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Comment by ekr____ | Hacker News Reader

OP here. Yes, this seems to be the best available approach. You apparently can burn it in regular reactors if you mix it with uranium in what's called "mixed oxide fuel" (MOX). However, there are a bunch of logistical hiccups that make all of this a giant pain.

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The US was planning to burn nuclear weapons plutonium in the Palo Verde plant in Arizona which are a European design designed to use MOX fuel from the very beginning.

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.

Aren't you suggesting that the french have more lax worker protections than the US? I would be very skeptical of that claim. Now, maybe it was """hard""" (expensive) to properly protect your workers and so it didn't make business sense, and that for some reason is enough to kill most good things in the US

They have a different viewpoint.

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.

What's wrong with requiring workers to wear breathing protection 100% of the time?

Isn't there hazard pay?

Hazard pay is sort of passable for risks like falling off a telephone pole, where you pretty much fully prevent it if you're careful and know for sure whether it happened to you or not. It's not at all compelling (morally anyway) for a risk with much higher odds, where you won't know for twenty years whether it gave you cancer. That's just taking advantage of people's shortsightedness, and I don't think "but I paid them really well" is an excuse.

No?

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.

With the Covid pandemic, we all saw that Americans absolutely refuse to wear masks any significant amount of time. Getting them to wear masks all day long would never work in America. In other countries, it's doable.

> Aren't you suggesting that the french have more lax worker protections than the US? I would be very skeptical of that claim. Now, maybe it was """hard""" (expensive) to properly protect your workers and so it didn't make business sense, and that for some reason is enough to kill most good things in the US

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.

It is perfectly fair for different regulators to have different ideas about what is safe.

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.

> It is perfectly fair for different regulators to have different ideas about what is safe.

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.

Interesting, it reminds me of another case of """deadly if inhaled""" : Covid (in the case if the lab leak hypothesis is correct).

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 ?

In 2007 the United States started building a MOX facility at Savannah River for turning the old weapons plutonium into power reactor fuel. Its cost and time to completion ballooned far beyond original estimates and it was ultimately canceled.

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...

There's a small typo around 1/3rd of the way down: It reads "Alomogordo New Mexico." The city should be rendered "Alamogordo."

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/...

The confusion probably arises from the fact that if you want to visit the Trinity Site, the caravan departs from the Alamogordo High School parking lot.

I'd bet that's a part of it to be sure!

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