The Viability of Germany’s Energiewende: Mark Jacobson Answers 3 Questions

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33. WRONG!!! WRONG!!! WRONG!!! 100% WRONG!!! both the name and substance

Last edited Sat Oct 12, 2013, 03:03 PM - Edit history (3)

I'm not disqualifying anyone because they disagree with me. Evidently you don't understand that the issue in question are the specs for nuclear bomb fuel; what can and can not be made into a bomb. Guess what - that information is CLASSIFIED. The ONLY people that have the qualifications to make a determination on that, by LAW; are the scientists at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. No other scientists can have the data needed, again, by LAW. THAT is why I disqualify people other than LANL or LLNL scientists.

Consider the following analogy concerning running an auto engine on a mixture of gasoline and water. Whether you can use the mixture depends on what the mixture is. Gasoline is the fuel, of course. Water inhibits the combustion; water is not combustible and it soaks up energy and lowers the temperature, which is why we use water for putting out fires.

Suppose I had a mixture that was 99.99% gasoline and 0.01% water. Do you think that would work in an auto engine? Sure it would. The fuel that is in the tank of your car right now probably has more than 0.01% water just due to condensation of the moisture in the air in the tank. How about a mixture that was 99.99% water and 0.01% gasoline. NO WAY would that work as a auto fuel. So at one end we have a mixture of 99.99% gasoline and 0.01% water that will work; and at the other extreme is a mixture of 99.99% water and 0.01% gasoline that won't work. Logically, there is some maximum value for the percentage of water in the mixture in order for the mixture to work in a car engine.

The same holds true for a nuclear bomb. When we are talking about nuclear reactions, it isn't sufficient to specify just the chemical species; that is to say something is "Plutonium". Saying something is "Plutonium" only specifies the chemical properties; NOT the nuclear properties. In order to specify the nuclear properties, you have to specify the particular Plutonium isotope. Plutonium-239 (Pu-239) is the isotope that is fissile, and hence Pu-239 is the bomb fuel. Other isotopes of Plutonium actually INHIBIT the bomb process, namely Pu-240. Pu-240 is NOT fissile and is not fuel; and is akin to the water. Additionally, Pu-240 has the nasty property that it can spontaneously fission. When a bomb is operating, you don't want to have a bunch of neutrons around or the bomb can pre-detonate. More on that later. Additionally, the neutrons released by Pu-240 can cause fissions and produce heat. Dr. Till mentions that in the interview:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

A: It's impossible to handle for weapons, as it stands.

It's highly radioactive. It's highly heat producing. It has all of the characteristics that make it extremely, well, make it impossible for someone to make a weapon.


So we have a situation just like the auto engine and a gasoline / water mixture. Pu-239 is analogous to gasoline and Pu-240 is analogous to water. As before, if we have 100% pure Pu-239, then that can be bomb fuel. If we have 100% Pu-240; that won't work. So somewhere there is a maximum percentage of Pu-240 that you can have and still have something work.

The scientists at Los Alamos found that out during the Manhattan Project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design


Gun assembly: one piece of fissile uranium is fired at a fissile uranium target at the end of the weapon, similar to firing a bullet down a gun barrel, achieving critical mass when combined.

Implosion: a fissile mass of either material (U-235, Pu-239, or a combination) is surrounded by high explosives that compress the mass, resulting in criticality.

The implosion method can use either uranium or plutonium as fuel. The gun method only uses uranium. Plutonium is considered impractical for the gun method because of early triggering due to Pu-240 contamination and due to its time constant for prompt critical fission being much shorter than that of U-235.

You can authenticate the following information by reading Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer-Prize winning book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" or from the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Neddermeyer

In April 1944 tests on the first sample of plutonium-239 that had been produced with neutrons in a nuclear reactor (rather than a cyclotron), revealed an unexpected problem: the reactor-bred plutonium contained five times more plutionium-240 (a result of reactor neutron bombardment), an unwanted isotope that spontaneously decayed and produced neutrons that promised to cause a pre-detonation, without sufficiently quick critical mass assembly. It now become apparent that only implosion would work for practical plutonium bombs, since neutrons from any amount of plutonium-240 which would be produced along with plutonium-239 in a workable reactor production scheme, would cause a pre-detonation in any gun-type bomb (see weapons grade plutonium for details). Plutonium-240, once produced in reactor-plutonium, was even more difficult to remove from plutonium-239 than isotopic separation of uranium. These facts made plutonium effectively unusable unless implosion worked.


The scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project planned to use a gun-assembly method for the Uranium bomb; and that's what they ultimately did. However, they also planned on using a gun-assembly method with a faster gun to be the basis of the design for an atomic bomb using Plutonium. However, when the first samples of weapons grade Plutonium were available from Hanford, the scientists discovered that you can't make a bomb from even weapons grade Plutonium using a gun-assembly method. The neutron background due to spontaneous fission of Pu-240 is just too high; and it is impossible to make a gun-assembled bomb out of even weapons grade Plutonium, let alone "reactor grade" Plutonium with its even higher concentration of Pu-240.

From above, the percentage of Pu-240 in "weapons grade" plutonium from Hanford is too high to make a plutonium bomb using the gun assembly method. Los Alamos scientists had to use the implosion method. However, if the percentage of Pu-240 is high enough; then even implosion doesn't work. In the limiting case, if you had a Plutonium that was 100% Pu-240 and 0% Pu-239 ( that's akin to 100% water and 0% gasoline ); the bomb won't work.

THAT is what Lawrence Livermore certified is the case with the IFR. The Plutonium produced by the IFR has so much Pu-240 and so little Pu-239 ( the IFR is a very efficient Pu-239 burner ) that it is IMPOSSIBLE to make IFR Plutonium into a bomb as Dr. Till states above.

That scientific truth was certified by scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, one of only two labs that are the real experts; so Dr. Till is 100% CORRECT; all the "pseuo-experts" that you may cite, notwithstanding.

The good thing about science is that it is always true, whether or not you believe in it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

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