Louis, fascinating about the documentary. Again, not quite related (or at all,
actually) to nuclear energy. Here is my take on this, at least from your
introduction. Indeed, plutonium is a by product of the fission in the reactor.
While the majority of energy is fissioned from U235 (about 4% of what is the
"fuel" in those fuel rods)...plutonium comes from the decay of the other 96%,
U238. Indeed, much of the plutonium by end of a 6 year of life in the reactor,
is actually fuel itself and some/a lot of it is burned up. At any rate, none of
it is used to make nuclear weapons. I think India may of used this process in
the 1960s to make one of it's nuclear bombs. Why?
Because it is waaay to expensive to separate out the Plutonium from the high
level waste/spent nuclear fuel from a commercial reactor. What Rocky Flats did,
what Hanford did, and what H-bomb makers do to this day is to use special "R&D
reactors", smaller than commercial reactors, and in many ways simpler and
cheaper to build, to bombard U238 with neutrons until it decays into P239 ("P"
for "plutonium"). That is how the N. Koreans did it, how Israel does it, how
the U.S., China and Russia do it. It is completely separate and distinct from
commercial nuclear energy and the high level waste from, day, Diablo Canyon
Nuclear Plant, never sees a gov't R&D reactor to make weapons grade plutonium.
The Hiroshima bomb was a U235 bomb. The larger more deadly Nagasaki bomb was
made from P239. That plutonium was made under the Polo Fields in the secret lab
at the University of Chicago (now Fermi Lab). It was called a "pile" and you
may of seen the term used in the past. This remain today how P239 WMD is made.
It is, unfortunately, "easy" to make relative to enriching U235 to fissionable
levels (.7% in natural uranium to ~4 for reactors, and over 90% for bombs).
Every nuclear weapon in the world was made this way that uses P239. None of it,
zero, was made from nuclear reactor waste. The good news is that the way to get
rid of it, just as we got rid of much of the old USSRs bomb grade U235, is to
recycle it into fuel and burn it all up in reactors. That would be good way to
get rid of this destructive isotope.
Lastly, as a footnote, when you see "Department of Energy" involved in anything
related to nuclear, it is always, to my knowledge, involved in military/WMD. A
special military sub-division of the DofE. If it's NRC, it's civilian.
David
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