cores would become red hot and possibly ignite releasing massive amounts of radiation into the air and water and the fuel in the cooling pools could ignite. It is strange that neither the US government in particular nor the global community seem to be concerned about these imminent possibilities and exhibit no urge to avert catastrophe.

Similarly the global media is strangely disconnected with the ongoing crisis. Most importantly, the Japanese government until very recently has obstinately refused to invite and collaborate with foreign experts from nuclear engineering companies and/or governments.

Building 4

This structure was severely damaged during the initial quake, its walls are bulging, and it sank 31 inches (79cm) into the ground. On the roof sits a cooling pool containing about 250 tons of hot fuel rods, most of which had just been removed from the reactor core days before the earthquake struck. This particular core did not melt because TEPCO was able maintain a continuous flow of cooling water, so the rods and their holding racks are still intact, but geometrically deformed due to the force of the hydrogen explosion.

The cooling pool contains 8,800 pounds of plutonium plus over 100 other highly radioactive isotopes. Instead of this core melting into a larval mass like the other three cores, it sits exposed to the air atop the shaky building. A large earthquake could disrupt the integrity of the building, causing it to collapse and taking the hot fuel rods with it. The cooling water would evaporate and the intrinsic heat of the radioactive rods would ignite a fire as the zirconium cladding reacted with air, releasing the radioactive equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs and 10 times more cesium than Chernobyl.

Not only would the Northern Hemisphere become badly contaminated, but the Japanese government is seriously contemplating evacuating 35 million people from Tokyo should this happen. TEPCO has constructed a steel frame to strengthen the shaky building in order to place a massive crane on the roof so they can extract the hot rods by remote control. This operation is always performed by computer and a remote manually-controlled extraction has never been attempted before. If the rods are deformed, a rod could fracture releasing so much radiation that the workers would have to evacuate or, should they touch each other, a chain reaction could release huge amounts of radiation.

I defer to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer in whom I have great faith. He says that a 2-meter thick zeolite wall should be constructed some distance from the reactors on the mountainside, which would effectively absorb the cesium from the water surrounding the reactor cores so it could not get out and further pollute the pure water descending from the mountain. At the same time, channels must be constructed to pump and divert the unpolluted mountain water into the sea. Then the three molten cores and their associated buildings could be immersed in concrete as the Soviets did at Chernobyl, and the situation could possibly be neutralized for about 100 years. What our poor descendants will then decide to do with this radioactive rubbish dump is beyond my comprehension.

However, as one Japanese official said, If we just buried them no one would look at another nuclear plant for years. An interesting reaction, so it is perfectly obvious that despite the calamity, they still want to pursue the nuclear option.

North America and Canada the EPA should immediately start monitoring the fish routinely caught off the west coast and it must also, as a matter of urgency, establish many effective airborne monitors up and down the west coast and across the US continent, so that if there is another large release of radiation it will be effectively measured and the information rapidly passed on to the public. The same holds true for Canada.

The US and Canadian governments must forthwith ban imported food from Japan, unless each batch is monitored for contamination, and the food grown in the US and Canada needs to be effectively monitored pending another major accident. The US has allowed food measuring up to 1,200 Becquerels per kilo to be sold in the US from Japan, while the Japanese allowable concentration for food is only 100 Becquerels per kilo. What does the US government think it is doing purposely exposing people to radioactive food? This situation must be urgently amended.

Nuclear Olympics

Given these impending problems, how can Japanese Prime Minister Abe possibly say that Tokyo will be safe for the Olympics? He actually said that there is absolutely no problem and the situation is under control. Does he not understand that parts of Tokyo are already radioactively contaminated and that his government is dumping ashes from the incineration of thousands of tons of radioactive debris from the tsunami and earthquake into Tokyo Bay? Is this what the athletes will be swimming in?

What if there is another major release of radiation before the Olympics? Young fit people who have spent years in rigorous training must, under no circumstances be exposed to radioactive air, food or water. And how can Abe possibly consider spending all thatmoney housing people in expensive accommodation and constructing stadiums etc. when his own people - 160,000 Fukushima refugees - live in shacks and millions still live in highly radioactive zones and when the Fukushima complex is out of control?



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