Today I received my first e-mail question from Jack Goldmaker. I figured what better way to launch the Ask a Nuke series than with my first reader e-mail. Now normally I won’t discuss nuclear weapons here at Nu because I believe that the weapons and the energy source are two totally different things and blurring the two is a common tactic by antinuclear activists. But in this case, the question is valid because it pertains to byproducts from the Uranium enrichment process, which is a key part in the nuclear fuel cycle. Now I’m not a weapons guy, so please feel free to correct me. Jack asks:
My question was about the fact that the forces in Afghanistan usually surround their bases with phalanx anti missile Gatling guns to prevent incoming Katyusha rocket attacks. Apparently, these guns use depleted uranium projectiles which stream out for over a few clicks from the gun. I wondered if the Taliban could go around and collect these projectiles and then sell them to someone to use in making nuclear weapons?
Theoretically, yes they could. But don’t panic, we won’t be getting nuked by warheads made from salvaged Depleted Uranium any time soon.
Depleted Uranium (DU) is made when Uranium 235 isotopes are removed from raw Uranium Ore. Uranium in the ground contains only about 0.711% U235, the isotope required for nuclear fission in either a nuclear reactor or a bomb. The rest is U238 which is more difficult to fission and generally not used for nuclear warheads (it can be made into Plutonium for bombs however). To make fuel for a nuclear power plant or a bomb, the Uranium must be enriched to a higher percentage of U235. The byproduct of that enrichment, is DU. DU contains only about 0.24% U235.
Now to make a nuclear warhead comparable to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, at a minimum you’re going to need about 36 lbs of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU). HEU has about 80% U235. So to get enough material to make a nuclear bomb, you would need to acquire 12,000 lbs of DU assuming your enrichment process is perfect and uses all U235. However, the enrichment process only uses about 2/3 of the U235, so you’ll need 18,000 lbs of DU to make enough HEU to make a bomb.
A few other things to consider:
- You would need the facility to melt down and enrich all of the DU, which luckily is immensely expensive, complex, and difficult to conceal.
- DU rounds turn into shrapnel, slag, and vapor when they impact a target or the ground, making the pieces more difficult to recover.
- The US and NATO forces patrolling Afghanistan and Iraq are likely to stop someone walking around picking up DU rounds.
- DU Rounds tend to get fired at the people who want to make bombs out of them.
So in short, Jack, you have nothing to fear from any hypothetical weapons made from scavenged DU ordinance. Rest assured it would be easier to start digging for Uranium in your back yard and there are plenty of former Soviet republics and rogue nations who make it much easier to get nuclear weapons.
If you have a question you want answered in an Ask a Nuke article, feel free to e-mail them to operations@nuclearfissionary.com.
Image Credit
Gatling Gun photo courtesy of Flickr user Waifer X published under the CC license.
8 Comments
Nice to see the Warthog’s 30mm GAU-8/A Avenger up close and personal.
You lost me after the “today I received my first email…” part. But I liked the photo of the Gatling gun.
Glad we have somthing for everyone, Will.
This was a really good question and a comforting answer. 18,000 pounds = ridiculous amount of fractured rounds to recover.
Of course, one could also go the plutonium production route. If anything, this would be harder than enrichment. While you would need less material, you would, however, need to construct a nuclear reactor or, at very least, have some strong source of neutrons such as a particle accelerator or fusion device. You would then need a chemical processing facility to separate out the plutonium, which is very hard to do because of the radioactivity from the plutonium and the fission fragments. And, even if you got enough plutonium, you would still need to machine it into a bomb.
If you are a nation state, this is possible given enough time and investment. Some rogue group of terrorists and criminals do not have the resources required to do this period.
So even with the plutonium production route, having DU in the hands of terrorists is not really viable. As you said, the far bigger threat comes from the former Soviet block states.
Absolutely Brian. Both methods are equally far-fethced for most countries, let alone poorly trained insurgents.
Jack, any nationstate with sufficient will, given enough time, can create a small, albeit unsophisticated, nuclear weapons program. It took North Korea four decades, but they accomplished it. The same cannot be said about independent organizations. They have not the territory for the facilities, access to natural resources, nor the sustained human capital (a pool of the “best and brightest” to pull from) to sustain any effort.
Back on topic, nuclear energy and nuclear weapons are only loosely related. Certainly, there are common knowledge and technologies useful for both: understanding of fission chain reactions and cross sections, uranium enrichment, and plutonium production and extraction. While these are enabling technologies, so is knowledge about fluid dynamics, explosives, and standard metallurgical techniques. Where does one draw the line about what technologies are “good” and “bad” without being arbitrary? I feel you can’t. Ultimately, the solution to nuclear weapons will be political, and not technical.
Right on all accounts.
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