British Royal Society ‘Vulnerable To Extreme Shortsightedness’
The headline in the Guardian screams: Sellafield's plutonium store 'vulnerable to terrorist attack'. All they lack is thirty exclamation points after it to make it a true internet classic. The Reuters story takes the hyperventilating position: Britain has plutonium for 17,000 Nagasaki bombs. Again, all it needs it the excessive punctuation. Here's the Guardian first:
Britain's stocks of plutonium are kept in "unacceptable" conditions and pose a severe safety and security risk, experts warn today.
The Royal Society says ministers must urgently review the way more than 100 tonnes of the radioactive element, separated during the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, is held at the Sellafield complex in Cumbria. The society, Britain's premier scientific academy, says a previous warning to the government has been ignored, and that the rise of international terrorism means the UK must now find a way to use or dispose of the material.
Plutonium is highly toxic and is the primary component of most nuclear bombs. In a report published today, the society says a well-informed terrorist group could turn a small amount of the stockpiled material into a crude atomic weapon.
And now on to Reuters:
The toxic stockpile, which has doubled in the last decade, comes mainly from reprocessing of spent uranium fuel from the country's nuclear power plants, so to stop it growing the practice must end, the Royal Society said.
"There should be no more separation of plutonium once current contracts have been fulfilled," said the report "Strategy options for the UK's separated plutonium."
Plutonium, one of the most radiotoxic materials known, is produced when spent uranium fuel from power stations is reprocessed to retrieve reusable uranium.
It can be processed into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel but it can also be used in nuclear weapons and so poses a security threat.
"Just over six kilograms of plutonium was used in the bomb that devastated Nagasaki," said Geoffrey Boulton, the report's lead author. "We must take measures to ensure that this very dangerous material does not fall into the wrong hands."
Paradoxically, the Royal Society said the safest option was to leave spent fuel as it was when it came out of the reactor because it was so radioactive that it was far harder to handle.
Not impossible, not unusable. Just "harder to handle." Strictly speaking, that is a completely factual statement. It is also completely meaningless. Many things are hard to handle. But not impossible. Extracting plutonium from spent fuel is very straightforward - much less technically challenging than enriching uranium. The Royal Society is exhibiting an extremely bad case of shortsightedness here. There is only one way to get rid of fissile material.
Burn it.
Use it in a nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes or explode it in a bomb; burning is the only way to get rid of it. There is no other way to render it safe and beyond the reach of terrorists. Period. Look closely at the tip of your little finger to the first joint. That is the approximate size of a nuclear reactor fuel pellet. With a 3-4% enrichment a fuel pellet that big yields about the same amount of energy as two train cars full of coal. The only fuel actually consumed in the reaction is the 3-4% of U-235 (or Pu-239). The alternative to using it is to guard it forever. Eventually, the guards will fail or people will lose interest and it will fall into the wrong hands.
So, either use it up for peaceful purposes or wait for it to fall into the wrong hands. Your choice. We know where the Royal Society stands.
Energy, Environment, World news | Gaius Thursday, 20 September , 2007
By wheels, Friday, 21 September , 2007 @ 10:06 am
Kept in “unacceptable” conditions? What, they’ve left it out on the counter rather than making sure it’s properly refrigerated?
Nuclear waste/byproducts are a significant, but not insoluble, problem. It’s a bigger problem than it needs to be here in the US, since Carter killed the processing facility that would have separated the components for better handling and disposal.
Some nuclear waste components are highly radioactive and require much shielding, while others are only slightly radioactive and require little. However, the more radioactive something is, the shorter its half-life. Things that are very radioactive are big problems for a short time; things that aren’t very radioactive are smaller problems for longer times. The type of radioactivity also affects how seriously something must be handled.
The problem is that if you don’t separate the components, you end up having to treat the waste as a big problem for a long time, which complicates your storage and security requirements.
Most plutonium isotopes are alpha emitters, which means that you can block the radiation with a sheet of notebook paper. Pu-239 has a half-life of around 24000 years, which means that it isn’t that radioactive. So it’s security to prevent “repurposing” it that you have to worry about most.
It could be used to build a bomb, or it could be dispersed into the environment - plutonium is a poisonous heavy metal, and once it’s absorbed into the body (where it has a biological half-life of about 40 years), there’s no notebook paper protecting your cells from the alpha particles.
I doubt that anyone other than a government has the resources to build a nuclear bomb with stolen plutonium (Bill Gates could probably afford it, but I doubt he has the infrastructure available), but making a dirty bomb is certainly within the realm of possibility.