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Plutonium recovered from LWR spent fuel, while not weapons grade, can be used to produce nuclear weapons at all levels of sophistication, [25] though in simple designs it may produce only a fizzle yield. [26] Weapons made with reactor-grade plutonium would require special cooling to keep them in storage and ready for use. [27]
The original gun-type plutonium weapon, code-named "Thin Man", had to be abandoned as a result—the increased number of spontaneous neutrons meant that nuclear pre-detonation was likely. [90] The entire plutonium weapon design effort at Los Alamos was soon changed to the more complicated implosion device, code-named "Fat Man".
The presence of gallium in plutonium signifies its origin from weapon plants or decommissioned nuclear weapons. The isotopic signature of plutonium then allows rough identification of its origin, manufacturing method, type of the reactor used in its production, and rough history of the irradiation, and matching to other samples, which is of ...
The first large-scale nuclear reactors were built during World War II.These reactors were designed for the production of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.The only reprocessing required, therefore, was the extraction of the plutonium (free of fission-product contamination) from the spent natural uranium fuel.
SEOUL (Reuters) -North Korea has halted the nuclear reactor at its main atomic complex, probably to extract plutonium that could be used for weapons by reprocessing spent fuel rods, a South Korean ...
The resulting mixture keeps the plutonium at all times in an unseparated gamma and alpha emitting actinide form, that is also mildly self-protecting in theft scenarios. [6] PUREX (plutonium uranium reduction extraction) is a chemical method used to purify fuel for nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons. [7]
The pits of the first nuclear weapons were solid, with an urchin neutron initiator in their center. The Gadget and Fat Man used pits made of 6.2 kg of solid hot pressed plutonium-gallium alloy (at 400 °C and 200 MPa in steel dies – 750 °F and 29,000 psi) half-spheres of 9.2 cm (3.6 in) diameter, with a 2.5 cm (1 in) internal cavity for the initiator.
Plutonium consisting of more than about 90% 239 Pu is called weapons-grade plutonium; plutonium from spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors generally contains at least 20% 240 Pu and is called reactor-grade plutonium. However, modern nuclear weapons use fusion boosting, which mitigates the predetonation problem; if the pit can ...