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The Biden administration’s goal of using dozens of highly enriched uranium bombs as fuel in a new civilian reactor sets a harmful precedent, one that could cause our enemies to acquire nuclear weapons.
Perhaps the simplest direction to making a nuclear weapon, for a country or a terrorist seeking one, is to extract a sufficient amount of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (UME) from the theoretically nonviolent fuel of a research reactor, the small kind that operates in dozens of countries, many of which do not have larger nuclear power plants. According to Luis Alvarez, a physicist with the Manhattan Project, even students at high-altitude schools “would have a clever chance of triggering a high-altitude explosion just by dropping a part of it. ” That’s why the U. S. introduced a program nearly a century ago to phase out those dangerous fuels from those facilities. Now, however, in a startling shift, the U. S. Department of Energy is expanding the likelihood of this fatal situation by supplying a new research reactor with enough weapons-grade uranium for a sizable nuclear arsenal.
The danger is simply hypothetical. In 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein secretly ordered an emergency program to extract EMU from the fuel of his foreign-supplied study reactor to make an atomic bomb (after invading neighboring Kuwait), but fortunately a U. N. intervention expelled his troops and stopped the plot that had preceded it. It could be successful.
To avoid such serious risks, the U. S. government has initiated a foreign collaboration since the 1970s to remove HEU from study reactors and replace it with low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, the type used in nuclear power plants and unfit for nuclear power. (UME is enriched to less than 20% in the chain reaction isotope uranium-235, making it unsuitable for nuclear weapons, while EMU fuel in study reactors is generally enriched to 93%, as in U. S. nuclear weapons. )helped engage nuclear proliferation and save nuclear terrorism by converting 71 reactors in the U. S. In the U. S. and from HEU fuel to LEU fuel, even the smallest ones involve only one kilogram of HEU. The U. S. hasn’t built a forced civilian reactor to HEU since the 1970s. And no other country has done so since the 1990s.
However, the Biden administration intends to violate this nonproliferation policy by supplying more than six hundred kilograms of weapons-grade uranium (enough to make dozens of nuclear weapons) to a personal experimental study reactor that would be funded largely through the U. S. government. If the task goes ahead, other countries will insist on violating this policy as well, refusing to settle for double standards. Whether they import EMU from the United States, buy it from Russia, or build their own enrichment plants, the dangers of nuclear power, proliferation, and terrorism will increase again.
The U. S. government is offering $90 million of the $113 million needed to build the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE), which aims to examine the possibilities of a publicity edition known as the Molten Chloride Fast Reactor. Although no such power plant exists, they would theoretically use a liquid fuel circuit (uranium dissolved in hot salt) to maintain the fission reaction and transport the resulting heat. Supporters say that using liquid fuel, instead of the counterfeit fuel that has been used lately in all nuclear power plants, would be a more efficient way to produce electricity and heat for advertising purposes. This is not a completely new concept. In the 1960s, a similar experiment with a molten salt reactor was attempted, but it largely failed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (in part due to corrosive salt mixing, maximum temperature, and radiation) and left a particularly serious radioactive waste problem that still persists. Six decades later, the Energy Discomponent has to invest money after money.
The ARC’s technical amendment is to use “fast” (high-energy) neutrons instead of the “thermal” (low-energy) neutrons used in all U. S. nuclear power plants. In the U. S. experiment in the 1960s. Fast neutrons facilitate fission in some humans. Radioactive elements produced in reactors can slightly reduce the long-lived radioactivity of the nuclear waste created. But fast neutrons are much less capable of inducing the fission of uranium-235, which is imperative for the necessary chain reaction. To force the reactor. Therefore, the fuel requires a higher percentage of this isotope, resulting in higher uranium-235 enrichment than the 4% enriched UFE typically used in nuclear power plants.
However, fast molten salt reactors, such as the proposed CEFR, do require an EMU. This fact is indisputable because Biden’s leadership and personal associates acknowledge that an advertising version, if ever built, would use UPE fuel.
So, if the reactor can use only UPE fuel, why is the Biden administration’s investment an EMU edition that would violate U. S. nonproliferation policy?
The answer is simple: management has prioritized prices over national security. Energy Department officials stated in recent correspondence that the use of UPE fuel for the ERCM would be “fully consistent” with the U. S. nonproliferation policy, which is to “refrain from using nuclear power. “curtains usable as weapons in new civilian reactors or for other civilian purposes, unless such use supports important U. S. domestic objectives. “Despite this, Biden’s management will use EMU “to restrict the length of the experimental reactor” and reduce radioactive waste.
The irony is that other countries have made similar arguments to boost their own use of EMU, but the U. S. government has rejected those arguments for part of a century, emphasizing that nonproliferation is worth the extra expense and that the U. S. is investing in practicing what it stands for. This long-standing U. S. policy of avoiding double standards has served to trigger foreign cooperation. Unfortunately, the Biden administration is now shifting to a “do as I say, not as I do” policy, which is almost certain. fail.
Earlier this year, U. S. experts, along with three former commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and three former assistant secretaries of state for nonproliferation, warned Energy Department officials that their plan “would undermine the longstanding U. S. policy of minimizing EMU and thereby increasing the dangers of a nuclear explosion, “nuclear proliferation and terrorism,” urging them to “suspend work on the ERCM until their department’s Office of Nuclear Energy develops a chosen design for the LEU. “
The last time short-sighted U. S. officials planned to build a UME-powered study reactor, in the early 1990s, “opposition to the use of highly enriched uranium in the reactor core led to its cancellation” through President Bill Clinton. whether Joe Biden will endorse such a show of American leadership or gratuitously undermine one of the world’s most successful nuclear nonproliferation programs.
This is an opinion and research article, and the reviews expressed through the authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Arab American scientist
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