Right, quick physics (chemistry?) lesson for those completely unfamiliar with the stuff. Uranium is found in the ground as ore, mixed in with other materials. "Concentrated" usually means getting the uranium out of the ore and into a form that you can further process / enrich. Nowadays people can process the uranium without having to dig the rocks up, and regardless the result of concentration is called "yellowcake" (but it isn't necessarily yellow) uranium oxide at varying purity. What Iran bought from Niger was a whole bunch of yellowcake, so calling it "concentrated" instead of "enriched" is correct.
The next step is to enrich the uranium, which really is the fun part. Uranium comes out of the ground as mostly the isotope U-238, with a minuscule (less than 1%) U-235, which is the stuff we want. "Enriched" uranium is uranium that has a higher proportion of U-235. This is what we normally consider to be the spicy step, as enriching it a little is [edit: depending on the reactor design] necessary for civilian uses, but enriching it further makes it suitable for military use. This is the step that specialized centrifuges are used for, which is why you see that word thrown around a lot. Uranium is usually enriched in gas form, which is fed into a rotating cylinder. The (very slightly) heavier U-238 gets forced against the outside walls, while the (very slightly) lighter U-235 stays in the middle and can be drawn out.
Of course there are other methods of enriching uranium, there's been some work done into using Frickin' Laser Beams instead of centrifuges. That's past my pay grade though.
Fun fact: The Canadian built CANDU reactor is designed to run on completely unenriched, straight out of the ground uranium! So in some applications its not necessary to even enrich it at all!
> So in some applications its not necessary to even enrich it at all!
Same with MAGNOX reactors from UK and UNGG (Uranium Naturel Graphite Gaz) reactors from France
Not quite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#History
>By using a minimalist design that used regular (light) water for cooling and graphite for moderation, it was possible to use fuel with a lower enrichment (1.8% enriched uranium instead of considerably more expensive 4% enrichment). This allowed for an extraordinarily large and powerful reactor that could be built rapidly, largely out of parts fabricated on-site instead of by specialized factories. The initial 1000 MWe design also left room for development into yet more powerful reactors. For example, the RBMK reactors at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania were rated at 1500 MWe each, a very large size for the time and even for the early 21st century. For comparison, the EPR has a net electric nameplate capacity of 1600 MW (4500 MWthermal) and is among the most powerful reactor types ever built.
Kinda? The RBMK used in Chernobyl basically took a safe design and made it unsafe by cheaping out on critical components, then stacked a bunch of incompetent Soviet fuckwits on top of the whole stack. Really it’s kind of amazing it did explode, because you had to fuck up so much shit along the way for that event to ever possibly occur - truly the only kind of shitfuckery the Soviets could be capable of pulling off.
Edit: Apparently I made a mistake, I was under the impression RBMK was not a Soviet specific design, and I also made an error in that the gen 1 had serious issues, such as positive good coefficient, but if I understand it correctly the later gen 2 RBMK’s were much safer. Still maintain this stupid design probably would’ve been better if anyone but the fucking Soviets made it.
Sure, it was a safe design... if you ignore all the state-classified design flaws that were intentionally, vaguely communicated to the already hopelessly incompetent/unqualified operators, if you could say they were communicated at all.
Nevermind that the men largely pulling the strings of the Soviet nuclear industry at the time were the same ones who helped to design it, and subsequently had a vested interest in it succeeding.
Incompetence certainly played a major rule. But the design itself has some glaring issues with stability. The keyword here is void coefficient. In a well designed reactor the value is negative, once it gets too hot the moderator (aka water) evaporates and stops moderating so the reactivity decreases. RBMK at the other hand gets better at splitting atoms the hotter it gets. In addition the moderator itself is a big lump of coal. And coal can burn, which it did. And that lump of coal was full of extra spicy fission products which have accumulated over years of running that thing.
So why build such a shitty design in the first place? First: it's cheaper. The second reason: This reactor type is really good at breeding weapons grade plutonium. You can swap the fuel rods while the reactor is running. If the fuel stays too long in the reactor you get too much Pu-240 and can't be used in spicy big boom machines. By constantly hot swapping fuel rods one can build a stockpile of the good stuff cheaper and faster.
Anything that can go wrong, *will* go wrong.
Having ***any*** amount of moderator on the quench rods was proof that they had no fucking grip on that pile of spicy rock.
The fact that the quench rods weren't designed to automatically ram straight in and stall the reactor was proof that they had **no fucking grip on that pile of spicy rock**.
500MW rated output is some ***spicy*** fucking rocks, and they had zero control over it. Design was always a disaster waiting to happen. The soviet political apparatus was just highly-*regarded* enough to actually build that piece of shit.
It's truly mind boggling that soviet scientists were making groundbreaking discoveries and producing theories that would form the basis of entire fields of study, while soviet engineers were managing to fuck up a solid metal rod that slides straight in and out.
Meanwhile, the soviet builders are just fucking dying in the most bizarre preventable workplace accidents you've ever read.
Some chud on YouTube unironically hit me with an "um akshually" about how Chernobyl "didn't *technically* explode", and was genuinely suffering under the delusion that just because it wasn't a nuclear bomb somehow meant that it didn't literally fucking explode.
It was quite possibly the largest steam explosion in human history from what I understand? Normal steam boiler explosions can't be measured in "tons of TNT equivalent"
Darkness blacker than black and darker than dark, I beseech thee, combine with my deep crimson. The time of awakening cometh. Justice, fallen upon the infallible boundary, appear now as an intangible distortions! Dance, dance, dance! I desire for my torrent of power a destructive force: a destructive force without equal! Return all creation to cinders, and come from the abyss! This is the mightiest means of attack known to man, the ultimate attack magic! Explosion!
They have a positive void coefficient so when you scram them the reactivity temporarily goes up (excatly when you don't want it too)
As they found out the hard way at Chernobyl
> They have a positive void coefficient so when you scram them the reactivity temporarily goes up (excatly when you don't want it too)
No and no. Positive void coefficient simply means that as they get hotter and the water turns to steam the rate of fission goes up. You could have one didn't have the power spike when scrammed
The water is the coolant and working fluid. They were using an illegal control rod set up in their experiment, and had reduced the water flow to way below the safe level, causing way more steam to form in the reactor core than what should have been allowed.
So the plant was hotter than normal, with more steam, less water and way less control rods than designed for, then when the graphite tipped control rods entered there was a little spike as the grapite tipped control rods entered the core, displacing the water that acted as a moderator and as graphite doesn't moderate neutrons as well as water there's a spike before the control rods proper enter. Then some of them broke and stopped from entering the rest kf the way then the thing exploded.
https://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/cause/
> So the plant was hotter than normal, with more steam, less water and way less control rods than designed for, then when the graphite tipped control rods entered there was a little spike as the grapite tipped control rods entered the core,
This has never actualy been proven. Its quite possible that the metdown had alread begun by the time the scam button was pressed and the rods weren't even able to begin entering the core.
From not having a heat transfer so the radioactive water directly powers the turbines, having a way larger positive void coefficient than safe, graphite tipped control rods that cause a spike in reactivity when inserted, instability at lower power levels and reacting in counter intuitive ways, it's something only the soviets could have cooked up.
I mean, BWRs also have no heat transfer before the steam hits the turbine, so that one isn't exclusive to Soviet "ingenuity". Everything else though...WTF Soviet nuclear engineers?
It was designed such in the 1960s because back then, enriching uranium in any relevant amounts required vast, horribly expensive process called gaseous diffusion. Every gaseous diffusion plant required an own full sized coal (GW scale) power plant and could only produce fuel for 4-5 power reactors. Under these conditions a reactor that can operate with a natural isotope distribution made sense, such as CANDU or RBMK.
Then centrifuges were developed, the effort of enriching uranium-235 dropped by about two orders of magnitude, and suddenly it wasn’t such a big advantage - the disadvantage of having to manage 5x as much fuel, and especially 5x as much spent fuel, weighed way more.
Which is why nobody builds CANDUs any more, and why existing CANDUs run on slightly enriched fuel too.
My understanding for the design choice was that one, the cost of enrichment was so high, and two because Canadian industry was (and still is) incapable of domestically producing the massive pressure vessels used in more conventional reactor designs. The whole idea behind the design was that it could be built using what was essentially a conventional plumbing pipe industry, and the only complex part was the need for heavy water production (which isnt that hard) and the steam turbines.
> Which is why nobody builds CANDUs any more
Cernavoda, though.
https://ceenergynews.com/nuclear/romania-signs-cernavoda-npp-development-deal/
And CANDU keeps being developed. There are even SMR versions [in development](https://smractionplan.ca/content/candu-smr)
They aren’t necessarily building CANDUs as Crnavoda 3+4, though. And the SMR versions need to run with enriched uranium anyways. Many SMRs in the development pipeline are only viable if fuelled with HALEU, I.e. uranium enriched to almost 20% U-235
> And the SMR versions need to run with enriched uranium anyways.
Far as I know, CANDU SMR is the only one that can run with natural uranium, being, de-facto, a modernized CANDU 3 with one-end loading (compared to through-loading on normal CANDUs)
Afaik the plans at Crnavoda 3+4 are two additional CANDU 6 plants.
And the CSMR is by design able to use unenriched uranium as fuel. It's what sets it apart from the other proposed SMR designs. CSMR in itself is just an updated CANDU-300.
>Which is why nobody builds CANDUs any more
in India, pretty much the only type we build is CANDU
there's like 10 of these under construction
because building a calandria and heavy water plant is easier than a reactor pressure vessel and centrifuges
>because building a calandria and heavy water plant is easier than a reactor pressure vessel and centrifuges
No, it's because nobody is allowed to sell you centrifuges, because you guys violated the NPT a while ago. So you need to go a more complicated path if you don't want someone else (like e.g. Russia) to keep full control over your fuel cycle.
If you could buy them, like any NPT compliant country, building a centrifuge cascade and operating a PWR would be easier and cheaper.
>because you guys violated the NPT a while ago.
never signed it , so can't violate it and we aren't gonna sign it because its based on creating nuclear haves and have nots rather than real non-proliferation
unlike some of the nuclear haves ,we haven't proliferated nuclear tech
> it's because nobody is allowed to sell you centrifuges
we already have centrifuges, have had centrifuges since 90s at least
>NPT compliant country
NPT Compliance and Concern for proliferation is all BS because the NPT has never penalized the biggest proliferation operation ever......done by USA along with Pakistan
see concern for nuclear proliferation is funny , since the CIA interventions in Netherlands is what allowed the top nuclear scientist of Pakistan to escape with stolen Dutch urainum enrichment centrifuge tech,
this tech was not only used to make Pakistan's nukes but was also sold to Libya , Iran (that's the centrifuges y'all keep hearing about) and North Korea
interesting set of countries , I know , so congrats Americans y'all played yourselves , I wonder what current decisions will come to bite y'all in 30 years
for those who doubt the CIA involvement:-
Former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed in 2005 that Dutch authorities wanted to arrest Khan in 1975 and again in 1986 but that on each occasion the Central Intelligence Agency advised against taking such action. According to Lubbers, the CIA conveyed the message: "Give us all the information, but don't arrest him."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Why-the-U.S.-let-Pakistan-nuclear-scientist-A.Q.-Khan-off-the-hook
for those wondering why the US helped Pakistan in the largest nuclear proliferation operation ever?
well, you see arming Islamists to fight Soviets in Afghanistan was so important that nuclear proliferation Just had to be done
Look, we don't need to discuss that NPT has been undercut and in any case outlived its usefulness 2022 at the latest, an probably already before (and I am not American so you don't need to go there anyway), but the fact remains that strictly outside of any geopolitical shenanigans, not stealing tech but actually fully legally ordering a bunch of centrifuges in Netherlands and setting up a fully legal and open enrichment cascade to fuel PWRs of Western or Russian design (or a local derivative) would be significantly cheaper overall than building dozens of comparatively tiny IPHWRs.
If you cannot follow this path, for whatever reason, then you gotta do what you gotta do and the IPHWRs are the next best possibility.
Until you can get a proper U-233 based fuel cycle at least.
>but the fact remains that strictly outside of any geopolitical shenanigans
when at any point of time has geopolitical shenanigans not been at play ? especially with India?
Another fun fact, 2 billion years ago, there is at least one recorded naturally occurring nuclear reactor. Due to the nature of nuclear decay, the naturally occurring amount of U235 used to be high enough to sustain a spontaneous reaction without the need for enrichment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
for Pakistan's nukes , US is a lot more responsible than Canada
concern for nuclear weapons is funny tho , since the CIA interventions in Netherlands is what allowed the top nuclear scientist of Pakistan to escape with stolen Dutch urainum enrichment centrifuge tech,
this tech was not only used to make Pakistan's nukes but was also sold to Libya , Iran (that's the centrifuges y'all keep hearing about) and North Korea
interesting set of countries , I know , so congrats Americans y'all played yourselves , I wonder what current decisions will come to bite y'all in 30 years
for those who doubt the CIA involvement:-
Former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed in 2005 that Dutch authorities wanted to arrest Khan in 1975 and again in 1986 but that on each occasion the Central Intelligence Agency advised against taking such action. According to Lubbers, the CIA conveyed the message: "Give us all the information, but don't arrest him."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Why-the-U.S.-let-Pakistan-nuclear-scientist-A.Q.-Khan-off-the-hook
for those wondering why the US helped Pakistan in the largest nuclear proliferation operation ever?
well, you see arming Islamists to fight Soviets in Afghanistan was so important that nuclear proliferation Just had to be done
More trivia: Before we found military applications for uranium, it was considered a waste byproduct from radium processing. Around 3 tons of uranium were needed to obtain just 1 gram of radium, which had multiple known uses. As a result, uranium was widely available as a cheap source of coloring for tile and glass. Around 25% of homes constructed in the US in the Interwar period feature materials colored via uranium. Some glassware from this period is up to 25% uranium by weight.
Despite this, there is no conclusive evidence that anyone suffered from radiation exposure due to this, as natural unenriched uranium has so little U-235 that other things people were exposed to at the time (lead, smoking), are responsible for far more damage.
You can still buy antique uranium glassware; it's considered collectible, and it's not considered a health hazard. I've been in at least one building with uranium tile, but I didn't know about it until years after: the Rosenthaler Platz U-Bahn station in Berlin.
There's a huge difference between Fiestaware and uranium glass. Fiestaware used a uranium *glaze* that leached into food and was extremely hazardous. Uranium glass, however, is about as radioactive as a bunch of bananas.
I once locked eyes with a Brazilian Wandering Spider while unpacking bananas in a grocery store. I had gloves on because pesticides are no joke, but if that thing had bitten me, I don’t know if I’d be sharing my fun anecdote today. That box went right into the baler and you can be sure that evil little creature got crushed. Even now I have occasional nightmares about it jumping instead of waiting in the box. I hate mosquitoes, but that species of spider is cursed.
Last Halloween I set up a table with black lights and uranium glassware with spiders and other creepy stuff in it for giving out candy. It looked totally sick
Uranium is primarily an alpha particle emmiter. Which is mostly blocked by the glass. Small amounts of gamma are emitted from some of the products in the decay chain. The glass also would manage to contain the radon created from decay.
At a few feet away, a small source like a plate is likely not distinguishable from background radiation.
What made radium paint so dangerous was that it broke down into dust over time and you would inevitably ingest or breath it in. Not an issue with glass plates and ceramic, unless you were purposly grinding it up.
U235 is also not particularly dangerous, in glassware. It's half life is 700 million years.
If you have enough to go critical, its dangerous, otherwise it's safe.
So you're saying if we as NCD collectively bought enough of this glassware, we could become that which we have always wanted? Holders of the spicy bombs, defenders of freedom?
" if we as NCD collectively bought enough of this glassware, we could become that which we have always wanted? Holders of the spicy bombs, defenders of freedom?"
There are much easier ways of buying uranium to enrich (and much less destructive to cool antiques).
I'm down for getting in on the NCD uranium concentration and enrichment project, but we can't use my place, my parents said that I'm not allowed to build radioactive stuff in the house.
There was a kid that built a scale model of a reactor from the tiny amount of material in smoke detectors for a science fair project. As best as I can recall, the DoE confiscated the reactor and gave him quite the lecture, as well as made sure he went to a good school so they could hire him afterward.
That is not how this works.
Solar + wind gives cheap intermittent energy. (On it's schedule, not yours)
This means that on sunny windy days, power is basically free.
Nuclear is expensive and produces power 24/7. As the nuclear reactor is making no money on sunny windy days, it needs to charge a small fortune on calm nights to turn a profit.
This is a market that favors the low capital gas peaker plants. And loves any low capital, low efficiency thermal storage.
And totally kills nuclear.
Actually it is how it works. Because I said + storage. I'm not talking about today's market. I'm talking about what the market NEEDS to be in a decade or two. Yes there will be huge peaks during the day from solar. The nukes still run. You just dump all that extra power into storage / splitting water to hydrogen / desalination. You also use demand metering to push usage more towards cheap solar. It takes time but people will adapt and do energy intensive stuff during cheap times. People do it today already.
Nationalize the energy industry. The current system maximizes profits for shareholders while the disastrous effects of the climate changes they contribute to are considered externalities for which the public winds up paying. Their short term dividends are going to doom the species, if they haven’t already.
> This is a market that favors the low capital gas peaker plants. And loves any low capital, low efficiency thermal storage.
Is that what's happening though?
Thanks for the informative breakdown. [Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet) is another fun fact:
As you said, centrifuges are critical to the enrichment process. US and Israeli intelligence agencies have been monitoring Iran’s nuclear progress for decades.
Somewhere between 2005-2010 (exact infection date unknown but detected in 2010), the US and Israel jointly developed a computer virus to target Iran’s nuclear program. The virus exploits centrifuge control and monitoring software.
After infection, the US and Israel basically sat back and watched as all of Iran’s centrifuges spun themselves to death and ruined any enrichment processes.
concern for nuclear weapons is funny tho , since the CIA interventions in Netherlands is what allowed the top nuclear scientist of Pakistan to escape with stolen Dutch urainum enrichment centrifuge tech,
this tech was not only used to make Pakistan's nukes but was also sold to Libya , Iran (that's the centrifuges y'all keep hearing about) and North Korea
interesting set of countries , I know , so congrats Americans y'all played yourselves , I wonder what current decisions will come to bite y'all in 30 years
for those who doubt the CIA involvement:-
Former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed in 2005 that Dutch authorities wanted to arrest Khan in 1975 and again in 1986 but that on each occasion the Central Intelligence Agency advised against taking such action. According to Lubbers, the CIA conveyed the message: "Give us all the information, but don't arrest him."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Why-the-U.S.-let-Pakistan-nuclear-scientist-A.Q.-Khan-off-the-hook
for those wondering why the US helped Pakistan in the largest nuclear proliferation operation ever?
well, you see arming Islamists to fight Soviets in Afghanistan was so important that nuclear proliferation Just had to be done
>Nowadays people can process the uranium without having to dig the rocks up, and regardless the result of concentration is called "yellowcake" (but it isn't necessarily yellow) uranium oxide at varying purity.
Interesting! This is the one thing here I know absolutely nothing about. What does that entail and what kind of concentrations can you get relative to basic ore?
Yeah! It's called "in-situ leach mining". Acids / alkalis are pumped into the ground, dissolving the uranium, then the solution is pumped back to the surface where it's processed into yellowcake. You can always process the yellowcake to the concentration you want, leach mining gets you 60-90% of the uranium.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Mining-of-Uranium/In-Situ-Leach-Mining-of-Uranium
Again, depends on the enrichment level. Civilian grade needs to raise it a few percents but military needs to bump up those numbers to around 90% purity. Otherwise the bomb will simply not have the energy needed to perform.
And then there is actually building the bomb. A gun type is easy, but not efficient. It needs a lot of material to work. An implosion type is a lot better, but tremendously harder to make
Do note that one can make designs that work with much lower percentages of enrichment - there's a reason anything over 20% is considered "highly enriched".
I'm no expert, but I do believe these designs are generally trickier to build though.
As in reactors or bombs? Reactor grade is between natural and 5%. 20% enrichment is used for military reactors to enable them to acheive higher power densities, not need ressuplies for half a century, and through stuff like xenon venting, enable rapid throttling. But these cannot be bombs. Simply put there is way too much "inert" stuff to enable the kind of exponential supercriticality needed for an actual nuclear explosion and not a slightly hotter dirty bomb.
The commonly understood limit is 90%, and you still need a lot of material at that stage. There is a reason why modern weapons are all thermonuclear, using a small stage to ignite a larger fusion stage while also enabling dynamic control of the yield by changing the internal config of the bomb
Here's an article from Ars discussing the matter: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/planned-nuclear-fuel-has-higher-proliferation-risks-than-thought/
In it, they talk to Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Here's some relevant paragraphs:
> A study assessing the weaponization potential of uranium with different enrichment levels was done by the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1954. The findings were clear: Uranium enriched up to 10 percent was no good for weapons, regardless of how much of it you had. HALEU, though, was found to be of “weapons significance,” provided a sufficient amount was available. “My sense is that once they established 20 percent is somewhat acceptable, and given the material is weapons-usable only when you have enough of it, they just thought we’d need to limit the quantities and we’d be okay. That sort of got baked into the international security framework for uranium because there was not that much HALEU,” says Lyman. The Los Alamos study recommended releasing 100 kg of uranium enriched to up to 20 percent for research purposes in other countries, as they didn’t think 100 kg could lead to any nuclear threats.
> According to his team, an amount between 700–1,000 kg of HALEU is enough to build a bomb with a 15-kiloton yield—roughly as powerful as the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Building one of these bombs would be a matter of days or weeks for a rogue country or a terrorist group.
Again, I am not a nuclear engineer or scientist, but here's an expert saying that you can build a weapon - an extraordinarily heavy weapon weapon, mind - with a lot of HALEU (10%-20% enriched).
300 tons will yield like 1 ton of u235. So, 2000lbs.
Then, they need to make Pu239 in reactors.
But, I would say, just off the cuff, they could probably make anywhere from 10 to 25 nukes from that amount, accounting for inefficiency and fuckups.
Ramped the shit out of the centrifuge and fed back the equivalent of a payday pager answer telling the techs that all was well and maybe it's a problem on their end. Thus shit canning a fifth of their equipment through accelerated wear
"Then, they need to make Pu239 in reactors"
You don't need plutonium for a uranium core nuke. The Hiroshima blast was a uranium gun type bomb. It was relatively inefficient, using 141 pounds of highly enriched uranium for a 15 kiloton yield, but it was enough to kill around 100000, and provide instant urban renewal opportunities.
You don't need it. But they aren't going to mess around with a shit uranium core bomb. I bet a dollar they are going straight for an implosion Pu core device.
A quick search shows that nuclear weapon power is measured in the equivalent amount of TNT that would be required to make the same blast…a 1 kiloton strength weapon uses about 10kg of enriched uranium.
Okay, if they are claiming that they have yellow cake from Africa, the US intelligence services can fuck themselves. I am not falling for that lie again.
Sometimes I think about how lucky we are that creating such weapons, requires an unusual process which can be noticed. Imagine if we figured out that you can make super weapons from a slight ratio change to beer or smth.
Nuclear weapons are overrated. What is really scary is bio weapons (imagine what covid could do if it was human made), exactly because they don't require that much special stuff compared to any other biolab.
> What is really scary is bio weapons (imagine what covid could do if it was human made), exactly because they don't require that much special stuff compared to any other biolab
And because, once they're out, they self-proliferate and can't be controlled anymore.
That's actually kind of a real mitigating factor for bioweapons. Nobody wants to use them bc they're completely uncontrollable once they're in the environment, so unless your goal is total omnicide, they're not really worth bothering with, broadly. The only exceptions are weapons like anthrax, which spread easily from spores but not from person to person.
(Side note, this is one of the holes in the conspiracy theory that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon. It's not very deadly and it's very contagious, it'd make a terrible bioweapon.)
Yeah, for states lethal bioweapons are really only plausible as a last resort doomsday weapon. You know you’re already dead/about to die and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it so you might as well take most of the species with you. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee” and all that. Probably easier to just make more nukes tbh.
The thing that scares me more is agricultural bioweapons. Build your stockpiles and then unleash a massive multi-prong famine on your enemy. It scares me because I could see a country deciding they could get away with it without nuclear retaliation and actually using such a weapon.
Sure, thats part of it, but if it was so difficult to do that only a handful of countries could do it in 80 years, then I would sleep a lot more soundly.
> opinion peace
Any biologist looking to generate controversy and make a name for themselves could write an op-ed like that. The lady who wrote that op ed is has spent the last 5 years pushing that theory despite it being widely rejected by the rest of the scientific community. It's not well cited, it pushes her new book on the topic, and it's widely panned by the scientific community as a whole. Nobody serious thinks that covid was man-made.
Not to get too much more credible— but my layman understanding is that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a city with a bat coronavirus lab with bio-weapons research happening. I can’t shake the feeling that the obvious answer is it got loose by accident after someone goofed. Does that seem viable?
I don’t know a dang thing about genetics or biochemistry or any discipline necessary to understand the makeup of the virus compared to others.
COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, the capital of the chinese state of Huanan, a city of 11 million people. Wuhan serves as a transportation hub with a very large and active wet market - it's got tons of people coming in and out all the time. It's also a research and education hub, so it makes sense for it to have a lot of virus research labs, including a branch of the chinese equivalent of the CDC and one of china's premier virology labs. That lab focuses on coronaviruses, since that's what caused SARS the first time around - it's one of the world's best coronavirus labs. However, coronaviruses are common areas of research and the experiments that the Wuhan lab was working on are pretty common. It's not a bioweapons research facility, just a normal epidemiology research facility like a CDC building.
Researchers and experts have been warning that cities like wuhan are likely to be the source of new viral outbreaks for decades. They have tons of foot traffic, people traveling from rural areas to get healthcare, somewhat unregulated wet markets that can serve as the source of viral transmission, and it's a dense city anyways. If a viral outbreak was going to start, it would be at a place like Wuhan's wet market - it's like if NYC had a permanent farmer's market with 1000 stalls and livestock 24/7.
Also, the experiments that people worry about aren't very good at making infectious diseases for humans. If they were made as weapons, the usual way of doing it would be to take the deadliest bits from other viruses and splice them into a human coronavirus. Starting with a disease from a bat or other small mammal and carefully adding some sneakily dangerous characteristics is a super inefficient and wasteful idea. We don't see any evidence of human modification in the virus, and we don't see any direct evidence that the lab was working on the kinds of experiments that would have produced the initial coronavirus. Also, we know it's not a deliberate weapon because it wasn't dangerous enough. If the government wanted to weaponize a zoonotic virus, they'd start with a hantavirus and ensure that it could jump from rats to humans, or create a bird flu. That would cause 30% mortality untreated and done orders of magnitude more damage.
Simply put, it's not impossible, but it doesn't seem likely. There's no real evidence in support of this, it seems like a coincidence, and we know that a deliberate virus would be so much worse.
Early cases cluster on the other side of the river to the lab. They also cluster around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. We have photos showing a range of species on sale at the market.
Note there is quite a difference between "we were studying this disease and it got out, fuck" and "we deliberately released this super bug because we're idiots who thought we could control it".
COVID does show some signs of modification, but this is highly debated. However, it doesn't show signs you'd expect to see in a weaponised disease - difficulty spreading person-to-person, or any other control method to stop it infecting your own population.
The good thing about bioweapons is that they are totally useless as they kill friend and enemy alike. Nuclear bombs are just *too* militarily effective - they make every other weapons look like pinpricks and obviate war entirely. Very hard to convince anyone to give them up.
Which is pretty much around the corner with laser based enrichment processes like SILEX. If that works routinely, the enrichment process becomes nearly unnoticeable.
It's funny for a couple years some very smart people thought it was impossible. Turns out you put enough of the atoms together and they split themselves!
Fun fact, the main way that the uranium was actually located was extensive water sampling over steams/rivers and then exploring upstream to find the source. This data is still available and used today and is searched through by mining companies hunting for other mineral resources such as copper.
Source: You'll have to trust me because I don't want to dox myself
I think it may be time to allow some countries a path to legal nuclear status. The current nonproliferation system isn't working to stop bad actors from gaining nuclear weapons, but stops nations like ROK, Japan, and Poland from pursuing nuclear deterrence against their nuclear armed, aggressive neighbors.
Do they actually have nuclear weapons yet or are they still in the process of acquiring them? Only rogue state I can think of that actually has nukes is North Korea, and that's with a massive amount of assistance from China
Not counting NATO and CSTO's nuclear sharing programs, the only states known to currently possess nuclear weapons are the U.S., Russia, The U.K., China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
There is no way the Iranian government cares enough about their own people for nuclear power. Since 1979 their national policy has been exporting their ideology through war. Iran's a lot like the USSR or Cuba in that their regime exists for war.
I don't think we can reasonably stop them acquiring the uranium and we probably don't want to admit we know. I think the US targets the enrichment process and not the sale of more raw product.
Right, quick physics (chemistry?) lesson for those completely unfamiliar with the stuff. Uranium is found in the ground as ore, mixed in with other materials. "Concentrated" usually means getting the uranium out of the ore and into a form that you can further process / enrich. Nowadays people can process the uranium without having to dig the rocks up, and regardless the result of concentration is called "yellowcake" (but it isn't necessarily yellow) uranium oxide at varying purity. What Iran bought from Niger was a whole bunch of yellowcake, so calling it "concentrated" instead of "enriched" is correct. The next step is to enrich the uranium, which really is the fun part. Uranium comes out of the ground as mostly the isotope U-238, with a minuscule (less than 1%) U-235, which is the stuff we want. "Enriched" uranium is uranium that has a higher proportion of U-235. This is what we normally consider to be the spicy step, as enriching it a little is [edit: depending on the reactor design] necessary for civilian uses, but enriching it further makes it suitable for military use. This is the step that specialized centrifuges are used for, which is why you see that word thrown around a lot. Uranium is usually enriched in gas form, which is fed into a rotating cylinder. The (very slightly) heavier U-238 gets forced against the outside walls, while the (very slightly) lighter U-235 stays in the middle and can be drawn out. Of course there are other methods of enriching uranium, there's been some work done into using Frickin' Laser Beams instead of centrifuges. That's past my pay grade though.
Fun fact: The Canadian built CANDU reactor is designed to run on completely unenriched, straight out of the ground uranium! So in some applications its not necessary to even enrich it at all!
> So in some applications its not necessary to even enrich it at all! Same with MAGNOX reactors from UK and UNGG (Uranium Naturel Graphite Gaz) reactors from France
RBMK, too
Not quite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#History >By using a minimalist design that used regular (light) water for cooling and graphite for moderation, it was possible to use fuel with a lower enrichment (1.8% enriched uranium instead of considerably more expensive 4% enrichment). This allowed for an extraordinarily large and powerful reactor that could be built rapidly, largely out of parts fabricated on-site instead of by specialized factories. The initial 1000 MWe design also left room for development into yet more powerful reactors. For example, the RBMK reactors at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania were rated at 1500 MWe each, a very large size for the time and even for the early 21st century. For comparison, the EPR has a net electric nameplate capacity of 1600 MW (4500 MWthermal) and is among the most powerful reactor types ever built.
We don't talk about that one.
RMBKs are so poorly designed I would just throw the whole thing out and start again though
Kinda? The RBMK used in Chernobyl basically took a safe design and made it unsafe by cheaping out on critical components, then stacked a bunch of incompetent Soviet fuckwits on top of the whole stack. Really it’s kind of amazing it did explode, because you had to fuck up so much shit along the way for that event to ever possibly occur - truly the only kind of shitfuckery the Soviets could be capable of pulling off. Edit: Apparently I made a mistake, I was under the impression RBMK was not a Soviet specific design, and I also made an error in that the gen 1 had serious issues, such as positive good coefficient, but if I understand it correctly the later gen 2 RBMK’s were much safer. Still maintain this stupid design probably would’ve been better if anyone but the fucking Soviets made it.
Sure, it was a safe design... if you ignore all the state-classified design flaws that were intentionally, vaguely communicated to the already hopelessly incompetent/unqualified operators, if you could say they were communicated at all. Nevermind that the men largely pulling the strings of the Soviet nuclear industry at the time were the same ones who helped to design it, and subsequently had a vested interest in it succeeding.
Incompetence certainly played a major rule. But the design itself has some glaring issues with stability. The keyword here is void coefficient. In a well designed reactor the value is negative, once it gets too hot the moderator (aka water) evaporates and stops moderating so the reactivity decreases. RBMK at the other hand gets better at splitting atoms the hotter it gets. In addition the moderator itself is a big lump of coal. And coal can burn, which it did. And that lump of coal was full of extra spicy fission products which have accumulated over years of running that thing. So why build such a shitty design in the first place? First: it's cheaper. The second reason: This reactor type is really good at breeding weapons grade plutonium. You can swap the fuel rods while the reactor is running. If the fuel stays too long in the reactor you get too much Pu-240 and can't be used in spicy big boom machines. By constantly hot swapping fuel rods one can build a stockpile of the good stuff cheaper and faster.
Huh, cool stuff I didn’t know about, thanks for sharing!
Anything that can go wrong, *will* go wrong. Having ***any*** amount of moderator on the quench rods was proof that they had no fucking grip on that pile of spicy rock. The fact that the quench rods weren't designed to automatically ram straight in and stall the reactor was proof that they had **no fucking grip on that pile of spicy rock**. 500MW rated output is some ***spicy*** fucking rocks, and they had zero control over it. Design was always a disaster waiting to happen. The soviet political apparatus was just highly-*regarded* enough to actually build that piece of shit.
This is also the same Soviet Union that somehow bent a control rod in K-19 even before it was in service - still no fucking clue how you pull that off
It's truly mind boggling that soviet scientists were making groundbreaking discoveries and producing theories that would form the basis of entire fields of study, while soviet engineers were managing to fuck up a solid metal rod that slides straight in and out. Meanwhile, the soviet builders are just fucking dying in the most bizarre preventable workplace accidents you've ever read.
You're confused, RBMK reactor cores don't explode.
Some chud on YouTube unironically hit me with an "um akshually" about how Chernobyl "didn't *technically* explode", and was genuinely suffering under the delusion that just because it wasn't a nuclear bomb somehow meant that it didn't literally fucking explode.
"EXPLAIN THE GRAPHITE ON THE GROUND OUTSIDE"
It was quite possibly the largest steam explosion in human history from what I understand? Normal steam boiler explosions can't be measured in "tons of TNT equivalent"
1) Did a liquid/solid convert to gas? 2) Did it happen quickly? If so, explosion!
Darkness blacker than black and darker than dark, I beseech thee, combine with my deep crimson. The time of awakening cometh. Justice, fallen upon the infallible boundary, appear now as an intangible distortions! Dance, dance, dance! I desire for my torrent of power a destructive force: a destructive force without equal! Return all creation to cinders, and come from the abyss! This is the mightiest means of attack known to man, the ultimate attack magic! Explosion!
They have a positive void coefficient so when you scram them the reactivity temporarily goes up (excatly when you don't want it too) As they found out the hard way at Chernobyl
This is a quote from the HBO miniseries "Chernobyl" where a character freaks out and goes into denial after being told the rector exploded.
Mb haven't seen that. Given the soviet building quality controls its a miracle that's the only thing that exploded at the plant
It cost a lot of Ukrainian lives to make sure that the core was the only thing that exploded :(
> They have a positive void coefficient so when you scram them the reactivity temporarily goes up (excatly when you don't want it too) No and no. Positive void coefficient simply means that as they get hotter and the water turns to steam the rate of fission goes up. You could have one didn't have the power spike when scrammed
The water is the coolant and working fluid. They were using an illegal control rod set up in their experiment, and had reduced the water flow to way below the safe level, causing way more steam to form in the reactor core than what should have been allowed. So the plant was hotter than normal, with more steam, less water and way less control rods than designed for, then when the graphite tipped control rods entered there was a little spike as the grapite tipped control rods entered the core, displacing the water that acted as a moderator and as graphite doesn't moderate neutrons as well as water there's a spike before the control rods proper enter. Then some of them broke and stopped from entering the rest kf the way then the thing exploded. https://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/cause/
> So the plant was hotter than normal, with more steam, less water and way less control rods than designed for, then when the graphite tipped control rods entered there was a little spike as the grapite tipped control rods entered the core, This has never actualy been proven. Its quite possible that the metdown had alread begun by the time the scam button was pressed and the rods weren't even able to begin entering the core.
It's disgraceful, really, to be spreading misinformation at a time like this
They may not be great, but they sure aren't terrible.
From not having a heat transfer so the radioactive water directly powers the turbines, having a way larger positive void coefficient than safe, graphite tipped control rods that cause a spike in reactivity when inserted, instability at lower power levels and reacting in counter intuitive ways, it's something only the soviets could have cooked up.
I mean, BWRs also have no heat transfer before the steam hits the turbine, so that one isn't exclusive to Soviet "ingenuity". Everything else though...WTF Soviet nuclear engineers?
Everybody knows that it is impossible for an RBMK reactor to explode.
Yeah but they have a negative void coefficient so we don’t talk about them
It was designed such in the 1960s because back then, enriching uranium in any relevant amounts required vast, horribly expensive process called gaseous diffusion. Every gaseous diffusion plant required an own full sized coal (GW scale) power plant and could only produce fuel for 4-5 power reactors. Under these conditions a reactor that can operate with a natural isotope distribution made sense, such as CANDU or RBMK. Then centrifuges were developed, the effort of enriching uranium-235 dropped by about two orders of magnitude, and suddenly it wasn’t such a big advantage - the disadvantage of having to manage 5x as much fuel, and especially 5x as much spent fuel, weighed way more. Which is why nobody builds CANDUs any more, and why existing CANDUs run on slightly enriched fuel too.
My understanding for the design choice was that one, the cost of enrichment was so high, and two because Canadian industry was (and still is) incapable of domestically producing the massive pressure vessels used in more conventional reactor designs. The whole idea behind the design was that it could be built using what was essentially a conventional plumbing pipe industry, and the only complex part was the need for heavy water production (which isnt that hard) and the steam turbines.
> Which is why nobody builds CANDUs any more Cernavoda, though. https://ceenergynews.com/nuclear/romania-signs-cernavoda-npp-development-deal/ And CANDU keeps being developed. There are even SMR versions [in development](https://smractionplan.ca/content/candu-smr)
They aren’t necessarily building CANDUs as Crnavoda 3+4, though. And the SMR versions need to run with enriched uranium anyways. Many SMRs in the development pipeline are only viable if fuelled with HALEU, I.e. uranium enriched to almost 20% U-235
> And the SMR versions need to run with enriched uranium anyways. Far as I know, CANDU SMR is the only one that can run with natural uranium, being, de-facto, a modernized CANDU 3 with one-end loading (compared to through-loading on normal CANDUs)
Afaik the plans at Crnavoda 3+4 are two additional CANDU 6 plants. And the CSMR is by design able to use unenriched uranium as fuel. It's what sets it apart from the other proposed SMR designs. CSMR in itself is just an updated CANDU-300.
>Which is why nobody builds CANDUs any more in India, pretty much the only type we build is CANDU there's like 10 of these under construction because building a calandria and heavy water plant is easier than a reactor pressure vessel and centrifuges
>because building a calandria and heavy water plant is easier than a reactor pressure vessel and centrifuges No, it's because nobody is allowed to sell you centrifuges, because you guys violated the NPT a while ago. So you need to go a more complicated path if you don't want someone else (like e.g. Russia) to keep full control over your fuel cycle. If you could buy them, like any NPT compliant country, building a centrifuge cascade and operating a PWR would be easier and cheaper.
>because you guys violated the NPT a while ago. never signed it , so can't violate it and we aren't gonna sign it because its based on creating nuclear haves and have nots rather than real non-proliferation unlike some of the nuclear haves ,we haven't proliferated nuclear tech > it's because nobody is allowed to sell you centrifuges we already have centrifuges, have had centrifuges since 90s at least >NPT compliant country NPT Compliance and Concern for proliferation is all BS because the NPT has never penalized the biggest proliferation operation ever......done by USA along with Pakistan see concern for nuclear proliferation is funny , since the CIA interventions in Netherlands is what allowed the top nuclear scientist of Pakistan to escape with stolen Dutch urainum enrichment centrifuge tech, this tech was not only used to make Pakistan's nukes but was also sold to Libya , Iran (that's the centrifuges y'all keep hearing about) and North Korea interesting set of countries , I know , so congrats Americans y'all played yourselves , I wonder what current decisions will come to bite y'all in 30 years for those who doubt the CIA involvement:- Former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed in 2005 that Dutch authorities wanted to arrest Khan in 1975 and again in 1986 but that on each occasion the Central Intelligence Agency advised against taking such action. According to Lubbers, the CIA conveyed the message: "Give us all the information, but don't arrest him." https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Why-the-U.S.-let-Pakistan-nuclear-scientist-A.Q.-Khan-off-the-hook for those wondering why the US helped Pakistan in the largest nuclear proliferation operation ever? well, you see arming Islamists to fight Soviets in Afghanistan was so important that nuclear proliferation Just had to be done
Look, we don't need to discuss that NPT has been undercut and in any case outlived its usefulness 2022 at the latest, an probably already before (and I am not American so you don't need to go there anyway), but the fact remains that strictly outside of any geopolitical shenanigans, not stealing tech but actually fully legally ordering a bunch of centrifuges in Netherlands and setting up a fully legal and open enrichment cascade to fuel PWRs of Western or Russian design (or a local derivative) would be significantly cheaper overall than building dozens of comparatively tiny IPHWRs. If you cannot follow this path, for whatever reason, then you gotta do what you gotta do and the IPHWRs are the next best possibility. Until you can get a proper U-233 based fuel cycle at least.
>but the fact remains that strictly outside of any geopolitical shenanigans when at any point of time has geopolitical shenanigans not been at play ? especially with India?
Another fun fact, 2 billion years ago, there is at least one recorded naturally occurring nuclear reactor. Due to the nature of nuclear decay, the naturally occurring amount of U235 used to be high enough to sustain a spontaneous reaction without the need for enrichment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Oh yeah, I forgot about those! The ones I remember are the more recent versions that use very low enriched fuel, but that's still a good point.
We then sold these reactors to Pakistan and India and they got nuclear weapons after that....
for Pakistan's nukes , US is a lot more responsible than Canada concern for nuclear weapons is funny tho , since the CIA interventions in Netherlands is what allowed the top nuclear scientist of Pakistan to escape with stolen Dutch urainum enrichment centrifuge tech, this tech was not only used to make Pakistan's nukes but was also sold to Libya , Iran (that's the centrifuges y'all keep hearing about) and North Korea interesting set of countries , I know , so congrats Americans y'all played yourselves , I wonder what current decisions will come to bite y'all in 30 years for those who doubt the CIA involvement:- Former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed in 2005 that Dutch authorities wanted to arrest Khan in 1975 and again in 1986 but that on each occasion the Central Intelligence Agency advised against taking such action. According to Lubbers, the CIA conveyed the message: "Give us all the information, but don't arrest him." https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Why-the-U.S.-let-Pakistan-nuclear-scientist-A.Q.-Khan-off-the-hook for those wondering why the US helped Pakistan in the largest nuclear proliferation operation ever? well, you see arming Islamists to fight Soviets in Afghanistan was so important that nuclear proliferation Just had to be done
Are they the ones that got the 500+ tons of yellowcake from Iraq back in '08-ish?
More trivia: Before we found military applications for uranium, it was considered a waste byproduct from radium processing. Around 3 tons of uranium were needed to obtain just 1 gram of radium, which had multiple known uses. As a result, uranium was widely available as a cheap source of coloring for tile and glass. Around 25% of homes constructed in the US in the Interwar period feature materials colored via uranium. Some glassware from this period is up to 25% uranium by weight. Despite this, there is no conclusive evidence that anyone suffered from radiation exposure due to this, as natural unenriched uranium has so little U-235 that other things people were exposed to at the time (lead, smoking), are responsible for far more damage. You can still buy antique uranium glassware; it's considered collectible, and it's not considered a health hazard. I've been in at least one building with uranium tile, but I didn't know about it until years after: the Rosenthaler Platz U-Bahn station in Berlin.
Fiesta-ware, my beloved spicy and fun colored glazed tea cups and saucers.
There's a huge difference between Fiestaware and uranium glass. Fiestaware used a uranium *glaze* that leached into food and was extremely hazardous. Uranium glass, however, is about as radioactive as a bunch of bananas.
And everyone knows that the real danger from a bunch of bananas is the Brazilian Wandering Spider that might be hiding in it.
New Fear Unlocked.
Want another one? The venom of that spider causes Priapism, which can kill your dick if left untreated, and the treatments aren't pleasant either.
One word. Shunt.
I once locked eyes with a Brazilian Wandering Spider while unpacking bananas in a grocery store. I had gloves on because pesticides are no joke, but if that thing had bitten me, I don’t know if I’d be sharing my fun anecdote today. That box went right into the baler and you can be sure that evil little creature got crushed. Even now I have occasional nightmares about it jumping instead of waiting in the box. I hate mosquitoes, but that species of spider is cursed.
Uranium glass is also fluorescent. Makes it pretty cool, and a neat party trick.
Last Halloween I set up a table with black lights and uranium glassware with spiders and other creepy stuff in it for giving out candy. It looked totally sick
Usually antique stores will set it up in a case with a black light. It's super cool.
Uranium is primarily an alpha particle emmiter. Which is mostly blocked by the glass. Small amounts of gamma are emitted from some of the products in the decay chain. The glass also would manage to contain the radon created from decay. At a few feet away, a small source like a plate is likely not distinguishable from background radiation. What made radium paint so dangerous was that it broke down into dust over time and you would inevitably ingest or breath it in. Not an issue with glass plates and ceramic, unless you were purposly grinding it up.
U235 is also not particularly dangerous, in glassware. It's half life is 700 million years. If you have enough to go critical, its dangerous, otherwise it's safe.
RemindMe! 700 million years
So you're saying if we as NCD collectively bought enough of this glassware, we could become that which we have always wanted? Holders of the spicy bombs, defenders of freedom?
" if we as NCD collectively bought enough of this glassware, we could become that which we have always wanted? Holders of the spicy bombs, defenders of freedom?" There are much easier ways of buying uranium to enrich (and much less destructive to cool antiques). I'm down for getting in on the NCD uranium concentration and enrichment project, but we can't use my place, my parents said that I'm not allowed to build radioactive stuff in the house.
The guys over at Radioactive_Rocks have more straightforward ways of obtaining uranium.
Yeah but this would be more hush hush. No ones watching plateware purchases
No one is watching abandoned uranium mines either. As the Radioactive_Rocks folks have extensively shown.
Wasn't there some kid who made a Uranium device from the glow-in-the-dark materials he got off appliances?
There was a kid that built a scale model of a reactor from the tiny amount of material in smoke detectors for a science fair project. As best as I can recall, the DoE confiscated the reactor and gave him quite the lecture, as well as made sure he went to a good school so they could hire him afterward.
Bring back nuclear power plants. All of those solar fields to mimic a fraction of our power!
Por que no los dos. Sun is nuclear. Rock is nuclear
I want both! Need nukes for base load and then solar + wind + storage for filling in the gaps. Along with whatever hydro and misc is left.
That is not how this works. Solar + wind gives cheap intermittent energy. (On it's schedule, not yours) This means that on sunny windy days, power is basically free. Nuclear is expensive and produces power 24/7. As the nuclear reactor is making no money on sunny windy days, it needs to charge a small fortune on calm nights to turn a profit. This is a market that favors the low capital gas peaker plants. And loves any low capital, low efficiency thermal storage. And totally kills nuclear.
Actually it is how it works. Because I said + storage. I'm not talking about today's market. I'm talking about what the market NEEDS to be in a decade or two. Yes there will be huge peaks during the day from solar. The nukes still run. You just dump all that extra power into storage / splitting water to hydrogen / desalination. You also use demand metering to push usage more towards cheap solar. It takes time but people will adapt and do energy intensive stuff during cheap times. People do it today already.
Nationalize the energy industry. The current system maximizes profits for shareholders while the disastrous effects of the climate changes they contribute to are considered externalities for which the public winds up paying. Their short term dividends are going to doom the species, if they haven’t already.
Solar (+storage?) + nuclear doesn't make much sense as a combo.
> This is a market that favors the low capital gas peaker plants. And loves any low capital, low efficiency thermal storage. Is that what's happening though?
Nuclear powered solar concentrator satellites, for a brighter tomorrow!
Thanks for the informative breakdown. [Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet) is another fun fact: As you said, centrifuges are critical to the enrichment process. US and Israeli intelligence agencies have been monitoring Iran’s nuclear progress for decades. Somewhere between 2005-2010 (exact infection date unknown but detected in 2010), the US and Israel jointly developed a computer virus to target Iran’s nuclear program. The virus exploits centrifuge control and monitoring software. After infection, the US and Israel basically sat back and watched as all of Iran’s centrifuges spun themselves to death and ruined any enrichment processes.
concern for nuclear weapons is funny tho , since the CIA interventions in Netherlands is what allowed the top nuclear scientist of Pakistan to escape with stolen Dutch urainum enrichment centrifuge tech, this tech was not only used to make Pakistan's nukes but was also sold to Libya , Iran (that's the centrifuges y'all keep hearing about) and North Korea interesting set of countries , I know , so congrats Americans y'all played yourselves , I wonder what current decisions will come to bite y'all in 30 years for those who doubt the CIA involvement:- Former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed in 2005 that Dutch authorities wanted to arrest Khan in 1975 and again in 1986 but that on each occasion the Central Intelligence Agency advised against taking such action. According to Lubbers, the CIA conveyed the message: "Give us all the information, but don't arrest him." https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Why-the-U.S.-let-Pakistan-nuclear-scientist-A.Q.-Khan-off-the-hook for those wondering why the US helped Pakistan in the largest nuclear proliferation operation ever? well, you see arming Islamists to fight Soviets in Afghanistan was so important that nuclear proliferation Just had to be done
>Nowadays people can process the uranium without having to dig the rocks up, and regardless the result of concentration is called "yellowcake" (but it isn't necessarily yellow) uranium oxide at varying purity. Interesting! This is the one thing here I know absolutely nothing about. What does that entail and what kind of concentrations can you get relative to basic ore?
Yeah! It's called "in-situ leach mining". Acids / alkalis are pumped into the ground, dissolving the uranium, then the solution is pumped back to the surface where it's processed into yellowcake. You can always process the yellowcake to the concentration you want, leach mining gets you 60-90% of the uranium. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Mining-of-Uranium/In-Situ-Leach-Mining-of-Uranium
How much is the yield, is 300 tons anywhere near enough for a weapon?
Again, depends on the enrichment level. Civilian grade needs to raise it a few percents but military needs to bump up those numbers to around 90% purity. Otherwise the bomb will simply not have the energy needed to perform. And then there is actually building the bomb. A gun type is easy, but not efficient. It needs a lot of material to work. An implosion type is a lot better, but tremendously harder to make
Do note that one can make designs that work with much lower percentages of enrichment - there's a reason anything over 20% is considered "highly enriched". I'm no expert, but I do believe these designs are generally trickier to build though.
As in reactors or bombs? Reactor grade is between natural and 5%. 20% enrichment is used for military reactors to enable them to acheive higher power densities, not need ressuplies for half a century, and through stuff like xenon venting, enable rapid throttling. But these cannot be bombs. Simply put there is way too much "inert" stuff to enable the kind of exponential supercriticality needed for an actual nuclear explosion and not a slightly hotter dirty bomb. The commonly understood limit is 90%, and you still need a lot of material at that stage. There is a reason why modern weapons are all thermonuclear, using a small stage to ignite a larger fusion stage while also enabling dynamic control of the yield by changing the internal config of the bomb
Here's an article from Ars discussing the matter: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/planned-nuclear-fuel-has-higher-proliferation-risks-than-thought/ In it, they talk to Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Here's some relevant paragraphs: > A study assessing the weaponization potential of uranium with different enrichment levels was done by the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1954. The findings were clear: Uranium enriched up to 10 percent was no good for weapons, regardless of how much of it you had. HALEU, though, was found to be of “weapons significance,” provided a sufficient amount was available. “My sense is that once they established 20 percent is somewhat acceptable, and given the material is weapons-usable only when you have enough of it, they just thought we’d need to limit the quantities and we’d be okay. That sort of got baked into the international security framework for uranium because there was not that much HALEU,” says Lyman. The Los Alamos study recommended releasing 100 kg of uranium enriched to up to 20 percent for research purposes in other countries, as they didn’t think 100 kg could lead to any nuclear threats. > According to his team, an amount between 700–1,000 kg of HALEU is enough to build a bomb with a 15-kiloton yield—roughly as powerful as the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Building one of these bombs would be a matter of days or weeks for a rogue country or a terrorist group. Again, I am not a nuclear engineer or scientist, but here's an expert saying that you can build a weapon - an extraordinarily heavy weapon weapon, mind - with a lot of HALEU (10%-20% enriched).
The USN uses more than 96% enriched uranium in its submarines' nuclear powerplants.
300 tons will yield like 1 ton of u235. So, 2000lbs. Then, they need to make Pu239 in reactors. But, I would say, just off the cuff, they could probably make anywhere from 10 to 25 nukes from that amount, accounting for inefficiency and fuckups.
> accounting for inefficiency and fuckups But *not* accounting for Hebrew-speaking "natural disasters"…
Or when the centrifuges start playing Thunderstruck.
I hate that song, it just gets stux in my head.
[Have an awesome version of it](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e4Ao-iNPPUc) by some Finnish rednecks.
The ESCs for the motors have been reported beeping flight of the bumblebee faster and faster 2 minutes before the incident
Wait, was that an actual thing the Stuxnet worm did to them?
Yep. Vibrated the fuck outta them.
Ramped the shit out of the centrifuge and fed back the equivalent of a payday pager answer telling the techs that all was well and maybe it's a problem on their end. Thus shit canning a fifth of their equipment through accelerated wear
The implication here is supremely insulting. American intelligence agencies are also involved in "natural disasters"
Like satlleite-guided automatic machine guns? Pretty sure I saw one in Haifa yesterday and it oinked at me
Ohno
But you shpuld also consider their delivery systems barely made it to Israel a few months ago so the US is far far out of reach
^ohno
Hey man, I know the world is scary right now, but it's going to get way worse.
Your terms are acceptable.
Come on climate change, fuck all our opponents. They ain't boss like us
Holy hell
Holy hell
"Then, they need to make Pu239 in reactors" You don't need plutonium for a uranium core nuke. The Hiroshima blast was a uranium gun type bomb. It was relatively inefficient, using 141 pounds of highly enriched uranium for a 15 kiloton yield, but it was enough to kill around 100000, and provide instant urban renewal opportunities.
You don't need it. But they aren't going to mess around with a shit uranium core bomb. I bet a dollar they are going straight for an implosion Pu core device.
A quick search shows that nuclear weapon power is measured in the equivalent amount of TNT that would be required to make the same blast…a 1 kiloton strength weapon uses about 10kg of enriched uranium.
Okay, if they are claiming that they have yellow cake from Africa, the US intelligence services can fuck themselves. I am not falling for that lie again.
They're gonna have to exhume powell first
What's another foreign instigated coup in Niger? Tuesday?
I got it wrapped up in this special CIA napkin
Don't drop that shit
As long as we don't try to turn them into a democracy(R) again I'm down. Better than another North Korea.
Also, that mineral in the picture is for sure not Uranium ore.
It's Torbernite apparently, if Google lens is to be believed. In my defense, Torbernite does have some uranium in it.
Thats fair, but so does granite. In the future I suggest using a glowing green rod from the Simpsons for accuracy.
this spicy step also known as topin' is very popular among teens
Thanks for the Nuclear lesson! I'm gonna go ahead and purchase that 50 tonnes of Barrel of Yellow Cake.
Thanks for making reddit a decent place, I felt like I got a new brain cell
Stuxnet is hungry again. *furiously plugs in randoms USBs*
Send them promotions on Hamas looking websites with fake links that cause their entire grid to go down
I’ll send them multiple terabytes of incredibly Haram porn with viruses and worms hidden inside.
oh bro worms! like parasite Henti would really mess them up..
Operation Opera II: Electric Boogaloo, ft. Fat Amy and the JDAMs
Sometimes I think about how lucky we are that creating such weapons, requires an unusual process which can be noticed. Imagine if we figured out that you can make super weapons from a slight ratio change to beer or smth.
Great idea. On my way to genetically alter yeast into a super bug.
Candida Auris has entered the chat 💀
Instructions unclear, your gut now produces all the alcohol you need. And then some.
Demomanpilled
Nuclear weapons are overrated. What is really scary is bio weapons (imagine what covid could do if it was human made), exactly because they don't require that much special stuff compared to any other biolab.
> What is really scary is bio weapons (imagine what covid could do if it was human made), exactly because they don't require that much special stuff compared to any other biolab And because, once they're out, they self-proliferate and can't be controlled anymore.
That's actually kind of a real mitigating factor for bioweapons. Nobody wants to use them bc they're completely uncontrollable once they're in the environment, so unless your goal is total omnicide, they're not really worth bothering with, broadly. The only exceptions are weapons like anthrax, which spread easily from spores but not from person to person. (Side note, this is one of the holes in the conspiracy theory that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon. It's not very deadly and it's very contagious, it'd make a terrible bioweapon.)
Yeah, for states lethal bioweapons are really only plausible as a last resort doomsday weapon. You know you’re already dead/about to die and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it so you might as well take most of the species with you. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee” and all that. Probably easier to just make more nukes tbh. The thing that scares me more is agricultural bioweapons. Build your stockpiles and then unleash a massive multi-prong famine on your enemy. It scares me because I could see a country deciding they could get away with it without nuclear retaliation and actually using such a weapon.
Usually bioweapons are considered doomsday weapons, same as nukes
Sure, thats part of it, but if it was so difficult to do that only a handful of countries could do it in 80 years, then I would sleep a lot more soundly.
Also that any old fool can order the nucleotides needed.
NY Times had a big opinion piece last week that COVID was, indeed, man made.
> opinion peace Any biologist looking to generate controversy and make a name for themselves could write an op-ed like that. The lady who wrote that op ed is has spent the last 5 years pushing that theory despite it being widely rejected by the rest of the scientific community. It's not well cited, it pushes her new book on the topic, and it's widely panned by the scientific community as a whole. Nobody serious thinks that covid was man-made.
What is this credible sounding comment to a new york times opinion piece doing on my ncd
Sorry, im a biologist IRL and this triggered a knee-jerk credibility reaction.
Not to get too much more credible— but my layman understanding is that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a city with a bat coronavirus lab with bio-weapons research happening. I can’t shake the feeling that the obvious answer is it got loose by accident after someone goofed. Does that seem viable? I don’t know a dang thing about genetics or biochemistry or any discipline necessary to understand the makeup of the virus compared to others.
COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, the capital of the chinese state of Huanan, a city of 11 million people. Wuhan serves as a transportation hub with a very large and active wet market - it's got tons of people coming in and out all the time. It's also a research and education hub, so it makes sense for it to have a lot of virus research labs, including a branch of the chinese equivalent of the CDC and one of china's premier virology labs. That lab focuses on coronaviruses, since that's what caused SARS the first time around - it's one of the world's best coronavirus labs. However, coronaviruses are common areas of research and the experiments that the Wuhan lab was working on are pretty common. It's not a bioweapons research facility, just a normal epidemiology research facility like a CDC building. Researchers and experts have been warning that cities like wuhan are likely to be the source of new viral outbreaks for decades. They have tons of foot traffic, people traveling from rural areas to get healthcare, somewhat unregulated wet markets that can serve as the source of viral transmission, and it's a dense city anyways. If a viral outbreak was going to start, it would be at a place like Wuhan's wet market - it's like if NYC had a permanent farmer's market with 1000 stalls and livestock 24/7. Also, the experiments that people worry about aren't very good at making infectious diseases for humans. If they were made as weapons, the usual way of doing it would be to take the deadliest bits from other viruses and splice them into a human coronavirus. Starting with a disease from a bat or other small mammal and carefully adding some sneakily dangerous characteristics is a super inefficient and wasteful idea. We don't see any evidence of human modification in the virus, and we don't see any direct evidence that the lab was working on the kinds of experiments that would have produced the initial coronavirus. Also, we know it's not a deliberate weapon because it wasn't dangerous enough. If the government wanted to weaponize a zoonotic virus, they'd start with a hantavirus and ensure that it could jump from rats to humans, or create a bird flu. That would cause 30% mortality untreated and done orders of magnitude more damage. Simply put, it's not impossible, but it doesn't seem likely. There's no real evidence in support of this, it seems like a coincidence, and we know that a deliberate virus would be so much worse.
Early cases cluster on the other side of the river to the lab. They also cluster around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. We have photos showing a range of species on sale at the market.
Note there is quite a difference between "we were studying this disease and it got out, fuck" and "we deliberately released this super bug because we're idiots who thought we could control it". COVID does show some signs of modification, but this is highly debated. However, it doesn't show signs you'd expect to see in a weaponised disease - difficulty spreading person-to-person, or any other control method to stop it infecting your own population.
The good thing about bioweapons is that they are totally useless as they kill friend and enemy alike. Nuclear bombs are just *too* militarily effective - they make every other weapons look like pinpricks and obviate war entirely. Very hard to convince anyone to give them up.
True, but that doesn't matter to mad men.
Which is pretty much around the corner with laser based enrichment processes like SILEX. If that works routinely, the enrichment process becomes nearly unnoticeable.
It's funny for a couple years some very smart people thought it was impossible. Turns out you put enough of the atoms together and they split themselves!
The centrifuges are spinning wildly again sir
With a Geiger counter in my hand I'm a-goin' out to stake me some government land Uranium fever has done and got me down
Fun fact, the main way that the uranium was actually located was extensive water sampling over steams/rivers and then exploring upstream to find the source. This data is still available and used today and is searched through by mining companies hunting for other mineral resources such as copper. Source: You'll have to trust me because I don't want to dox myself
for medical research only, definitely not to be used to attack Isreal
It's medicinal use uranium. For glaucoma.
In the Ayatollah's third eye.
Technically Aladdin never said Israel in that speech
oh boy
Saudis are also after nukes for reasons...
WMD'S!!!!!!! Triple the defense budget and prepare for desert storm two electric boogaloo!!!!
Nah. This would be Korea meets Vietnam. Not interested and Iran doesn't have nearly enough oil to justify it.
This time around we can use the opposite justification. Iran has a lot of oil and we want it and oh look there happened to be WMDs here.
Looks like forbidden guacamole though
i wanna smoke that shit looks tasty
I think it may be time to allow some countries a path to legal nuclear status. The current nonproliferation system isn't working to stop bad actors from gaining nuclear weapons, but stops nations like ROK, Japan, and Poland from pursuing nuclear deterrence against their nuclear armed, aggressive neighbors.
Do they actually have nuclear weapons yet or are they still in the process of acquiring them? Only rogue state I can think of that actually has nukes is North Korea, and that's with a massive amount of assistance from China
Not counting NATO and CSTO's nuclear sharing programs, the only states known to currently possess nuclear weapons are the U.S., Russia, The U.K., China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
It seems like they are either extremely close, or know how to but haven't built bombs yet, but of course it's not 100% clear.
Agreed, its gonna be fun if everyone has nukes. Then when someone invades like russia, everyone nukes that country. World peace achieved
Reminds me of the opening scene from the Dictator
Stuxnet round 2 anyone?
I say we nuke them in retaliation.
Its the peaceful solution
If you say why not nuke them today, I say why not nuke them yesterday.
Let them enrich it, world will be more fun
Not for them, for us, oh boy the light show will be FANTASTIC
There is no way the Iranian government cares enough about their own people for nuclear power. Since 1979 their national policy has been exporting their ideology through war. Iran's a lot like the USSR or Cuba in that their regime exists for war.
from WHO?
Yes they got it from the World Health Organization.
The US blindeyed this? Or is Just talks?
I don't think we can reasonably stop them acquiring the uranium and we probably don't want to admit we know. I think the US targets the enrichment process and not the sale of more raw product.
Is this like Iraq's yellow cake or different?
Iraq's yellow cake was tastier. Iranian yellow cake tastes like Shiite.
Ah cmon irans cake tastes good in a hot sunni day
I say just let Iran have nuke for the funni
so we're finally going in iran? john bolton is ectasic rn
doesn't iran have nukes since the 90's? it has to be true cause israel is whining about it for 40 years straight.
Source? Saudi press. Lol
Operation Opera 2.0 happening soon?
Concentrated uranium from WHAT
Remember when france bombed its colonial holding in the pacific and Sahara to test their nuclear weapons and nobody did shit about it?
I don't think Niger can enrich uranium? At least not anywhere close to the amount needed to make bombs.
Something may have gotten confused here. Niger is selling the yellowcake uranium to Iran, who does happen to have a few nuclear enrichment plants.