Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Also of interest is this table showing prior siezures (by law enforcement and government security agencies, I assume) of nuclear material, including over a dozen instances of highly enriched uranium (!)

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/11/12/18849/previous-sei...

View on HN

Dang (or whoever is minding the store right now): A minor concern, but something is wrong with the time on comments:

* I posted the parent comment yesterday

* Currently, it says "2 hours ago"

* If I click "2 hours ago", the new page still says "2 hours ago"

* If I click "reply", the new page says "22 hours ago", which seems plausible.

It's because of the experiment I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537417.

Not sure what to do about this. I suppose we can make the older comments keep their original timestamps and just be older than the timestamp at the top. That already happens when we merge threads anyway.

In some cases, articles that the HN staff find interesting are reposted at a later date if they don't 'connect' the first time around.

Holy shit. Where is all of this being sourced? Is this all "fall of the Soviet Union" stuff where someone wandered into a silo and took apart a bomb?

Given this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_..., NK, Pakistan, India, Israel... To say nothing of the others... Every individual in every step in the supply chain is beyond corruption? Or blackmail? The door doesn't even need to be left open.

Israel is only "widely believed" to have nuclear weapons.

No they definitely have nuclear weapons. Relating to this article is the fact that Israel stole and smuggled 100kg+ of uranium from Pennsylvania http://thebulletin.org/did-israel-steal-bomb-grade-uranium-u...

A few years ago there was a report [0] listing weaknesses in the protection of nuclear material and smuggling possibilities.

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/12/how-to-get...

It is curious -- it's not like enriching Uranium is easy. It's a very expensive process with incredibly low yields if I understand it correctly.

The USSR and the US have enriched probably a million tons of it by now, the EU has enrichment capacity of about 20,000 tSWU which they used to enrich Uranium to about 4% (some to higher levels for research/breeders/medical plants). They are the 2nd largest producer of low and high level of enriched Uranium in the world, and also due to various security blunders also helped to proliferate nuclear technology. It's expensive but it is still done at very high scales, heck feeding a 1000MW fast nuclear reactor today require much more enrichment than running a weapons program. That fact was actually was one of the main "fear factors" in the Iranian deal, they have a huge enrichment operation however oddly enough it would not be sufficient to drive a power program. The part of the nuclear deal with Iran was actually a bit ironic because cutting down on their centrifuge numbers means that they could not actually sustain a "civilian" nuclear program as they will not manage to enrich enough fuel to keep any commercial energy producing reactors running. So while they will be able to enrich uranium capping their centrifuges (at what 5000?) actually means that outside of research the only other use would be to make a bomb. And this is simply because bombs don't care about time lines, if you are running nuclear energy you need to be able to continuously feed it with fuel fast burning light and heavy reactors consume fuel at a very high rate so if you can't have an enrichment process which can keep up with your reactors the whole program is pointless. The nuclear deal with Iran pretty much means that they'll need to enrich Uranium for 2-5 years then run their reactor for 6 months till it burns out and repeat which is obviously nonsensical.

> The nuclear deal with Iran pretty much means that they'll need to enrich Uranium for 2-5 years then run their reactor for 6 months till it burns out and repeat which is obviously nonsensical.

So the deal was just for show? Surely both sides are aware of this specific issue?

It was mentioned couple of times on the news and in various places i would assume. A quick google search shows relevant result in the top findings from earlier this year.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/feb/25/...

Not sure what politifact's standing is exactly, from the Wikipedia page there isn't much contraventions surrounding it and it seems to be hated by both right and left wing so it might be "ok".

As for the Iran deal, well it is some what of a show it is a breakout state and always will be however it doesn't mean that the deal won't be effective if it will be used as a gateway for further political concessions within the state. For the time being Iran is not really owning up to the deal it's halted the dismantling of it's centrifuges http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/10/us-iran-nuclear-de... and it's just the recent hurdle in the implementation of the deal. The deal was a big win for the US as it needed to regain some form of legitimacy on the world stage and it at least gave them couple of more years till they'll actually have to deal with the issue, for Iran it's also not a bad delay even if they'll have to slow down the process if in fact they are building a bomb, as their delivery systems aren't complete and their long range missile program wasn't progressing at the same pace. If it will end up well or will it blow up in everyone's face only time will tell. The Iranian deal was inevitable China and Russia wanted it, and most importantly the EU was in desperate need for new markets and new energy sources especially with relations with Russia circling the drain. If the sanctions couldn't hold Iran could do what it wants anyhow, this way the US has at least some way to try to keep it accountable to something and at least some way to justify a military action if one would ever take place (even tho i doubt it could be ever considered successful, not at the usual expected costs as set by the US public anyhow).

Weren't breeder reactors solving that problem?

Yes, but they aren't that common* , especially in very large installation pretty much since the 60's and 70's most nuclear reactors that were build were light water fast reactors. The advantages of breeders started to fade away when the cost of enrichment dropped significantly and when new stockpiles of Uranium were found, after the fall of the USSR when Russia became an exporter of Uranium it made them pretty much non-viable. They are still used to create medical and research isotopes, and Plutonium for either weapons or for nuclear batteries. Today there are 2 maybe 3 actual breeder reactors that are used for commercial power production. Most next-gen reactor design are breeders, or breed-capable (you can alternate between power-production and fuel breeding cycles) but none of them were built as of yet.

*Pretty much all reactors are create new fissile material even in normal fission Plutonium is created in the fuel rods and about 30% of the thermal energy produced by a power producing reactor comes from PU decay and fission. But breeder reactors are ones that designed to breed fissile material from fertile material (reactor based enrichment) so they create more fuel than what they consume but they can't really be used to produce power at that time. Some reactors combine the 2 and they'll have a power producing phase and a breeding phase usually they'll have several cores and move the fuel around to either breed or burn it.

Thank you!

How much of that production between the US and USSR is weapons-grade?

If you have links or books to recommend that would be great.

Cheers!

I don't really know those numbers (not sure if anyone does, and you know various treaties make any numbers published debatable because the official should be 0 or very close to it) officially they aren't supposed to make any new weapons and they have to disassemble existing ones and to dilute their highly enriched uranium stockpiles (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, probably some others too). Uranium enrichment is usually measured in SWU's that's separation work units which basically means your capacity to separate Uranium with 1 ton of raw Uranium as the feeding source. Basically to get 90% or higher enriched uranium you need about 1000-1200 SWU's which will produce 5-6kg* of weapons grade uranium from 1 ton of raw feed. If you have en enrichment capacity of 20,000,000 SWU you should be able to produce about 100,000 tons of weapons grade uranium per year (enough for about 2000* non salted/boosted bombs)

As for books don't have anything on top of my head but this is a good source of info http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nuclear-fuel-cycle/convers... The association of american scientists and similar organizations should also have plenty of nuclear related information. As I had to Google this earlier, and you might do it now, may I be the 1st one to welcome you to the watch list.

* may vary based on your enrichment process

* based on common publicly known weapon designs (50kg per fissile core) not sure how low an Uranium fissile core can get once you start getting into salting and multi staged fission.

Edit: Just to elaborate on the previous comment.

The difference in effort required between weapons grade and fuel grade uranium is almost negligible (this is why breakout is so easy for nuclear powered states). A 1000SWU on average will produce 5KG of weapons grade Uranium and about 100-120KG of reactor grade uranium. A 1000MW nuclear power plant needs about 75 tons of fuel per year (or upto 18 months depending on the burn rate), a bomb needs under 50kg of Uranium.

Perhaps they found a nuclear landmine and defeated the 1950's anti-tamper mechanisms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com