broadsword
Brigadier
What has that got to do with this thread and the prevailing discussion?
China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread
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What has that got to do with this thread and the prevailing discussion?
Hendrik is spouting actual garbage like "Iran is making plutonium" and "Plutonium reprocessing is easy to hide" while at the same time not understanding that the Pu you get from uranium reprocessing is not even remotely suitable for weapons production and needs to be further processed in large facilities that are extremely hard to hide. He somehow turns incorrect estimates of uranium enrichment in North Korea into incorrect estimates of Pu processing in North Korea. He insults people using incredibly poor grammar while failing to actually provide any sources to back half his claims up. So when he claims other people are amateurs, with the implication that he himself is not, it has about as much weight as me claiming my dad works at Nintendo.
antiterror13
Brigadier
@Hendrik_2000 is a big contributor and has been around for long time in this forum, you may not agree with him but please be respectful and use your arguments instead of your rubb** comments
I also don't agree of some of his posts, and it is totally fine, the same thing to many members here
I explained the THEORY behind the reactor design.
So, basic expanded:
Moderator required to decrease the required amount of fissile material in the reactor. Example nuclear weapons doesn't contain moderator, the atoms split by fast neutrons.
Normal hydrogen (water) is a good moderator, issue is it has higher neutron cross sections than deuterium, means require higher enrichment.
Your statement doesn't make sense.
There are countless reactor design that use graphite as moderator, like the molten salt reactor , pebble bed reactor (both active development area in China, there is a working PBR reactor there), there is a MAGNOX gas cooled reactor that use graphite moderator and the list is endless.
There is no military reactor using heavy water, that makes its very expensive, big and doesn't bring any benefit.
The military reactors needs high enriched uranium to keep the "seeder" bundles in the reactor as long as possible, and the blanket is rotated on a two weekly basis.
They doesn't generate energy, using air or direct water cooling, example the US military reactors simply sent the river water through the core.
As I mentioned earlier, the cooling tower is one option, river/direct air cooling the other.
There are many more Pu making reactor around the world, with different cooling methods, the only way to get reliable data about them is the infrared thermal imaging .
And again, it is quite hard to see if the reactor is on power with visible spectrum.
It is quite old technology, and in the 70s they must be able to detect a MW/GW big thermal source on the surface of earth.
The Pu-239 has 11 kg critical mass.
Smaller critical mass means smaller weight for explosive lenses, casing, holarium, neutron initiators and so on.
Using U235 in the primary means the Chinese ICBMs could have half as many warheads than the USA or Russia.
In practice it should means China would need two SSBN to have the same punch capacity like the USA/Russia with a single SSBN.
From the cost of a single SSBN + missiles they can make Pu for thousands of warheads.
I think it is easy to see how silly would it be.
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Heavy water based reactor is proven to be safe on the other hand nobody built graphite moderator nuclear plant except the Russian with their infamous Chernobyl. Pebble reactor was never commercialized it is still in experimenting stages . What do you mean military never use graphite reactor Read manhattan project the plutonium are derived from graphite reactor
But nobody build strictly plutonium bomb anymore due to difficulty of processing the Plutonium Plus it cannot be hidden underground . Today if we see the W88 bomb design they are 2 stages design with plutonium act as primer and U235 as main fissile material
But nobody build strictly plutonium bomb anymore due to difficulty of processing the Plutonium Plus it cannot be hidden underground . Today if we see the W88 bomb design they are 2 stages design with plutonium act as primer and U235 as main fissile material
At least you can read basic information about nuclear energy.
At the moment Russia has two energetic reactor design (since the 90s), one water cooled, water moderated the other fast neutron, natrium cooled.
On the other hand China has working graphite moderated nuclear reactor, and there is an active development program around it, and there is another development program in China for molten salt reactor, another graphite moderated reactor type.
I wrote :
Interesting, is it possible to do more complete falsification ? I mean, no word was true from your statement. And even you tried to change the tings that I wrote few line ago.
The W88 secondary use U235 as pusher to decrease the weight compared to the yield a bit (maybe 20-30%),but using U235 instead of Pu239 in the primary will dramatically increase the weight of the weapon without affecting the yield.
The Thermonuclear bombs using usually U238 as pusher, the civilian bombs use lead.
U235 nuclear bomb will weight at least 20-30% (by my calculations) , but considering no nuclear nations used U235 in primary then the weight of the device will double more likely.
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What I don't see is any study on how much plutonium can be recovered from the civilian fission reactors. Because AFAIK with PUREX you can do it by chemically separating the plutonium out from the spent fuel rods. It might not generate as much plutonium as a reactor dedicated to the process, but given the huge fleet of civilian reactors China has I would not be surprised if you could recover usable amounts of plutonium from that.
China also has a fast nuclear reactor, is in the process of building a larger one, depending on the design some of those can easily reprocess
fuel and breed plutonium. Also like @Hendrik_2000 was saying you can use a CANDU reactor to breed plutonium. It might not be efficient, but China has huge civilian CANDU reactors they can repurpose. And in China the power generation facilities belong to the state anyway, so it's not like they can't mobilize them for military purposes if it was so required.
If we are talking about U235 China has more enrichment facilities than the US has. They basically have the 1990s model Russian centrifuge design in working facilities and they have designed their own centrifuge which they also manufactured and they have in working facilities.
China also has a fast nuclear reactor, is in the process of building a larger one, depending on the design some of those can easily reprocess
fuel and breed plutonium. Also like @Hendrik_2000 was saying you can use a CANDU reactor to breed plutonium. It might not be efficient, but China has huge civilian CANDU reactors they can repurpose. And in China the power generation facilities belong to the state anyway, so it's not like they can't mobilize them for military purposes if it was so required.
If we are talking about U235 China has more enrichment facilities than the US has. They basically have the 1990s model Russian centrifuge design in working facilities and they have designed their own centrifuge which they also manufactured and they have in working facilities.
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It makes more sense to use enriched U235 than civilian reactor Pu.
Problem with civilian pu is it contain lot of pu240 , and same 242 and 238. Each of them creating different issues and challenges, and additional equipment (pu238 means active cooling of the Pu pit)
It is not possible to make miniaturised ICBM warhead from it, and generally, making more than one thermonuclear weapon design is very expensive.
Problem is the same again: replacing Pu239 with U235 or civilian Pu increasing dramatically the amount of required delivery vehicles.
The delivery vehicles makes the 90-95% of the cost of the nuclear triad, so saving pennies on the pit material loose serious pounds on the delivery equipment and development funding.
Then its fair to say for every warhead/delivery system unit there is an accompanying nuke, since it would be equally inconsistent to assume otherwise by the same standards... so count up all the existing delivery vehicles and systems and that is the minimum base number of nukes China has
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
But China sign the nuclear proliferation agreement in order to buy the CANDU reactor So they put camera in front of the fuelling machine So they can track the inventory any fuel that come in and out of the reactor. It is very strict . There is strict accounting of fuel rod .Plus they station inspector on those facility and maybe even daily inventory All of those are reported to the International nuclear energy association IAEA with the headquarter in Wien. So there is no way they can divert the plutonium from thos Qinshan Nuclear power plant
China did bouth 2 X600 Mw CANDU nuclear power plant
Nuclear technology has the potential to save lives, make food and medical supplies safer and produce energy. But it is also the basis for the development of nuclear weapons. One of the IAEA's core functions is to confirm that countries are not misusing nuclear materials or equipment to produce nuclear explosive devices. To verify that nuclear materials are used solely for peaceful purposes, the IAEA has developed a system of "Safeguards Agreements". 179 States have entered into these agreements with the IAEA, submitting nuclear materials, facilities and activities to the regular scrutiny of the IAEA's inspectors. In November 2012, the IAEA conducted an inspection at the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant, in the Czech Republic.
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