Israelis develop 'safe' plutonium: good for power......

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Israelis develop 'safe' plutonium: good for power, bad for weapons
Nuke waste could be used as fuel - even by Arabs

Plutonium is considered one of most dangerous substances on Earth. Maybe it only kills 20 million instead of 30...

Plutonium is an element. Maybe they're mixing it as an alloy or something...who knows.

says there 'front', inorder to try to hide what they are really doing.

Adding americium to MOX will not make it harder to use the Pu for making a bomb, the Pu can still be recovered from the unused MOX using a simple version of a PUREX process. I am sure that a PUREX process on unused MOX fuel would work as a method of getting the Pu back out of the MOX.

I think the idea of adding Np-237 to spoil Pu is a non starter, it will not prevent anyone getting the Pu-239 out of unused MOX. But it will make the Pu in the used MOX very bad for bomb making, the addition of Np-237 will cause a lot of extra Pu-238 to form in the fuel. Pu-238 has a half life of 80 to 90 years and a little Pu-238 will increase the alpha activity of the Pu a lot and will make it harder to build a bomb. Pu-238 is a nasty isotope to work with on the gram scale, it brings with it contamination issues which are almost as bad as those of radium-226 / radon-222.

A better thing to do if you want to spoil Pu, is to mix bomb grade Pu with Pu from used UOX (or even used MOX) to create Pu with an isotope signature which is mid way between the bomb grade and the Pu from a power reactor after a long irradiation time. This would increase the Pu-240 content of the Pu. After a few uses / recycles of MOX it will have such a bad Pu isotope signature that it is impossible to use it in a thermal reactor such as a PWR or BWR, at that stage the only use will be as fast reactor fuel.

If you want to make pure Pu-239 then it is important to only leave the fuel in the reactor a short time, if you are trying to run the reactor to make cheap electric power then you want to get as much energy out of each fuel rod. So you want to go for a high burn up and a long irradiation time, during this time some of the Pu-239 is converted into Pu-240 and Pu-241.

The Pu-240 is a long lived isotope of Pu which makes it hard to make a Pu based bomb, the Pu-240 undergoes spontaneous fission which forces the bomb builder to have to devise a bomb which goes very quickly from subcritical to supercritical. The Pu-241 is quite short-lived so if you sit back and wait for 30 years then most of the Pu-241 will have vanished

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Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

"Safe" plutonium??? That sounds like an oxymoron, but then again, I'm no nuclear physicist.

Which isotope? wouldn't we like to know... If it's safe enough, maybe they can let the Iranians use it...

are they gonna test it out on the Palestinians?

Nah, just out of the mouth, and I was adept enough to miss the screen.

I can see the seriousness of the question, but to me, I find humor in the whole conflict.

Wrong, I know. Sometimes it's the only way I can deal with rather tough political issues.

As the article said, America stores all the hot scrap, forever.

That gets expensive, but what if it could be used for fuel, for a few years, we sell it to the arabs, then they get to store it for a few hundred thousand years?

The true cost per Kilowatt hour is over $100, mostly spent on waste storage.

Bomb grade is five pounds of power, and five pounds of black powder, small boom, long term dirty.

This is an immature, downright childish, technology.

'ceptin they don't use Plutonium in commercial reactors. The use Uranium, and not the isotope. About 3% if I remember correctly. It can't be used in a bomb, cept maybe a dirty bomb.

the NRC requires all radioactive materials be stored on site, or in a safe storage area. They're so stirct that no-salt (potassium) and old CRT monitors are classified as radioactive waste. Used to work in a nuclear plant, back in the day.