Seven Nuclear Bombs worth of plutonium gone from Sellafield

[Agathon]

Those figures look screwy to me. I thought it took about 30 kilos plus of material to make one bomb.

Critical mass and all that... any atom physics heads around?

Dud, this is the internet. If you want to know how to make a nuclear weapon, use Google.

[child of Thor]

I guess this is one of the problems with using nuclear power as an energy source?

They'll probably find that the 30kgs never exsited in the first place, probably an error when they were updateing some database figures that the 'temp' made, or something like that. At least one hopes that's the case.

There hasn't been much of a fuss over this here yet, which is strange.

[Sava]

[pchang]

You can construct a weapon with much less than 30Kg of Plutonium if it is pure enough.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Agathon
Dud, this is the internet. If you want to know how to make a nuclear weapon, use Google.

http://www.geocities.com/sooterkin/atomic.html

[Dauphin]

Its not like a the loss in blocks of materail. Its due to what is effectively a back of the envelope estimate of how much plutonium should have leached out of the recycled material.

The process then involves cutting up the fuel rods, dissolving them in acid and then separating the solution into three streams — uranium, plutonium, and high-level waste.

At each stage of the process the material is weighed and calculations made of the amounts of plutonium it contains. All this has to be done remotely behind shielding because of the radioactivity involved.

At the end of the process the weight of the plutonium recovered ought to balance with the estimates of the amount put in. They seldom do, but the discrepancy is rarely as large as it is this year.

[Provost Harrison]

30kg of plutonium, nice, enough to wipe out the population of earth (theoretically) 4 times over...

[Vlad Antlerkov]

It's Clinton's fault.

[child of Thor]

Originally posted by Dauphin
Its not like a the loss in blocks of materail. Its due to what is effectively a back of the envelope estimate of how much plutonium should have leached out of the recycled material.

The process then involves cutting up the fuel rods, dissolving them in acid and then separating the solution into three streams — uranium, plutonium, and high-level waste.

At each stage of the process the material is weighed and calculations made of the amounts of plutonium it contains. All this has to be done remotely behind shielding because of the radioactivity involved.

At the end of the process the weight of the plutonium recovered ought to balance with the estimates of the amount put in. They seldom do, but the discrepancy is rarely as large as it is this year.

So from those last two paragraphs it would seem that its merely a bean-counting error? It has to be right? How could someone siphone of 30kgs of highly radiactive material and smuggle it out of the power plant(this is what we're all worried about after all)?

It's not really possible is it, mostly due to how nasty the stuff is to handle and move around?

[reds4ever]

Originally posted by Oerdin
They point out that this doesn't mean it's gone it just means it's some where not where they thought.

OBL's cave in Khandahar

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by child of Thor


So from those last two paragraphs it would seem that its merely a bean-counting error? It has to be right? How could someone siphone of 30kgs of highly radiactive material and smuggle it out of the power plant(this is what we're all worried about after all)?

It's not really possible is it, mostly due to how nasty the stuff is to handle and move around?

I've never audited the stuff but I would guess it goes something like this:

1,000 kg of material should have 1 +/- 0.2% plutonium, so per the books we should have 10kg of plutonium. The sample we have has 0.8% plutonium for whatever reason. So we really have 8kg of plutonium and magically we have lost 2kg that was never really there before we even do a measurement. We then measure the amount of plutonium to an accuracy of 10% and we end up only measuring 7.5kg. Well done, we just lost 25% of our plutonium.

[Whoha]

uh o spaghettio.

[Provost Harrison]

Is that a technical term in the nuclear industry?

[Dauphin]

You never know. They may have use of spaghetti calorimeters.

[child of Thor]

I dont know......it could have been a deliberate attempt to illegaly obtain some. Dirty bombs and all that jazz?

But it is weirdly comforting to think it might just be a mistake by a Homer Simpson somewhere in the chain