The Apollo Affair | Hacker News Reader

The Apollo Affair

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79 pointsLammy16 comments

Crikey - 93Kg of highly enriched uranium is enough for 4 nukes and would cost about $1.4Bn in today's money.

'Curious' that the US didn't move entire mountain ranges to find the stuff... .

That's because they knew where it went.

Exactly. They couldn’t not investigate, but they also knew where it went and didn’t exactly want to dig too hard because they might accidentally find too much evidence.

Am I wrong or did I just read that it essentially “evaporated”?

That was the second 90kg of Enriched Uranium lost at that facility.

The mind boggles.

It's more like $10 million in today's money, based on the $12/gram cost shown for highly enriched uranium in "UCOST - A Computer Code for Calculating the Cost of Enriched Uranium" (Atomic Energy Commission report, 1966) and then adjusted by CPI.

Huh, I'd've assumed it the other way around given the infrastructure requirement at the time, but your cost sounds a lot more likely given its provenance than the [now, i realise belatedly, unvalidated] cost I Googled prior.

For a sense of scale, 93 kg of uranium would occupy a space a little smaller than one soccer ball: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+93+kg+of+ura...

HEU would be supercritical in that configuration, wouldn't it?

I suspect you're right, so we can assume that it was never all in one piece or we would have known about it!

Oh, I don't know. Lacking implosive compression the consequence would have been, not the sort of blast you seem to have in mind, but rather a "demon core"-style radiation accident. That said, it'd still be enthusiastically messy albeit in a more limited fashion, and there'd still be no reason for anyone to assemble the material that way - not least for what grisly example became of the last guy who took so little care.

Still, as you note, it's remarkable to think of the density of the material - a soccer ball's worth that masses about as much as me.

i find the idea of 100+ kilos of some of the densest material on earth evaporating or being scrubbed off by mistake totally unfathomable, but i'm inclined to take the word of hersh. surely this kind of thing must have occurred in other nuclear programs?

With the Soviet programme, perhaps. Just by sheer scale, even a small % of loss would amount to a worrying quantity.

All the other nuclear regimes around the world? Less so, I'd imagine. They'd be counting their beans a bit more.

I recall 60 Minutes had a story about theft of uranium from a convoy in Pennsylvania, with suspicion of Israeli involvement. This story was back in the 70s. I'm sorry, my memory fails me about any further details. It might or might not be related to this posting.

It is absolutely insane that the government is allowed to be so reckless with highly enriched uranium.

Also worth looking into the origins of Pakistan's nuclear program.

Pakistan built their own uranium centrifuge plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan. What that page doesn't mention, is that Khan simply copied the plan of the Urenco plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urenco_Group#Abdul_Qadeer_Khan).

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