Comment by giardini
3 days ago
OK, so you seem the proper nerd to ask something I've been wondering for a long, long time: the world has tons of nuclear weapons. Each consists of at least one fission component and an optional thermonuclear component. Let's concentrate on the fission part.
Q. Would it be possible to economically move the fission component into a standardized nuclear reactor that could then generate electrical power?
IOW is there a "swords to plowshares" solution to the disposal of fission weapons or, once you've made one, are you stuck with a device that can only be used to blow things up?
Reason I ask is, I see Russia et al sitting on all these weapons which cost a great deal, are no doubt costly to maintain and of little or no benefit to anyone (well, other than as a threat). [I mean, it's almost like owning a fleet of BMWs but even less useful! ] If we could build a "reactor framework" into which we could move a single warhead's fuel and that fuel could generate electrical power until sufficiently diminished to be of little/no use as a weapon, then that would IMO be a very good thing. Countries like Russia who had a closet of nukes but no money could sell the nuclear fuel off and benefit, buyers could get electrical power cheaper(?), and the world would be better off. Everybody wins.
Or is making a nuclear weapon effectively an economic one-way street (i.e., you're stuck paying for it forever?
Weapons-grade uranium is easy to blend down into lower grades. Once you've got all the safety protocols you need because nobody wants to risk the theft of the weapon part, the down-blending process is just "break apart the metal and keep in small chunks so nothing gets close to critical while you do this, mix with similar sized chunks of depleted or natural uranium, melt, stir".
Plutonium is its own special thing, and I don't know much about its use in reactors: while it's definitely possible to use as reactor fuel, I can't speak to the cost or effort required. Apparently plutonium is a PITA when it comes to metallurgy, but while this makes it hard to process into a weapon, I don't know if it also makes it hard to process back to fuel.
So theoretically, Russia could begin converting their nuclear warheads to heat-generation units that could be used for all sorts of purposes. What kind of safeguards would be required?
The Russkies have lots of nukes but no cash. They're apparently as money-illiterate as I am, which is pretty awful. But if converting warheads to "heaters" (for everything from heating to power generation) would be worth a fortune, then it might be enough to rebuild Russia's economy.
Furthermore, it might be a way to save OpenAI by creating cheaper power supplies for AI datacenters [just kidding about this last one - always like to get the AIers excited, see if their stocks rise!].
> So theoretically, Russia could begin converting their nuclear warheads to heat-generation units that could be used for all sorts of purposes.
They already did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
A little too well, in fact, undercutting other suppliers; to quote from the page:
> What kind of safeguards would be required?
Mostly the classified security measures kind of safeguard: Make sure nobody can come in and steal the hard-to-make enriched weapons grade stuff before it gets blended down.
For material handling, everything I've heard about uranium as a metal is fairly mundane. Just:
• don't ingest it, lick it, or sniff it, it's an alpha emitter and a heavy metal
• don't grind it while you work on it, not only do you not want to breathe in a dusty alpha emitter, the dust is pyrophoric, i.e. catches fire in air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophoricity#Pyrophoric_mater...
• and make sure the weapons-grade chunks are not ever under any circumstances near each other while working on them, for which the main big surprise is "do not work them into cylinders, because cylinders can roll towards each other and end up touching".