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Re: So, is reprocessing in America's future?
Franta,
Thank You for your cogent response and cited references.
But, please,let's not get hung up on the pro-nuke/anti-nuke thing that
taints so much of what radsafe folk have to say that is otherwise valid and
informative..
"Please inform yourself before jumping to the conclusions propagated
by
antinukes & sympathetic media types."
I am anti-nuclear in persuasion and don't mind arguing, but I'm just asking
questions. I can't speak for Franz who made the asssertion that CANDUs were
deliberately used to produce bomb grade material,
"Yes, you are. India has not scavenged, but deliberately produced b
o mb -
plutonium (at least for sure for their first bomb exploded decades
ago) in
their CANDU-power-reactors (heavy water cooled and moderated
natural
uranium reactors), which are because of their construction suitable
to easily
change the fuel rods after a short irradiation time without
interrupting power
production. From these fuel rods b o m b - plutonium is
extracted."
but it seems to me that Franz is a learned individual and very much
pronuclear. That said, and forgive me for preaching, perhaps you would be
willing to say: At 10GWd/tonne, what percentage of Pu - 240, 241, 242 would
be present in CANDU fuel?
Thanks
Again,
Ray
----- Original Message -----
From: Franta, Jaroslav <frantaj@AECL.CA>
To: <radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 12:35 PM
Subject: RE: So, is reprocessing in America's future?
> Raymond Shadis wrote :
>
> > Franz,
> Quite so! On line refueling. Have you references that confirm they pulled
> their fuel at low burn-up right under the noses of Canadian and IAEA
> oversight? Does anyone have data or references regarding the Pu-240 levels
> in the fuel the Indians "scavenged" for their bomb? I apologize for the
use
> of the term , "scavenge" , I meant it in the loose sense of drawing off a
> minor portion. Thank you for your patience. Ray
> <><><><><><><><><><>
>
> COMMENT : NOT SO FAST !! ....many years ago - I guess after the TMI
> accident - before I joined AECL, I asked whether the CANDU fuelling
machine
> could be used to "defuse" a potential meltdown accident by simply
> de-fuelling the reactor core (or at least the central part of it), to
reduce
> the heat load. To my surprise, I was told that the machine works only very
> slowly, so there is no question of it being useful for such a purpose.
> Now I know better.
> Turns out the fuelling machine operation is so slow, you could NOT shuffle
> the thousands of fuel bundles in & out of the core fast enough to get the
> required low fuel burnup that gives bomb-grade Pu. At best, you could do
it
> with a few specific pressure tubes within the reactor, but that would give
> you only a small fraction of the "theoretical" yield, and it would be
plain
> as day that you are trying to do something weird (and as someone else said
> already, you can't just walk out of the plant with spent fuel bundles
under
> your coat anyhow....).
> Alternately, you could do periodic shutdowns to give yourself time to do
> complete core refuelling, but this would also be very obvious to IAEA
> inspectors, and you would essentially destroy the usefulness of the plant
as
> a steady power-producing source. It is for the latter reason that the
> military find it much more economical to just build dedicated
Pu-production
> reactors instead of entire plants with steam turbines, condensers, cooling
> towers, auxiliary process systems, etc., etc.
> I don't know that much about the Russian RBMK reactors, but I suspect they
> have the same limitations as CANDUs. Of course the Russians - like the
US -
> have/had plenty of dedicated Pu-production reactors. I also think that
RBMKs
> have a close relationship to their Pu-production ancestors, but only for
> reasons of convenience/experience. The US too once considered developing
> Hanford-type reactors into full-blown power plants....
> ....I was in the audience at Dr. Edward Teller's last visit to Montreal
some
> years ago, where he recounted his story of the safety committee which
> rejected that idea, on the grounds that the water-cooled,
graphite-moderated
> reactors suffered from precisely the type of potential instability that
lead
> to the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor.
> As for India, it is well known that their Pu came from the CIRUS research
> reactor - although this fact is frequently ignored, on purpose, by the
media
> and by antinuke activists, in order to play up the weapons proliferation
> issue vis-à-vis foreign NPP sales. For details, PLEASE see the following
> web-posted discussions:
>
> "Did India use a CANDU reactor in the 1970's to make an atomic bomb?" at
> http://www.freenet.carleton.ca/~cz725/cnf.htm#x1
> "What is the relevance of Canadian technology to India's recent nuclear
> weapons tests?" at http://www.freenet.carleton.ca/~cz725/cnf.htm#x1_2
> and
> "How easily can an atomic bomb be made with spent CANDU fuel?" at
> http://www.freenet.carleton.ca/~cz725/cnf.htm#x2
>
>
> A couple more points : Since CANDUs use natural uranium, they can't get as
> much fuel burnup as PWR-type reactors (actually less than about one third
as
> much -- 10GWd/tonne vs. some 30 - 40 GWd/tonne for PWRs) . Its NOT enough
to
> make a big difference in the Pu-240, 241 & 242 content (for bomb-building
> purposes), but if you REALLY believe that the Pu isotopics don't matter,
> than the preferred way to go for your bomb-building effort is the PWR,
since
> the total concentration of Pu in the spent fuel - all isotopes combined -
> will be higher by about the same ratio too.
> Lastly, nuclear weapons decommissioning in recent years has demonstrated
the
> relative importance of weapons grade Pu versus weapons-grade Uranium --
the
> surplus quantities of the latter (U-235) are over TEN TIMES as much as the
> former, measured in the hundreds of tonnes, rather than mere dozens of
> tonnes.
> Please inform yourself before jumping to the conclusions propagated by
> antinukes & sympathetic media types.
> Thanks.
>
> Jaro
> frantaj@aecl.ca
>
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