Radioactive Wolves.

[MiM]

Zilla, on your question about how many reactors and how many bombs.

The World Nuclear Association gives about 430 reactors producing a total of about 3700 GW electricity in October 2011. Multiply by roughly 3 to get ~10 TW thermal effect.

Stockpiles are harder, and there are many estimates. Here is one historical listing http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nucstock-0.html, giving peaks of about 70,000 warheads, and 27,000 Mt, in the 1970's. Another estimate I found was 5000 Mt today. If we (roughly) estimate half of that to be fusion energy, those numbers need to be halved for fission content.

If we calculate from here, it would take about 1.5 years for all power plants to produce the energy of the fission part of the peak total weapons stockpile and about 4 months to match todays stockpile. If we consider that the medium age for the fuel in a reactor is about 2 years, we can estimate that the amount of long lived fission products in all reactors today is of the same order of magnitude as the long lived fission products that theoretically could have been released in a nuclear holocaust during the crazy years, and clearly above what is available today.

But then we have to add all the short lived nuclides from the weapons and activation products from both, so that is not the full picture. And of course, you have to put a nuke (or another big bomb) on a power plant to get it to release all of its content.

Hope I didn't make any bad mistakes, calculating with that many zeros is always a challenge -maybe Jim's 11 y students could check my calculations

[Svartalf]

If only we could make powerful fusion bombs without having to set them off withy fission!

Wonderfully destructive weapons without that messy and annoying fallout!

I remember the faux outrage at the neutron bombs. "Destroy the people without damaging private property!" C'mon, folks, private property has a real, tangible value. People, not so much. Especially the young ones. You never know how they're going to turn out, and you can invest years in one and have it turn out to be a total failure. It's just too risky, IMHO. I'm going to put my money in something safe, sound, and secure, with a real return on my investment. I'm going to buy an iPhone.

Private property aside, I mourn the neutron bomb because there are plenty places you might want to empty of people without destroying precious historical and cultural treasures... If we have to bomb Iran, the damage to our knowledge of the past would be incalculable.

[Schneibster]

The big problem with neutron bombs is that they're only useful for genocide.

[Svartalf]

There are very few if any operational reactors that use plutonium.

Actually, almost every commercial reactor uses plutonium. This is because commercial reactors generally start with low enriched uranium, which is typically only 2-3% fissionable U235. The rest of the uranium is largely U238, some of which absorbs neutrons and transmutes to fissionable Pu239 which then undergoes fission. Over the usage life of a typical commercial reactor core, approximately the same amount of power is extracted from plutonium fission as from uranium fission.

Honestly, your post makes it sounds like you know very little about nuclear engineering. You might want to do some research before posting on the topic.

True, although I'm not sure it is quite a half - around one third was what I had heard. However, I took Schneibster's point to be about the use of Pu239 as a primary fuel, derived from fast breeder reactors. The fashion for those never really took off, given the travails of transporting highly radioactive Plutonium, which is also a perfect target for a terrorist group...

You bet that breeder reactors, that produce more Pu than they are fed would have taken off if the arms race hadn't dropped off, and with it the need for that element. Plutonium is fine fuel, but since it doesn't exist naturally, obtaining it relies on operations that use other fuels, and now that the use for it is not so great, we can rely entirely on primary reactors using mainly LEU.

[Svartalf]

The US decided to dispose of fuel after one time through the reactor, rather than reprocessing it. Part of the decision was cost, part was supply being very high, and part was concern over proliferation.

France reprocesses; I don't know if they burn plutonium or not.

We do... which is why we actually don't reprocess that much, since the waste from the MOX fuel used in our power plants is not suitable for recycling.

[Svartalf]

The big problem with neutron bombs is that they're only useful for genocide.

and the purpose of nukes now that the shock value they had in Japan is no longer a feasible tactic is?

[Schneibster]

Wikipedia claims that MOX is only used in 2% of installations. I know that France has a lot of reactors; and I saw a show a year or two back that was about France's use of nuclear energy. It claimed you guys reprocess a fair bit and that's where the MOX comes from. They went into what would be involved in reprocessing in the US.

You have French, so you can read sites I can't, so I'm very interested to hear your views.

[Schneibster]

The big problem with neutron bombs is that they're only useful for genocide.

and the purpose of nukes now that the shock value they had in Japan is no longer a feasible tactic is?

The purpose of the US nuclear arsenal is deterrence. Just as France's is.

Currently we keep around 2,500 of them. You can look it up on Wikipedia, actually. We don't keep them a secret because they're not a deterrent unless they're public.

[Svartalf]

Wikipedia claims that MOX is only used in 2% of installations. I know that France has a lot of reactors; and I saw a show a year or two back that was about France's use of nuclear energy. It claimed you guys reprocess a fair bit and that's where the MOX comes from. They went into what would be involved in reprocessing in the US.

You have French, so you can read sites I can't, so I'm very interested to hear your views.

2% Worldwide, maybe... Here, we decided 30 or 40 years ago that our mainline reactors would run mostly on MOX, since we expected to have some superphenix type ones producing more plutonium than our nuclear armament production could ever absorb. Of course, the superphenix thing fizzled, and nobody acted on the fact that recycling spent fuel might be a good idea, given the rise in the cost of yellowcake. So now we're stuck with a pool of aging reactors that produce way more waste to be disposed of than they should.

[Schneibster]

See, the thing about reprocessing is it concentrates the waste, making it much easier to dispose of.

I thought I heard about France storing some in disused salt mines; I stand ready to be corrected.

[Svartalf]

I don't remember where we put the final wastes... completely failed to keep up with that one. At one time we were planning to build a giant Yucca Mountain type facility, but I don't remember how far along that is, or if it got aborted.

and I know what reprocessing does, but I've been told that MOX waste is not suitable for that, likely due to it being a hellish cocktail of elements that would cost far too much to separate and treat before actual reprocessing could even take place.

[Schneibster]

I wouldn't be surprised at problems processing spent MOX being greater than for uranium fuel. OTOH, with the price of yellowcake, as you pointed out, I suspect using MOX fuel isn't cost effective unless the reactor requires it.

France in general did a better job with nuclear energy than the US, Britain, or the USSR. I suspect there are cultural reasons for it.

[Svartalf]

Maybe we did, we still had our fair share of flubs... and now, with the fucking greens making it a prereq to supporting the socialists should they come to power, it's likely we're going to phase it out, no matter that the touted 'sustainable' power sources have huge manufacturing and environmental costs (know how polluting it is to make solar panels?), and can't be deployed to the tune of producing enough power to substitute for nuclear generation (plus, how do we get power on windless winter nights?)

[Schneibster]

Education and regulation, my friend. The cure for many ills.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Just watched video. Very cool.

What video? Oh, that video. It's kind of gotten lost in the massive derail.

If you found that interesting, "Wolves in Paradise" is an nice contrast. It's set in the Paradise River valley of Idaho and shows just how far we have to go to get people to understand that a balanced ecology means making some accommodations.

Seeth will hate it most of it of course.