Over the last few months, North Korea has severely tested the world’s patience. It conducted its third nuclear test, canceled the armistice ending the Korean War, threatened the US with nuclear ruin, warned foreigners to leave the country because war was imminent, cut its hotline with South Korea, and readied a missile for firing. This [...]
Every so often we hear something in the news about nuclear reactors fueled with highly enriched uranium (HEU); usually with regards to nuclear weapons proliferation. Back in the good old days both the US and USSR constructed over a hundred small HEU-fueled reactors and shipped them all over the world – Uruguay had one, there were some in [...]
Well, it finally happened – North Korea finally set off another nuclear test, which wasn’t much of a surprise to be honest with you. After a couple of low-yield devices the North Koreans had plenty of reasons to continue testing – we’ll talk about that in a moment – and the world reacted fairly predictably [...]
As I discussed in a past posting on uranium enrichment, the uranium we dig out of the ground is unable to sustain a nuclear chain reaction without a lot of coaxing – it has to be immersed in heavy water or surrounded by graphite as opposed to natural (light) water. This is why we enrich [...]
As I mentioned in my first posting on thorium reactors, this is a huge topic that deserves a careful discussion – even four postings isn’t enough to do justice to the topic, but it’s a good start. So this will be my last posting on thorium reactors for now, but I might come back to [...]
At one point John Kennedy predicted there might be over 20 nuclear powers by the mid-1970s – one of the triumphs of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is the fact that, as of the year 2000, there were fewer than 10 and only North Korea was added to the total since then. But we know that the [...]
Quick note – I haven’t exhausted the topic of thorium, and I am incredibly gratified at the number of comments my last two postings have attracted and the thought that’s gone into them. But I wanted to take a short break from thorium since I know that not everyone is completely enamored of that particular [...]
Last week I wrote a little bit about how fertile thorium can be turned into reactor fuel. A discussion of how a thorium reactor might differ from a uranium reactor seems a reasonable follow-up topic. The reactors I worked with in the Navy were light-water pressurized water reactors. Like virtually every reactor we have on [...]
Nearly two decades ago I took a short class on nuclear criticality safety – basically a class on how to work safely with things like enriched uranium. When we were reviewing the nuclear properties of U-235 (the isotope of uranium that fissions) I happened to notice that U-233 seemed to have a lot of advantages [...]
Several months ago I was involved in an interesting conversation about improvised nuclear devices – specifically, the best way to tell the public what had happened. In particular I recall a several-minute discussion on whether or not the public should be told that an attack had taken place. I have to admit I was somewhat [...]