The surprising afterlife of unwanted atom bombs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Isn't the threat of treason/jail enough of a deterrent for engineers not to build nuclear weapons for other countries?
Kind of like a beefed up NDA.
after you join the elite you need market forces to be controled.
Should you get caught developing nuclear weapons for another state, what's stopping the US government from going after you Snowden style, cancelling your passport, seizing your assets, extradition orders to every country?
If you're highly skilled in such a thing and unemployed, you may go where the jobs are. So probably a good idea to keep them happy and employed in USA.
I see assertions in planning documents that the supply of tritium on hand is wholly inadequate for planned research operations on ITER, never mind its successor imagined to be built in such a way as to be able to drive a steam turbine, or likewise SPARC or its imagined successor. I.e. there is not enough for either program, never mind both.
And Helion's D-3He reactor would need lots of 3He, and be utterly dependent on making more, itself. It takes 12 years for half of your stock of tritium to spontaneously become the needed 3He, and no possibility of hurrying it along.
B41: 25MT, retired in 1976
B53: 9MT retired in 2011
B83: 1.2MT retired 2022
Despite its dearth of tactical (or strategic) uses, the B41 is a marvel of engineering assuming it does what it claims; 25MT from 5T of mass is crazy efficient.
As you mentioned, fallout is greatly decreased by the reduction in warhead size. Additionally, as airbursts are more effective at causing damage, they have taken precedence over ground bursts, and have a substantial impact on the reduction in fallout.
The concept of a nuclear winter is primarily related to the expected firestorms in cities and forests, which would throw colossal amounts of soot into the air. With infrastructure devastated by the strategic weapons exchange, the resources to effectively fight the fires weren't expected to be in place, so it was thought they'd burn out of control. While there has been debate over how realistic it is that a nuclear winter would occur from a strategic nuclear exchange, nobody doubts that it would be catastrophic.
...
“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.
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If you read "The Bomb", by Fred Kaplan, there is a telling scene in which Trump was briefed by the Pentagon on the state of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal. Trump was shown a chart that showed the dramatic drop in the total number of nuclear warheads in the arsenals of both the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. has peaked at over 32,000 in 1969, but was down to about 2,500 in the active arsenal. This was presented as a good thing. The U.S.'s warhead count had dropped dramatically because they had phased out tactical warheads intended for battlefield use. Such warheads were hazardous to maintain and the military had eagerly retired them once they were obviated by more modern conventional weapons that could do the same job with less collateral damage. The nuclear warheads that the U.S. still had were tailored to meet modern requirements and were far better suited to that task than 1969's arsenal would have been.
Trump didn't understand that being able to do the same job with fewer nuclear warheads was good, and told the group that he wanted more warheads. He wanted the 32,000 the U.S. had once had and was not satisfied by arguments to the contrary. This prompted secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to comment that Trump was a "fucking moron" shortly after he left the meeting. Trump would become obsessed with this number and repeatedly ask for more nuclear warheads to be made on several later occasions.
The B83 had the largest yield of any nuclear weapon in the U.S.'s arsenal, but it's an obsolete weapon. If the U.S. gets into a hot nuclear war, they're unlikely to rely on bomber planes with gravity bombs such as the B83, like they would have in the 60's. Such a war would likely be over before they even got to their targets. If the U.S. is retiring the B83 now, it's because they can destroy the same targets in far less time with other weapon systems.
Dismantling weapons such as the B83 does reduce the risk of accidents, theft, and loss, even if the components go onto shelves for potential reuse in new weapons. However, one should not make the mistake of thinking that the U.S. is, in any way, losing capabilities here. Let's just hope those capabilities are never actually tested.
What is this theoritical nonsense of dreams of hot nuclear wars and proceed to chest thump about having better weapons? No nuclear device has landed on US in war time. What do you base those assumptions on?
Do you think a country would face the US head on like trench warfare in the 1700s?
You think a belligerent nation would start a war with tge biggest military in the world and roll up with the trebuchets filled with nuclear bombs and start slinging at Washington?
Holy sh*t.
Of course I wish that we wouldn‘t need nuclear warheads capable of total annihilation to keep peace, but I‘m afraid that‘s just unrealistic.
https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2022/02/06/could-ukraine-...
https://www.icanw.org/did_ukraine_give_up_nuclear_weapons
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2015.1...
How difficult would it be to divert fuel and processed daughter nuclei to create a few weapons?
The answer comes in the form of another question: how many billions would it cost?
And ultimately building a nuclear weapon would alienate both sides unless it was being done explicitly with help.
Spent nuclear fuel rods are among the most dangerous and difficult to handle materials available, and ones that have been sitting in a power reactor for years are far more radioactive than ones that spend a day or two in a bomb production reactor. So reprocessing the fuel rods would be a considerable challenge and would require not insubstantial industrial facilities, which would likely be blindingly obvious to superpower intelligence agencies.
Then you'd have to fabricate the plutonium into a weapon. Weapons made from reactor-grade plutonium would be a real pain to handle and store because they would be exceedingly radioactive and would require a lot of shielding. But my understanding is that a nation-state with Ukraine's resources would probably be able to manage it if sufficiently determined. But, again, the idea that you'd be able to do it in secret is highly unlikely.
And then you'd have to deliver it. The resulting weapon would probably be extremely large, unlike the more sophisticated weapons that established nation-states have, and implausible to mount on a missile. So delivery would probably have to be with an aircraft, and then you've got the question of how likely it would be to get shot down before it reached its target.
And finally, you have to consider whether a few small nuclear weapons with not-great delivery systems would be a useful deterrent. It's not hard to imagine Russia's response if a few small nuclear weapons landed on its territory - and whatever else you might say about their military, they have a lot of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Ukraine would be a radioactive crater by the time Putin was finished with it.
And what's your proposal? Start nuclear war hoping that your guess is correct?
It was Russia removing their control of Nukes under their control in Ukraine.
Somewhat a big difference.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...
Its disappointing considering Europe's history and seasoned institutions.
I would not be surprised if Ursula has to phone Washington everytime she needs to go to the toilet.
But now we see Russia invading Ukraine and using the threat of nuclear weapons to reduce NATO countermeasures. The nuclear weapons have made its conventional war possible.
I think the verdict is still out on this. Should we destroy human civilization with nuclear weapons at some point in the future, none of that peace will have been worth it. We've had so many close calls (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls) that we're very lucky that this hasn't happened yet.
If the odds of nuclear war are 1% in a century, we won’t last much more than 10,000 years, and might last a lot fewer.
If you look at the close calls Wikipedia page linked upthread, one of the worst was a Soviet sub that lost radio contact during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2 out of 3 (!) of the officers on the sub approved a nuclear strike on the US fleet. The fate of human civilization relied on the choice of a single mid-level naval officer.
Considering the other two officers approved the strike, the final officer being the kind of person who would also approve the strike was probably in the 50/50 realm at best. So basically we won a coinflip on that day for the fate of humanity, and that's far from the only close call we've had.
It really does seem like just plain dumb luck that we made it through those turbulent wild west days when the bomb was new without killing ourselves.
Just as a side note, reading all the unexpected failure modes that popped up during the weapons program was remarkably humbling. Interactions with reality will poke all the holes in can in your world view. One of my favorite examples from the book: One of the early designs of the bomb required a human to specifically remove a key card from the bomb in order to arm it. This was deemed pretty safe. Until, an aircraft entered problems during a training mission and entered a spin. The centrifugal force of that spin was enough to suck the key out, arming the bomb on the way down as the plane crashed into the earth.
There is, counter intuitively, a lot of comfort to be had in modern missiles from a "will we accidentally blow ourselves up?" perspective.
Did someone think the plutonium was going to disappear?
This is why ALL nuclear power is a disaster. Even after this material is used to boil water for a few years, it's still highly radioactive for millennia.
The waste that remains after reprocessing in a fast cycle are fission products that will decay so much in 1000 years that the waste is less radioactive than the original uranium ore.
Cs137 and Sr90 lasting 'mere' centuries isn't helping your case any. Especially when existing MOX programs spill more than Fukushima and TMI combined as standard operating procedure.
With larger timescales, my understanding is that the mountain itself might disrupt the cube + drums, opening Pandora’s box.
Perhaps an actual geologist can weigh in and correct me.
100,000 not so much. All kinds of things can go wrong. It is expected for instance that as Yucca Mountain cools down water will infiltrate. Uranium is water soluble so some will migrate in the direction of Death Valley. Uranium is toxic the same way lead and mercury are and that is more dangerous than the radiotoxicity of uranium.
A "once through" repository will contain valuable plutonium and uranium. People might want to drill into it 10,000 years from now because they want to use it as a power source or to make nuclear explosives. For that matter we could change our minds and decide we want to recycle the waste in Yucca Mountain after all so we have to be able to retrieve the waste in the first 100 years.
A waste repository used for fission products can use highly secure but difficult to reverse approaches such as encapsulation in a salt dome or burial in areas at sea where sedimentation is taking place where waste would get deeper and deeper year after year and be blocked from migration by the tendency of ions to get trapped in clay.
"Cost estimate for MOX facility at Savannah River Site swells to $47.5 billion"
https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/2015/04/22/cost-...
"US MOX facility contract terminated"
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-MOX-facility-cont...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savannah_River_Site#MOX_Fuel_F...
Existing renewable tech + storage will do the job just fine in most of the world, and at lower cost than nuclear.
Something can be highly radioactive for a short time, moderately radioactive for a long time, or slightly radioactive for a very long time.
If something is “radioactive for millenia” then it’s probably so mild that you could store in your underpants without I’ll effects.
Have a little snack consisting of 1 gram of americium and 7 grams of neptunium 237, or store an equivalently active gamma emitter in your underpants.
Also, it's a exponential decay curve, so something that's slightly radioactive a very long time from now is probably still fairly dangerous right now.
So it space and were actively trying to send people up there to live and colonize.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Coal is far, far worse than this.
The size of our generation capacity is as important as its emissions.