https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savannah_River_Site#MOX_Fuel_F...
"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...
The hang up is that they were unable to build a MOX fabrication facility in the US even with the help of the French, who have run a successful MOX plant.
I haven't seen a detailed explanation of what exactly went wrong, but it seems challenging to build a MOX facility to operate under US worker safety regulation. The trouble is that quality MOX fuel is made with a high energy ball mill that alloys uranium and plutonium oxides by making plutonium particles that are potentially deadly if you inhale them.
My understanding is that the factory where Karen Silkwood worked at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimarron_Fuel_Fabrication_Site
was unable to eliminate plutonium particles completely from the work spaces so that workers had to wear breathing protection 100% of the time at work. It may be the French are OK with this but the US is not.
Britain built a MOX facility that was unable to make quality fuel
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/minister-admi...
The Russians were concerned enough about the primary route to MOX failing that they developed an alternate "vibropacking" route that they didn't need in the end. Russia is now recycling MOX in the BN-800 reactor.
Isn't there hazard pay?
I personally would be fine working in such an environment, and accepting the risk if the pay was sufficiently high.
Many folks do some everyday all around the world.
This sounds like a stereotype. What an individual country's regulations and negotiated union agreements are are not on a linear scale with France better than the US.
The French COGEMA plant is studied to death and doesn't seem to be a terribly dangerous place to work
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078398/
but recent studies seem to show that lung cancer from plutonium exposure is a real thing for nukes
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5540354/
Conventional MOX production involves making little fuel pellets that get sintered in an oven and then somebody uses a glove box to pick up individual pellets and stuff them into a fuel rod. You'd think in 2022 they could find a way to do it with remote handling, but those plutonium particles are pesky in many ways and they are highly detectable whether or not they are dangerous so people will detect them and worry about them.
I'm not saying it isn't, although fairness probably isn't the goal for safety regulations. I'm saying there doesn't exist a continuum of "goodness" that France sits above the US on for worker safety.
The P4 Wuhan lab has been designed and trained by the French, following their own P4 labs, the know how for which... has been acquired during their own first nuclear weapons program ! I'm willing to bet that the same know how is used in the French MOX facilities !
Has Covid been the 2nd time that this know how has failed to be properly exported ?
It's also something of a persistent anachronism that lends itself to the historic population centers, I suspect. The actual test location was at Trinity Site, which is closer to present day Socorro and Carrizozo[1] than to Alamogordo and detonated on the north end of what was then called the "Alamogordo Bombing Range." This location is now a part of the broader White Sands Missile Range. It gives me some amusement as a local, because we occasionally hear the question "Oh, Alamogordo? That's where they tested the bomb, isn't it?!"
I hate to disappoint their curiosity, of course, but according to present day geography, no; historically—kind of—if you consider everything was then associated with Alamogordo, including the army air base! To us, Trinity Site is 80 miles to the north/northwest and on the other side of the Oscura Mountains (north of the San Andres Mountains)!
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.6815401,-106.4737885,20277m/...
I'm sure it would be far cheaper to burn it than store otherwise.
That doesn't even make sense. Nearly all the fuel reactors use is shipped in anyway, only 5% of the US fuel is from the US itself. How is holding tones of weapon making stuff in one convenient location safer than ultimately getting rid of it through burning it up?
Nuclear reactor fuel, on the other hand, even if it is stolen can't do much more than get really hot. It's not possible (without a lot of expensive post processing) to turn regular reactor fuel into a bomb.
"
OK, so we just need to collect enough material and presto, we have a bomb. Unfortunately, it's not so simple:
Getting enough of the right material is hard.
As soon as you start to assemble the material into a critical mass, it starts reacting, and so if you do it wrong, the energy emission will cause it to explosively disassemble, which isn't fun if you're nearby, but produces a much smaller bang than you were looking for (a "fizzle").
"
A nuclear bomb is a massively complex adventure in timed explosions to get the "lens" to work. This is after you figure out what size/shape to make the "pit".
Depending on the reactor design, regular reactor fuel often contains plutonium which is rather easy to separate because it is chemically different vs other elements in the used fuel waste. Again this is covered in the article.
The article backs up my assertions.
The hard part of assembling a nuclear weapon is the materials, not the timing mechanism.
> The pit presents two problems. First, even without the rest of the components, the plutonium pits can be reused to make new weapons, either with a similar geometry to the current weapon, or melted down and formed into the pit of a new weapon with a new geometry. We know from experience that once state-level actors get access to enough plutonium to build a bomb they generally succeed. Of course, non-state-level actors might have a much harder time building a bomb from raw plutonium.
The thing that stops nations from getting nukes isn't the mechanical parts of the bomb but rather the actual raw fissile materials.
Fuel for reactors does not contain enough fissile materials to present a problem which is why the security around it can be much more lax. On the other hand, shipping the pit for a nuclear bomb is inherently a lot more dangerous. Once you have the plutonium, making the bomb isn't an expensive prospect.
The first nuclear bomb was a gun. We shot an enriched uranium bullet into an enriched uranium pit. The timing is only complicated if the intent is to drop the bomb or shoot it as a missile. Otherwise, a gun is pretty much all that's needed to have a suitcase nuke.
First you need some sort of nuclear power plant because plutonium is not a naturally occurring element in any quantity.
Once you have this and attempt to purchase uranium on the open market you can face being blacklisted. Do you know why this is the case? Because the jump from uranium to plutonium is actually easy.
The second is you need to use a specific reactor design. Again referencing the article some designes can be targeted to produce plutionium. This is where the bulk of the US plutonium came from.
But again, all reactors produce plutonium because even "enriched uranium" contains both U235 and U238.
U235 splits and creates energy and free nutrons, U238 captures nutrons and transmutes to plutonium.
Reactors like what we have here (Canada) actually "burn" plutonium and are not really suitable but yet India got its plutonium this way
"India's first nuclear explosion in 1974 used plutonium from a heavy water reactor that was a gift from the Canadian government."
As an added "negative" our reactors also produce Tritium which Canada refuses to sell to anyone who intends to use it for weapons.
> fuel for reactors does not contain enough fissile materials to present a problem which is why the security around it can be much more lax.
This covers "reactor grade plutonium" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium
I'm not sure security is "lax".. the nuclear power plant near me has armed guards 24x7 and "deadly force authorized" signs.
It also provides citations of how this was actually used to build a 20KT proof of concept weapon.
You are mixing Plutonium vs Uranium devices to suit your needs.
Sometimes you reference "pits" which are plutonium devices, sometimes you reference "gun" which are antiquated uranium devices.
I don't know if a "suitcase nuke" can use uranium given its "critical mass" is 107 LBS.
On top of this you need a "gun" to launch the two together with sufficient speed.
"Suitcase" nukes are almost guaranteed to be plutonium based because its critical mass is just 22 lbs and is far more destructive.
Doing anything with plutonium is expensive. It has some strange physical properties, such as going through phase changes, expanding when heated and not shrinking when cooled. This makes machining difficult. Plus it's toxic and flammable, as well as being radioactive. The Pantex plant has struggled with this for decades. It may be machined in a liquid bath. Usually under remote control. Everything about making a plutonium bomb is hard.
Metallic uranium is not difficult to machine. There's a tech note on how to do it from Union Carbide.[1] Even the radioactivity problem isn't too bad.
> Otherwise, a gun is pretty much all that's needed to have a suitcase nuke.
Truck bomb, yes. Suitcase bomb, no. The minimum size for a gun bomb is rather large.[2] Implosion bombs can be made smaller, but at a cost in complexity and reliability. The US nuclear establishment spent most of the 1950s on that problem.
That's why non-state actors getting hold of weapons grade uranium is a big concern.
see my comment below.
Hint: MSRs use 99-100% of fuel.