Quote:
Originally Posted by sunnyside
Just wondering if anyone had any input on this. As far as I can tell the answer is near zero.
From
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/wo...an/bushehr.htm
It sounds like a plant like Iran is making could produce enough plutonium for 30 bombs per year. What is required to get the right plutonium amount is to pull the fuel rods at ~4 months instead of leaving them in longer.
However, depending on how they rotate the fuel rods, that means that there could be up to 10 nukes worth of plutonium just sitting there. That number being for putting all rods in at the same time, waiting until they reached the desired time period and then pulling them.
The rest of the project could have been done elsewhere. For a simple implosion type device it's simply a matter of getting the stuff in the cores turned into balls. That process is what I have no idea about.
Otherwise it sounds like you have minutes to hit a nuclear power plant if fuel is being taken out to stop it. Probably impractical if not impossible to do. Then you have some small amount of time to locate and destroy wherever the final refinement is taking place before the country in question becomes a nuclear power.
Maybe a couple days? |
It depends on the type of reactor and the type of fuel rod. IOW, fast flux reactors like the newest one at Hanford does not necessarily create plutonium. The original reactors at Hanford for example created trace amounts of plutonium as a byproduct of the nuclear chain. So, yes, the fuel rods may have plutonium in them, but the process to isolate the plutonium involves something like 15 highly radioactive and incredibly caustic steps. The buildings at Hanford used for plutonium separation are essentially sealed for thousands of years with automated, integrated, and self-sufficient processes never meant to have a human any where near them. That was how they were designed in the early 40's. The point is, it is not really a simple task to isolate the plutonium, plus, it tends to decay into other elements thus "poisoning" its fissile qualities rather quickly--especially compared to uranium 235.
The other aspect of your post was the simplicity of creating the cores. You have to understand that the way the implosion device works is by taking a sub-critical amount of fissile material in a given volume, and turning it into a super-critical amount of fissile material of the same amount in a much smaller volume. This is really no easy task. They pulled this off at the trinity test in New Mexico for the first time. The way they did it was by using "lenses" of high explosive joined with shapes of low yield explosive. The idea was to completely turn a shockwave inside-out (an uninterrupted shock wave gets larger from its epicenter) and focus it in three dimensions literally inside its epicenter on a sphere of low-density plutonium, crushing the sphere to a volume that created a super-critical mass. When Oppenheimer described the physical challenges created in this problem, he likened it to crushing a beer can without spilling a drop.
These are just a few highlights of the challenges that they faced in the Manhattan Project. I think it is harder than you imagine to make an atomic bomb. The refinement of the fissile material is especially tedious, expensive, slow, and deadly. If you want to look at photos or read more about either gaseous diffusion or plutonium separation, look up Hanford, Washington, (AKA Manhattan Project, plutonium separation) or Oakridge, Tenessee. (AKA Site X Gaseous Diffusion, isotope separation.)
Anyway, there you go. Something to think about...