Q. Would it be possible to economically move the fission component into a standardized nuclear reactor that could then generate electrical power?
IOW is there a "swords to plowshares" solution to the disposal of fission weapons or, once you've made one, are you stuck with a device that can only be used to blow things up?
Reason I ask is, I see Russia et al sitting on all these weapons which cost a great deal, are no doubt costly to maintain and of little or no benefit to anyone (well, other than as a threat). [I mean, it's almost like owning a fleet of BMWs but even less useful! ] If we could build a "reactor framework" into which we could move a single warhead's fuel and that fuel could generate electrical power until sufficiently diminished to be of little/no use as a weapon, then that would IMO be a very good thing. Countries like Russia who had a closet of nukes but no money could sell the nuclear fuel off and benefit, buyers could get electrical power cheaper(?), and the world would be better off. Everybody wins.
Or is making a nuclear weapon effectively an economic one-way street (i.e., you're stuck paying for it forever?
Plutonium is its own special thing, and I don't know much about its use in reactors: while it's definitely possible to use as reactor fuel, I can't speak to the cost or effort required. Apparently plutonium is a PITA when it comes to metallurgy, but while this makes it hard to process into a weapon, I don't know if it also makes it hard to process back to fuel.
The Russkies have lots of nukes but no cash. They're apparently as money-illiterate as I am, which is pretty awful. But if converting warheads to "heaters" (for everything from heating to power generation) would be worth a fortune, then it might be enough to rebuild Russia's economy.
Furthermore, it might be a way to save OpenAI by creating cheaper power supplies for AI datacenters [just kidding about this last one - always like to get the AIers excited, see if their stocks rise!].
They already did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
A little too well, in fact, undercutting other suppliers; to quote from the page:
The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US.
Mostly the classified security measures kind of safeguard: Make sure nobody can come in and steal the hard-to-make enriched weapons grade stuff before it gets blended down.
For material handling, everything I've heard about uranium as a metal is fairly mundane. Just:
• don't ingest it, lick it, or sniff it, it's an alpha emitter and a heavy metal
• don't grind it while you work on it, not only do you not want to breathe in a dusty alpha emitter, the dust is pyrophoric, i.e. catches fire in air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophoricity#Pyrophoric_mater...
• and make sure the weapons-grade chunks are not ever under any circumstances near each other while working on them, for which the main big surprise is "do not work them into cylinders, because cylinders can roll towards each other and end up touching".
Sarcasm noted, but you were mixing up something that wasn't isolated by Curie because it was too hard to do so, with something that was only found in the year she died.
> Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
If you gathered all the nasty decay products from Chernobyl and put them into convenient balls to strap to an explosive for the purpose of messing up someone else's country, you'd immediately have a problem of *the balls would cause the explosives you put them next to, to catch on fire, because of the heat output of their own radioactive decay*. Even in the spread-out form of the real life incident, robots stopped working when they got too close to large concentrations, the radiation fried circuits.
You are scared of something that is not only not plausible, it's something such that if they could do it at a scale big enough to hurt you, they'd have better things to do, e.g. hitting the US warships counter-blockading Hormuz.
> Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc.
Spare you the most important point?
> Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
You say "lots" like it's a point, but it isn't: "lots" is far too vague.
Chernobyl had nearly 3000 times as much uranium in it as a fission bomb, to a different enrichment level, but how much enrichment matters during a criticality incident which transmutes elements into the nasty radioisotopes that you don't want to be around is complicated for fallout calculations. Nobody, including SpaceX, has a missile that is big enough to carry that all in one go.
- https://www.osti.gov/biblio/226794In comparison, the one which levelled Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
This scale difference is also (one of the reasons) why even having a nuclear reactor as a "civilian program" is suspect. Makes it relatively easy to hide a weapons program.