One potential sticking point of making an agreement with Iran is the disposition of their 60% enriched uranium. One option that I see in media reports is to “destroy” it while it is still in Iran. Without going into the political aspects of the plan, how is this even possible without fission or fusion?
You could mix it back in with the U-238 it was separated from. It’s still there, but you’ve undone the hard work of enriching it.
Mix it? It isn’t in our custody. Do they drop it from the sky and hope it lands on the uranium?
Obviosly any such settlement would be monitored by the
I was interpreting this as being part of “making an agreement with Iran”. I.e., we make a deal with them, one of the terms of which is “you’ll allow in UN weapons inspectors, who will monitor the de-enrichment of your uranium, or do it themselves”.
We would save time and effort and just take it.
That’d work, too. But Iran might be more willing to agree to a deal involving it being deweaponized in situ.
Or just outright buy it and their processing facilities at a profit to Iran. Let them recoup their investment so to say.
Of course that would be fair, a concept that is foreign to this administration. Too much like losing they would say.
If we know where it is? Use nukes or large amounts of conventional explosives to scatter it wide enough that reclaiming it is impractical.
(This is a “could”, not “should” tactic to be clear)
I could totally see the trump administration agreeing to a deal where they allegedly have to totally promised to destroy all their Uranium absolutely pinky swear. But actually they just sort of agree they may water it down a little
Iran wants a civilian energy nuclear program too. (They have a civilian power reactor - when Israel landed something too close to it, they retaliated with a missile close to the Dimona reactor in Israel … a simple message to “back off”). They would see how the nuclear materials are disposed of as a message as to how well they have done in negotiations. As we’ve seen so far, they do not intend to surrender. Handing over the materials would be seen as surrender, and pride might not let them do that.
The USA is not going to be able to simply take the materials. To get at deeply buried materials, they would need to fly in massive amounts of heavy equipment if the entrances are sufficiently damaged. Running an airfield while vulnerable to guerillas and drones would be very risky and cost a lot of lives. Any accidents with the material would be equally horrible. Trucking it across a thousand miles when guerillas could be hiding anywhre would be equally risky.
So the solution is for Iran to agree on something to ensure it does not get further concentrated - isolate and not touch the material, or dilute it for civilian use, but not surrender it. Provide some for of oversight to guarantee compliance. Melting it into dilution with less potent uranium is the obvious solution there, but carries some implicit message of surrender, so they will ask a lot of concessions from the USA to do so without appeaaring to “give in”.
Enriched uramium is chemically identical to unenriched, so melting together is a quick way to ensure it is no longer as threatening. The onlly difference is a 235:238 weight difference, which requires long term differentiation in high-speed centrifuges to enrich it again… slowly. (The estimate is they have about 440kg of 60% enriched, the results of a huge number of centrifuges running since the agreement was cancelled, so 10 years or so. Enrichment is slow. OTOH they only need about 30kg of 80% per bomb from what I recall of Oppenheimer)
Yeah. 60% enrichment is only useful on the way to a weapon. Diluted back to 3% and you have perfectly useful reactor fuel of reasonably significant commercial value.
The separated non-fissile uranium is almost certainly sitting around somewhere. It has its own value and isn’t just a waste product. Even if it wasn’t easily to hand, there is a lot available in the world.
Or they could mine more. They obviously got the original material from somewhere; and I agree, the leftovers must be somewhere, even if in a discard pile.
OK, only 13 posts in, but what the heck is enriched uranium. Aperntly it takes powerful centrifuges is all I know. Is this striping off electrons or something?
TLDR: There are multiple kinds of uranium. Uranium 238 is by far the most common, but uranium 235 is the kind that’s used to build bombs. They’re basically identical chemically; the only difference is their mass. Centrifuges separate them out by mass, but because their masses are so similar, it’s an inefficient process. Natural uranium is around 99% 238, and 1% 235 and others. To make a bomb, you need to get it up to around 80% 235. That takes a lot of centrifuging. They’re currently at around 60%.
The details: Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons have almost the same mass as each other, and are almost all of an atom’s mass. They’re also very tightly bound to each other in the nucleus of the atom. Electrons are much less massive, and much easier to move around. Atoms generally like to be neutral, so there will be the same number of positive protons and negative electrons, but the electrons can be messed with easily enough. It’s interactions with the electrons that are responsible for all of chemistry, and the number of electrons is determined (mostly) by the number of protons, so the number of protons is what gives an element its identity (this is called the atomic number: For instance, oxygen has 8 protons, so it’s atomic number 8, and uranium has 92 protons, so it’s atomic number 92).
Well, that’s the protons and electrons. What about the neutrons? Chemistry mostly doesn’t care about those. As far as chemistry is concerned, an atom could have any number of neutrons, and it’d work the same (well, almost: There are some slightly mass-dependent effects, but that mostly only matters for very light elements like hydrogen, and even there, the difference is subtle). Two different atoms with the same number of protons (hence, the same element) but different numbers of neutrons are called isotopes of that element. You distinguish between two isotopes by saying the total number of protons plus neutrons (since the two have almost the same mass, this is basically the total mass of the atom, in appropriate units). For instance, all carbon has 6 protons, but it could have 6 or 8 neutrons (or, much more rarely, other numbers), so there’s carbon-12 and carbon-14. Or for uranium, you have 92 protons, but 143 or 146 (or occasionally other numbers) of neutrons, for uranium-235 or uranium-238.
For nuclear chemistry, though, the neutrons do matter. Some isotopes of some elements are stable, and some are unstable. Of the unstable ones, some are less stable than others. For instance, ordinary carbon is carbon-12, and it lasts forever. Carbon-14, with 8 neutrons instead of 6, decays after a few thousand years. No isotope of uranium is completely stable, but U-238 lasts for several billion years on average, and U-235 lasts for hundreds of millions (and other isotopes last shorter times).
Well, the Earth is billions of years old, so roughly half of the U-238 we started with has already decayed, but most of the U-235 (and other isotopes) has decayed. So in uranium found on Earth today, most of what’s left is the more-stable 238 isotope. U-238 can’t be used to make a bomb, though: That needs U-235. So to make a bomb, you need to purify that small amount out. Which is very difficult, since they’re chemically the same, and only differ in their mass. And they don’t differ very much by mass, either. So it’s hard work, and you practically speaking can’t completely purify the U-235. But you can produce uranium that has a higher than natural percentage. That’s enriched uranium. You need about 80% pure to make a bomb; Iran currently has stuff that’s about 60% pure.
Just for your edification…
Enrichment by centrifuge is a relatively recent technology. In WWII the technology used was gaseous diffusion (make the Uranium into gaseous compound, then filter it through a huge number of filter stages. The U235 compound will tend to arrive at the end first, since it’s slightly less massive. Do that enough, and you can get highly enriched Uranium. Or - you could feed low-enriched Uranium into a giant mass spectrometer, called a Caultron. Here you ionize the Uranium and accelerate the ions with an electric field, while at the same time having a magnetic field perpendicular to their path. The electrically-charged Uranium ions will tend to deflect due to the magnetic field, and you then end up with two spots where the U235 and U238 hit the backstop. Scrape off the U235 splat, and your will find that it’s nearly pure - much purer than other enrichment technologies. But, it’s a very, very slow process.
Thanks for that. I remember a (very) little of this from high school chem. You explained it very well.
Oh, and I’m sorry but we are probably on a list somewhere now.
To expand of that a little; in lighter elements, the variable neutrons consist of a larger percentage of the mass of an atom’s core. Deuterium has about twice the mass of normal hydrogen, since it’s the difference between a single protein and a proton with neutron. So deuterium can have noticeable differences in chemistry (including biological effects) from normal hydrogen.
But that difference rapidly grows small as the atom gets bigger. Hydrogen atoms are the lowest mass atoms possible, while uranium is one of the largest. Uranium has 93 protons, Uranium 238 has 146 neutrons to go with them and Uranium 235 has 143 .
The most common isotopes in natural uranium are uranium-238 (which has 146 neutrons and accounts for over 99% of uranium on Earth) and uranium-235 (which has 143 neutrons).
Percentage-wise, the difference in mass between 235 and 238 is much tinier than the difference between 1 and 2. Which is why separating uranium isotopes is much harder than separating hydrogen isotopes.
Also for the same reason the effect of the mass difference on chemistry is also negligible with uranium isotopes.
Nah. I mean, just enrich it to 5% and start churning out some plutonium.
That’s an option, too. It’s easier to produce the material that way, but it’s harder to use that material to make a bomb. I think that’s mostly what the US uses. But it’s (mostly, at least) not the method that Iran has chosen to pursue.