The US has declared a new energy war against Russia.

Joshua

Caitlin Johnstone’s take on unilateralism…

“The US needs to constantly bully the world, drop bombs, patrol the skies with drones, torture people, arm terrorists, start wars for oil, starve civilians, and surveil everyone on earth while endangering us with nuclear brinkmanship, because if it didn’t, the bad guys would win.

I mean can you imagine if the US stopped circling the planet with hundreds of bases, waging dozens of undeclared military operations, imprisoning journalists and obliterating every nation which refuses to bow to it? We might all find ourselves ruled by some sort of evil tyrant!

That’s why it’s so important to preserve the unipolar world order at any cost. If we don’t all bend over backwards to help the US threaten everyone with nukes and wage endless wars around the globe, we might wind up under the thumb of a brutal oppressor…I mean, a different one.”

Food for thought!
Cheers
Col

Thorium reactor development could be a big part of the energy solution. This isn’t some pie-in-the sky theory, a reactor was actually built and operational many moons ago (the researchers actually turned it off every weekend btw). The reactor design features a built-in safeguard that halts the reaction in the event of some malfunction as opposed to causing a meltdown, and it doesn’t rely uranium as a fuel source, but rather common thorium.

Of course it isn’t the silver bullet for everyone, it’s biggest downfall is that it’s atomically lighter byproducts can’t be used for weapons manufacturing, but only for medical isotopes badly needed across the globe, and there is also the difficulty of monopolizing the thorium supply chain…

Kirk Sorensen has a lot of info available online, here’s a short 10 minute video if you’re interested:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel/discussion&ved=2ahUKEwj57tftr4vpAhUHt54KHTG8BRoQt9IBMBB6BAgMEC8&usg=AOvVaw2yosAfMyucgtPbsvUJwa3o

Clinton supposedly sold Uranium One to Rosatom……………….who can you believe these days? If she did, I’d expect there are clauses in the contract, (and Russia always fulfills it’s contracts) where the US still gets a supply of fuel from Russia.

Augusto

A somewhat generalised explanation goes like this. Natural uranium in the earth comes in three flavours known as isotopes of uranium. They are referred to as 238, 235 & 234. Of the three 235 is “fissile” while the others not immediately so. What this means is that 235 can undergo fission. Uranium 235 atoms are marginally stable. 235 atoms spontaneously fall apart. When they do this they produce thermal energy, product atoms (daughter nucleides), particles and radiation. The other two flavours of uranium do not do this.

As an analogy consider the old Soviet Union. It was one political state, albeit unstable. Subsequently it fell apart. The result of that was a collection of smaller states or daughter states. Uranium 235 atoms behave along similar lines. They fall apart and produce daughters. Some of these daughters are also unstable and subsequently fall apart themselves. That process may be almost immediate or it may take an extended period of time before it happens. On the other hand some of the other daughters are stable. In the end all of the unstable daughters fall apart until stable daughters are produced. The decay of U235 produces a great deal of energy- some right away (most of it) and some over time. We seek to harness the energy (more on aspect that shortly).

The process of falling apart produces radiation. There are three types we are interested in. They are referred to as alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Alpha is helium nuclei. That is the centre of helium atoms is emitted (helium atoms stripped of electrons). These can be stopped with a sheet of paper. Beta are electrons. These can be stopped with a sheet of aluminium foil. Gamma are very energetic x-rays. They are highly penetrative and we employ extensive shielding (such as lots of lead or concrete) to stop them. Whenever a uranium atom or one of its daughters falls apart radiation is produced and steps need to be taken to control or shield the radiation (since it is not very good to get too much of it- it burns!).

Returning to our U235 again. Given a population of these atoms, we do not know precisely when any one of them will fall apart. We do know that from time to time one will. On the other hand, U234 and U238 are stable. They do not spontaneously fall apart. Natural uranium is a mixture of all three isotopes. According to Wikipedia the percentages of these in natural uranium is uranium-238 (99.2739–99.2752% natural abundance), uranium-235 (0.7198–0.7202%) and uranium-234 (0.0050–0.0059%). So you can see that the flavour we are interested in is present in vanishingly small concentrations. We know it is in natural uranium though because atoms of U235 are always falling apart and natural uranium is slightly radioactive as a result. We can detect this radiation.

With me so far? OK, ’cause here is where it gets interesting. It turns out that we can entice a U235 atom to fall apart on command. This is useful. Instead of waiting around we can cause the U235 atom to fall apart deliberately when we want it to. The trick is to deliver a nice, fat, slow moving neutron to it. This is known as a thermal neutron. We want to feed this fat little guy to the hungry nucleus (the centre) of the U235 atom. The U235 consumes the neutron, absorbing it. What a tasty meal. Alas, just as in the case of the gluttonous Mr. Creasote from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life movie the neutron causes the U235 nucleus to promptly fall apart (there is a short delay but it is but tiny, tiny fractions of a second). We get daughters and radiation and, most importantly, several neutrons (often three)!

Now if we want an explosion (God forbid), then all we need to do is create a chain reaction like this. First U235 atom falls apart and produces, daughters, radiation, energy and three neutrons. The three neutrons are utilised to feed three more U235 atoms which in turn fall apart and produce more daughters, more radiation, three times as much energy and three times as many neutrons (nine). The nine neutrons are utilised to feed nine more U235 atoms which in turn produce daughters and energy and radiation and another 27 neutrons. In around ten generations there will be ~59,000 neutrons available to cause 59,000 more U235 atoms to fall apart and release energy. By the way, this all occurs in tiny fractions of a second and the amount of energy released is vast. Let it go far enough and you have a nuclear explosion- tremendously destructive. Such ought to be forbidden in the populated biosphere.

Now I have made some assumptions and simplifications in getting this far, but please bear with me a little longer. The point here is that it is possible to create an exponential chain reaction of the type disclosed above and it will liberate a great deal of energy very quickly indeed. But what about if we do not want to release all that energy all at once? Instead we seek to extract it over time and in a controlled manner so we can use it for civilised purposes (such as lighting, industry, heating, manufacturing, air conditioning, transport, chemical processing, mining, refining, entertainment even, etc.). Well, we still need a chain reaction but this one is different. It is not exponential, but linear.

Here is what we need to do. We need to use the first U235 atom’s neutrons to cause the collapse of more U235 atoms and so on as before, but only until we reach a certain rate of U235 atoms falling apart. Once we reach that rate then we no longer want the rate to increase further. So, from that point on, two of the neutrons have to be “lost”. We have to arrange matters so they do not get eaten by any U235 atoms around and about. Meanwhile that third neutron does get fed to a U235 atom so that the creation of energy can continue at the rate we want. One falls apart, generating a neutron to feed the next one to fall apart to generate the next neutron and so on. That is a self-sustaining rate and no more than the rate we seek to harvest thermal energy to generate steam and from there kinetic energy (spinning machinery) and from there electricity. That rate and no more than that. How can it be done?

Let’s get back to the natural uranium. Remember it is mostly stable. We can say it is not fissile. The vast majority of the atoms in there do not fall apart even if they do happen to come across a yummy neutron. So a lump of natural uranium is slightly radioactive as the odd U235 falls apart, but that is all. The neutrons are unlikely to find a U235 atom. They escape. All we get is the radiation of random U235 atoms occasionally falling apart. Things can change if we were able to increase the proportion of U235. If the percentage of that was raised some (to, say 3% to 6%), it would be possible to start and sustain a chain reaction. The idea is that given a lump of uranium wherein the concentration of U235 was high enough it ought to be possible that one neutron departing a U235 atom falling apart would be gobbled up by another U235 atom which in turn would fall apart. Meanwhile the two excess neutrons would be lost, escaping out of the lump or being absorbed by other atoms (ones which did not fall apart when they had a meal).

It turns out this can be accomplished. The arrangement is a nuclear reactor for making steam and hence electricity. The key step is that of increasing the concentration of U235. The processes to do this task are hugely demanding (there are three processes I know, there may be others). To keep this to a reasonable length I propose not to delve deep into the enrichment processes this time. A high level of technical and industrial competence are prerequisite to achieve what is wanted though. It really is a tough job and the plant needed is large- very capital expensive. If you are in the game of uranium enrichment you need to be right at the top of technology. There are not many who can do it successfully. It takes years and years to build the capability (especially earning the experience and developing the right people).

Returning to the idea of a bomb. In this case the level of enrichment of U235 has to be very high indeed. Now we need get up to some 85% U235 (although it may be possible to make a bomb with 20% enriched but that has its own challenges). This makes the enrichment process even more demanding. It can be done but it is not easy. Hence few outfits have the ability.

Now we get to you’re the nub of your question. First, uranium enriched to 3% to 6% U235 is unsuitable for a bomb. It is suitable for reactor fuel though. Hence Rosatom could sell this stuff quite happily, even to a purported unfriendly outfit. If someone wanted to enrich the reactor grade fuel to a level suitable for a bomb, then they’d need a sophisticated enrichment plant of their own and that in turn would be something everyone would know they possess. Then it would be the case that you’d not be selling those guys anything. Anyway, if they did have a good enrichment plant they’d not be needing reactor grade uranium from you in the first place. They’d be enriching the natural stuff.

Final point. In his post Canuck is referring to liquid thorium reactors. Those are the best way to go. He is correct. They are unsuited to weapons making. They are intrinsic safe (the present designs of light pressurised water reactors are not). Thorium is common (much more so than is uranium). Guess who is undertaking a lot of research in that area?