Current Nuclear Weapons Development

bobbymike said:
www.heritage.org

America Must Prepare to Test Nuclear Weapons

The United States has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1992.REF However, given the deteriorating security environment, it may need to do so once again.
www.heritage.org www.heritage.org
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The article is from the right-wing Heritage Foundation so that doesn't surprise me however if Putin decides Russia needs to perform a new round of nuclear tests (And does so) it's a sure bet that Trump will order the DOE to reactivate the NPG for some new US nuclear tests.
 
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bobbymike said:
www.heritage.org

America Must Prepare to Test Nuclear Weapons

The United States has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1992.REF However, given the deteriorating security environment, it may need to do so once again.
www.heritage.org www.heritage.org
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Stupid idea, we have tons of data from past tests and have developed technology to no longer need them. All this will do is allow China and Russia who don't have those means to do desperately needed testing.
 
Desertfox said:
Stupid idea, we have tons of data from past tests and have developed technology to no longer need them. All this will do is allow China and Russia who don't have those means to do desperately needed testing.
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Every time you make a new computer model, you need to do a test shot to validate it.

What you're saying is that the computer models we have are 30+ years old and therefore SUCK.
 
There are other ways to get that data to validate models without having to do a full scale shot. I've seen it.
 
Scott Kenny said:
What you're saying is that the computer models we have are 30+ years old and therefore SUCK.
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Not to mention that the sensors used to take measurements from the exploding test-device (In the brief time they exist before being vaporised) while state-of-the-art at the time are now 32 years old, there has been enormous advances in high-speed sensor tech in those 32 years since the last test-shots in 1992.
 
On the other hand, the U.S. is not designing new warheads. New weapons are just rebuilds of existing physics packages.
 
Missions and associated yield / effect requirements are mushrooming again for one thing. Warheads in the 300kt range just don't cut it any more for strategic targets (if they ever really did).
 
Grey Havoc said:
Missions and associated yield / effect requirements are mushrooming again for one thing. Warheads in the 300kt range just don't cut it any more for strategic targets (if they ever really did).
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Could you give an example of a target where 300kt with a <100m CEP would not suffice?
 
ROK and Japan are not adopting nuclear weapons anytime soon for domestic political reasons. I am all for it, but it would be an economic nightmare immediately.
 
NMaude said:
Do they already have weapons-grade fissile materials on hand?
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Japan has a massive stock of Pu and recently built a reprocessing plant for it. They would be awash in weapons grade plutonium if they lifted their finger. ROK much less so I think; I’m unfamiliar with their efforts. But as Bestest Korea has shown, even a half dozen weapons would carry a lot of weight.
 
Josh_TN said:
Japan has a massive stock of Pu and recently built a reprocessing plant for it.
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If that reprocessing plant also includes AVLIS or MLIS equipment then Japan can in principal create 100% Pu-239, 100% Pu-238 could be made for use by JAXA in RTGs (For probes to the outer planets) and the rest of the Plutonium isotopes used as reactor fuel.

On another note it would be interesting to see if Japan will stockpile weapons-grade Li6D.
 
I haven’t studied their efforts, but they have a huge decades old civilian nuclear program that results in a huge stockpile of plutonium waste that is just raw material for purification. They also have an existing civilian solid fueled three stage orbital rocket that is basically MX by another name. They can create an ICBM in months.
 
Desertfox said:
It depends on what isotopes of Pu it is, not all Pu is usable for weapons.
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Most of the Plutonium formed is Pu-239, there are a number of techniques that can be used to isotopically purify the Plutonium to get the Pu-239, the latest and best methods use AVLIS or MLIS (URLs are in post#4,590).

Edit: I forget about a relatively new but still largely classified enrichment process developed in Australia called SILEX.
 
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Yes they could reprocess the Pu, but they would first have to build the facilities to do so. All their civilian reactors are LWR which produce significant (~50%) amounts of Pu-240 while you need to get down to <7% Pu-240 for weapons-grade Pu. They may have a lot of Pu lying around, but its not usable as is.
 
Desertfox said:
Yes they could reprocess the Pu, but they would first have to build the facilities to do so. All their civilian reactors are LWR which produce significant (~50%) amounts of Pu-240 while you need to get down to <7% Pu-240 for weapons-grade Pu. They may have a lot of Pu lying around, but its not usable as is.
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These are very good points but now that Tubby has operational nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the CONUS I won't be surprised at all if the Japanese government is quietly making plans and secretly allocating the needed funding to build the required Pu-239 purification facilities.
 
Desertfox said:
Yes they could reprocess the Pu, but they would first have to build the facilities to do so. All their civilian reactors are LWR which produce significant (~50%) amounts of Pu-240 while you need to get down to <7% Pu-240 for weapons-grade Pu. They may have a lot of Pu lying around, but its not usable as is.
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Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
That plant is specifically to reprocess waste into reactor-grade Pu, which is a very different process from turning waste into weapons-grade Pu.
 
Desertfox said:
That plant is specifically to reprocess waste into reactor-grade Pu, which is a very different process from turning waste into weapons-grade Pu.
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I admit my ignorance on that matter. Is it a different isotope or is the plant simply unable to enrich to the proper levels, or some other issue? I had been led to believe that the capacity for nuclear weapons production was specifically why some people protested the plant.
 
Josh_TN said:
Is it a different isotope or is the plant simply unable to enrich to the proper levels, or some other issue?
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If you're simply talking about separating out the Plutonium from the Uranium (The PUREX process) and of course the fission products are separated out (There are a number of useful radio-isotopes here such as Cobalt-60, Strontium-90 and Caesium-137) which is a chemical process.

On the other hand separating out Plutonium isotopes uses some form of isotopic separation of which there are a number of methods that could be used. IMO once the Plutonium has been extracted from the spent fuel-rods then it needs to go through two series of isotopic separation with the first series to isolate the Pu-239 from the Pu-240, 241 and 242 then seperate the Pu-238 from the Pu-239. With the result you have three product streams:

Stream 1: Pu-239 for weapons use
Stream 2: Pu-238 for use in powering RTGs (JAXA would have use for this)
Stream 3: Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242 and Pu-243 which could be used as reactor-fuel.

Josh_TN said:
I had been led to believe that the capacity for nuclear weapons production was specifically why some people protested the plant.
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The only thing they're parading is their wilful ignorance.
 
Josh_TN said:
On the other hand, the U.S. is not designing new warheads. New weapons are just rebuilds of existing physics packages.
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And if any of the geometry of the physics package changes, the computer models are 32 years old, and the high-speed sensors that produced the data then are now cheap enough to put in a burner-quality smartphone.
 
Josh_TN said:
Could you give an example of a target where 300kt with a <100m CEP would not suffice?
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The bunker complex that is part of the new Beijing Military City, and even the old Western Hills leadership bunker facility that it is meant to supersede is hardened against megaton-range strikes.
 
Desertfox said:
That plant is specifically to reprocess waste into reactor-grade Pu, which is a very different process from turning waste into weapons-grade Pu.
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Not always, look at THORP in the UK, it's produced a shed-load of weapons grade Pu.

Grey Havoc said:
The bunker complex that is part of the new Beijing Military City, and even the old Western Hills leadership bunker facility that it is meant to supersede is hardened against megaton-range strikes.
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TBH, targets like NORAD and enemy equivalents won't be the main concern, it's killing the enemy's ability to strike you and then their economy. If some men want to hide under a granite mountain or similar, leave them there.
 

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