Neutron Bombs against North Korea

[Whitehall]

Read an interesting speculation of how to deal with North Korea. If one looks at the options and how they would play out, the US has only the choice of war now or war later. We\'re so big and such a tempting target that if we just stand back, someone is going to come after us with nukes made in North Korea someday. Just what are the North Koreans thinking?

War now risks South Korea but war later means New York or Chicago. Hence, it will be war now.

How do do this? One proposal is a massive first strike along the DMZ with neutron bombs. In one blow we would wipe out perhaps a million North Korea soldiers and their missiles and guns. Surprisingly, this would take a fleet of only 16 B-2 bombers. These planes have just been repositioned to Guam. We have thousands of neutron bombs in stock (or we used to). Damage on the south side of the DMZ would be trivial from our weapons and would only result from those units that did not escape the initial attack. There would be no local fallout and global fallout effects would far be less than our first hydrogen bomb test in 1953 since neutron bombs (technically \"enhanced radiation weapons\") are rather clean. We\'d also target their weapons facilities and command and control centers.

In one stroke we would eliminate the North Korean army, it\'s leadership and it\'s potential for nuclear weapons.

The only problem I see technically is fraternization. That\'s where the radiation from one burst interfers with subsequent weapons in the same area. The ideas about attacking their plutonium production reactor also has some fuzzy thinking but it\'s cute.

It is truly chilling what my tax dollars have bought over the years.

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5367 (\"http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5367\")

Morally, this is a terrible thing to do. But the threat is serious.

[Whitehall]

We\'ve just posted 12 B-52s and 12 B1s in Guam - not B-2s. Still, that\'s more than enough.

[proteus]

It\'s become a strange world. When the millenium hit I remember all the conversations in the media of at the most small isolated conflicts, an almost \"peace in our time\" zeitgeist. Now we have the spectre of major war(s). Guess the old adage that \"the only thing certain about life is change\" is true. It still beats me how as supposedly civilized and advanced the world has become we still settle disputes the same old way - by spilling the blood of others, and what sickens me even more is that I see too many folk who seem to even relish the prospect of a bloody war. Anyway, what will be must be but we will annihilate ourselves if we continue on the path we are headed, because the weapons we have no longer know any boundaries.

[EXIT63]

We\'re NOT as advanced as one would like to think. Like it or not. The world is ruled by the aggressive use of force.

[bundyburger]

<<We\'re NOT as advanced as one would like to think. >>

Someone show me evidence of how far humans have evolved since the Dark Ages. A few hundred years?! It will be a long time before we are capable of true peace. It\'s sad to think of that.

[Mtnjim]

100,000 years ago, we used sticks and stones. The Neutron Bomb? Just a bigger stone--not much advancement.

[Lucky]

Whitehall,
I thought about you as I read The New Yorker article (maybe March 3?) on Indian Point...I was wishing you could explain to me the process by which nuclear power becomes a radioactive threat to an area. The article simplified it as much as possible, but I\'d still like your two cents. You are always well positioned in any statement you make.

[Whitehall]

The basic problem is a conflict in priorities - on one hand you\'d like to put your generators as close to the end-users of the electricity as possible. That cuts losses in the transmission lines. Balancing that, you\'d like nuclear reactors to be well away from population centers -if something bad happens, the fewer people that have to evacuate and the more time you can give them, the better.

Indian Point (IP) is, what, 30 miles up river from New York City, the country\'s and maybe the world\'s largest electrical load. Plants licensed after IP had to be 50 miles away from a city of 50,000 or more. So, Indian Point is closer to more customers than just about any nuke in the US.

That said, Indian Point has full safety protection and is well run so it\'s not a particularly risky plant except that it might be difficult to evacate everyone in case of a release. The local authorities have been grandstanding lately. They claim that an airplane crash has not been proven to be harmless (true enough) and so have refused to plan evacuate routes, emergency operations systems, etc as a way to put pressure on the plant.

So shut it down - then what are you going to do? Import fuel oil from where? How about liquidfied natural gas? From where? Maybe burn coal? Global warming?

A nuclear plant splits atoms of uranium. The split parts (fission fragments) are very radioactive, so much so that after a while, the fuel rods have to be kept covered with water or they will overheat and meltdown. You can\'t turn the heat from the fission fragments off - it\'s physics. The reactor with it\'s thousands of rods is cooled by water. Lose the coolant (water) and after a couple of hours the fuel turns into a self-heating lava called corium which slumps into the bottom of the big steel reactor vessel. It will eat through the metal and plop on the floor below. The concrete floor breaks down into non-condensible gases like carbon dioxide.

The whole reactor is inside a huge building called a containment. It\'s designed for maybe 55 pounds per square inch (psi) internal pressure (your car tires are maybe 35 psi) to handle steam from a burst pipe. What it can\'t handle is the non-condensibles. You can spray water on the steam and the pressure collapses but not so with non-condensible. At about 150 psi, it will crack and leak steam and gases with some of the fission fragments out into the local atmosphere. This might happen in as little as 8 hours but probably it will take 24 hours or more. Of course, the plant crew will be working feverishly to get cooling water back in to re-cover the fuel.

Once the crack in the containment happens, people need to move out of the way of the cloud of radioactivity, in other words, evacuate. The local politicans just don\'t want to think about this happening. The odds of it going this far are infinitesimal - maybe once in every 100 million reactor years.

So what are the odds of us going to war to ensure a supply of oil? Over the last 20 years, it\'s been 1 in 10.

[Lucky]

What makes radioactivity important in nuclear fission? Yeah, I know I\'m ignorant.

[Whitehall]

Uranium is very weakly radioactive, trivially so. But once you split an atom of uranium, the split parts (fission fragments) are highly radioactive. In bulk, the split off pieces give off a large amount of heat

For example, after a 100 days, the fission fragments contribute 7% of the total heat used to make electricity. One hour after the reactor is shutdown, they still give off 3%. But that\'s 3% of a very large number - the reactor core is one of the most powerful machines on the face of the earth so even that 3% is enough to melt the ceramic fuel and its metal casing if not immersed in water. And you can\'t turn it off!

The high radioactivity also makes the fission fragments extremely hazardous to biology. That\'s why we go to great lengths to keep it confined in the plant.

[Lucky]

<In bulk, the split off pieces give off a large amount of heat>

Is this heat what creates the steam that ends up as our energy source?

[Whitehall]

Most of the heat (80%) is from the pieces flying apart. These are things like iron molecules traveling at almost the speed of light - they are something like cosmic rays. Another major energy source is the gamma rays and neutrons that are also emitted at the time of the split.

The heat from the fission fragments is released over time. Some decays have half-lives in the order of milliseconds, others hundreds of years. And then there are the cascades of decays - one radioactive isotope decaying into another and another... That\'s one of the reasons nuclear waste has to be isolated for so long.

Surprisingly, a nice chunk of the total energy is released in a way that we have no technology for capturing - neutrinos. In fact, they were first detected by putting a special detector up close to one of the biggest nuclear reactors.

[franki]

So, when is the US going to bomb north-korean nuclear facilities, just like the israeli\'s did with Osirak in the early eighties? It certainly would ease up tensions in the Far East when Kim Jong-Il looses his nuclear toy I would think.

Franki /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[EXIT63]

Perhaps we should wait for the Europeans to take the lead.

[franki]

The North-Koreans say this is an issue between them and the USA .....

[EXIT63]

Hmmm, What do the Chinese have to say about that?

[foofoo]

no matter what weapons some1 uses on some1 else, they\'ll both get mashed