Re:Weapons grade Pu

[Jacques.Read@eh.doe.gov]

An earlier posting said:

"The Clinch River Breeder Reactor was supposed to reprocess it and turn it
into burnable fuel.  The waste portion would have been greatly reduced.
Unfortunately,  it would also produce a lot of bomb grade material, so
President Carter scrapped the project."

Correction -- "Fast" reactors make Pu quite rich in 238Pu and 240Pu, and do not
have the ability to be refueled while at power.  They can't really make "weapons
grade" Pu, which must be fairly pure 239Pu.  It is theoretically possible to
drive any fissile material to super-criticality if you use enough chemical high
explosive to compress it, but the fission density suffers and the resulting
object doesn't give a big multiplier over the same weight of TNT.



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