Nuclear weapons are bad and excess plutonium makes the problem badder
Nuclear weapons are bad.
Simply put, they kill people and break things. That’s what they’re designed to do.
Stick with me. I’m laying this out because it will be the science example in upcoming posts on scientific discovery. So…
Having nuclear weapons around makes life dangerous.
You never know when someone might accidentally kill people and break things with one. You never know when someone might kill people and break things with one on purpose. It’s just a bad piece of technology.
There are about 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world with the sole purpose of killing people and breaking things.
So…nuclear weapons are bad.
Having them lie around instead of getting rid of them is bad.
But having a massive pile of the stuff that helps make them go boom, plutonium, makes a bad problem even badder.
Why?
Because even if you get rid of the current batch of nuclear weapons, all that extra plutonium makes it easy to build and stockpile them again.
If the world were more convenient we could get rid of all that plutonium, like putting leftovers down a garbage disposal. Done and dusted.
Too bad getting rid of plutonium is not that easy.
Once plutonium is made it’s currently impossible to get rid of it fast. That’s because plutonium can’t be destroyed in any safe and easy way. You have to wait for physics to run its course.
The plutonium used to make weapons is radioactive. That means it naturally disintegrates over time. Every isotope disintegrates at its own speed. For plutonium-239, the isotope most commonly used to make nuclear weapons, the time it takes for half of the plutonium you have to disintegrate away is about 24,000 years.
If the average person lives 100 years. That means it will take about two hundred and forty generations for half of the plutonium we’ve created for nuclear weapons to decay on its own and go away. We have no way to speed up that natural process with science and technology we have now.
Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear weapons, put together an accurate graphic of how much plutonium is stockpiled in the world. The number at that time (a few years ago) was a whopping 495 tons.
That much stockpiled plutonium is equal, by mass, to about four hundred and twelve Fiat 500 Sport cars (what I happen to drive).
I love Fiats. But I don’t want the equivalent of 400 of those little Fiats sitting around, for two hundred and forty generations, when they are ultra-explosive killing people and breaking things machines.
Still, that’s the state we are in.
Let’s call it the “plutonium disposition problem”.
Luckily, lots of people realize having that much raw material to build nuclear weapons hanging around is a badder thing than just having nuclear weapons.
But discovering new ways to get rid of old plutonium is tough.
Many people have thought about how to deal with this extra plutonium. And get rid of the plutonium from any new weapons that get taken apart.
But plutonium disposition solutions have stalled out because of politics, money, and difficulty. One of the most popular solutions is to mix this plutonium with other things to make it less dangerous when it’s stored together in large quantities. Next put that mixture in special barrels, bury it in one or two underground facilities, and permanently seal it.
Then you wait for physics to work its magic and hope nothing goes wrong in the meantime, like natural disasters or someone breaking into the facility and treating it like a gold mine, only for plutonium.
But the ideal solution would be to discover a way to get rid of the world’s excess bomb plutonium within one human generation, using a non-self-destructive, sustainable, and ethical method.
I say within one generation because I think that’s the maximum amount of time any social agreement can be maintained, remembered, and honored. If all goes well. Longer than that and life is too unpredictable.
Simply put, nuclear weapons are bad and getting rid of extra plutonium prevents the problem from sticking around even after the last nuclear weapon is gone.
Plutonium may be a case of going from bad to badder. But it makes for a great real-world example of an area that desperately needs new discoveries to shift the balance.
The fate of the world depends on it.
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Around the web
- Project to end nuclear weapons by the year 2045, Horizon 2045
- Network of innovators committed to ending the nuclear threat, N Square
- Learning about arms control through the fictional nuclear weapon state “Nu”, Princeton University
- Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium (1994), National Academy of Sciences
- Disposal of Surplus Plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (2020), National Academy of Sciences
- International Panel on Fissile Materials, IPFM
How to cite this post
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Nuclear weapons are bad and excess plutonium makes the problem badder”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, August 7, 2020.
[Page feature photo: Photo by Giacomo Ghironi on Unsplash.]