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At 08:38 AM 4/6/2008, spike wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Thanks John, but I didn't write
that about breeders. I have intentionally<br>
avoided posting anything about the topic ever since doing some calcs
on<br>
Keith's notion of using fairly common neutron sources to separate
plutonium.</blockquote><br>
It's more like making plutonium 239 out of depleted uranium without
making any plutonium 240. Sources where you can steal a hundred
grams of neutrons aren't that common, but every power reactor makes
kilograms of neutrons over a fuel cycle. A hundred grams of
neutrons gives them 24 kg of a better grade Pu 239 than any government
ever produced. That's enough for 4 implosion bombs.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">That was a shock to my system,
because I still haven't figured out why that<br>
wouldn't work. Unless I was sleeping in one of my physics lectures,
that<br>
would work. I never slept in those physics lectures, I loved those
things.</blockquote><br>
It's more combining separation chemistry with the really well known
transmutation of U 238. I figured this out at least a decade
ago. Finally decided it was better to have it in the open than
keeping it to myself, especially after the US scattered DU all over the
mid east. (I was also really pissed about being jailed by a
corrupted government.)<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">That being said, I am now
calculating the impact of bad guys with plutonium.<br>
I am still convinced that detonating a nuke is technically difficult,
</blockquote><br>
If they are not constrained by military requirements to make it small and
rugged, i.e., they can use the volume of a shipping container then there
is a really simple path. They need big aluminum spinnings, half
ellipsoids 4 feet deep and about 3.5 feet in diameter. Easy to make
and simple to disguise as reflectors for stadium lights. <br><br>
Here is how you make them.
<a href="http://www.metalspinningworkshop.com/MovieClipTwo.html">
http://www.metalspinningworkshop.com/MovieClipTwo.html</a> But
that's not the only way. A cnc lathe, a bunch of glued up sticks
and line it with aluminum foil would work. Heck, use a cardboard
guide made with a string and two pins to guide hand turning the
ellipsoidal surface. <br><br>
Then use two half elipsoids to make an ellipsoidal reflecting
surface. The bad guys put their implosion device with a uniform
shell of some high grade explosive around it at one foci and put 5 pounds
of flash powder at the other foci. They can fire the flash powder
with a damned fuse! They do need to be careful about putting the
fuse end in the center of the ball of flash. The pulse of light
from the flash powder takes 8ns to bounce off the polished inside surface
and arrive at the explosive shell. The shell of explosives may
require something to make it more light sensitive, but that's probably
not hard.<br><br>
So without hydrocodes to design the explosive drivers, or fast krytron
switches or any of the rest of the electronics that make bombs
complicated, they get a uniform spherical detonation. It would take
some work and some testing to get all this right. With a light
sensitive primary explosive on the surface of the sphere, they might be
able to use a xenon strobe light instead of flash powder.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">but a<br>
dirty bomb is simple. So how much plutonium would it take to mess
up a city<br>
indefinitely? </blockquote><br>
There are tens of thousands of tons of it in old reactor fuel rods.
But if you want to know,
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster" eudora="autourl">
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster<br><br>
</a>snip<br><br>
Keith</body>
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