Tanachai Limpaitoon, a PhD candidate at MIT, is thinking out loud about America's energy challenges, and what part his university can play in helping to solve them:
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy
Obviously, we all understand the risks that accompany too great a dependence on foreign energy, particularly from politically unstable parts of the world. We also need to secure extended energy delivery systems, which are vulnerable to disruption, whether from sabotage or natural disasters. We must remember that major wars have been fought over access to scarce resources, and our dependence on oil for transport means growing prospects for conflict over energy supply. And while there is a renewed interest in nuclear power as an alternative to carbon-based fuels, we must answer the questions about the consequent potential for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.Plenty of food for thought, though I hope Tanachai is taking a close look at GNEP as a long-term answer to his question.
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy
Comments
Is it the US industry's position that plutonium with less than 90% Pu-239 cannot be used to make a nuclear explosive device?
WRT reactor-grade plutonium, I am not a nuclear physicist but I've read studies that claim that while reactor-grade plutonium is not ideal for making the kind of bombs that a first-world military would expect, it's quite adequate for making something that would explode with around 1 kiloton of force, even if the bomb was no more sophisticated than Trinity. That's enough to kill many thousands of people if you let it off in a densely populated city, with a lethal blast and radiation dose radius of roughly half a mile.
Interestingly, the same seems to apply (but to a lesser extent) to modern "bomb-grade" plutonium, which is not the super high purity stuff used in WWII. It would, apparently, be quite difficult to get Trinity-level yields out of the stuff reliably without using boosting. If you were talking about a nation-state with significant technical resources, they could probably use a boosted fission design to get much bigger yields (though that's apparently much more difficult to get right).
So spent fuel rods are a proliferation risk, though luckily they are so radioactive that they're damn near impossible for a terrorist to steal without immediately incapacitating and killing himself in the process, let alone reprocess into plutonium for a weapon.
This was also the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences in their 1994 and 1994 studies on options to dispose of surplus weapons grade Pu. And of the US DOE in its 1997 nonproliferation assessment of the surplus Pu disposition program.