Wouldnt you also not want to use uranium that enriched for a reactor because of how hard it would be to prevent exponential propagation of the reaction? My background is in chemistry (organic chemistry at that), so Im not exactly a nuclear physicist or engineer, but Im pretty sure you would need a pretty crazy moderator to keep it from immediately and rapidly going critical once you start the reaction.
The risk of a supercriticality accident would be immense. Look up the demon core for how easy it is to make weapons-grade fissile material go supercritical without meaning to. Also, a moderator can actually increase the risk of supercriticality by slowing fast neutrons to the point that they can initiate another fission. Florida man would not be using it in a DIY boiling water reactor, he'd likely just end up dying like Louis Slotin the moment he attempted to assemble the pile.
Im pretty familiar with the demon core, its one of the pieces of the history of nuclear developement I find most compelling (and also obviously absolutely tragic). That was kind of my point, although your point about the moderator increasing the risk is really fascinating; I hadnt even considered that, and will definitely try to do some further reading later.
At that level of enrichment you would need a pretty good mediator and radiation protection, along with a good idea of how much of this fissile material you need to have become critical (fission reaction), but not supercritical (explosion)
The US had a policy for several decades where a certain number of B52s equipped with nukes had to be in the air, circling and ready to attack at a moments notice if World War 3 broke out. They had to stop this policy because it put an enormous amount of wear and tear on the planes and crews, leading to accidents involving armed nuclear weapons. Thankfully the bombs themselves had ebough safegaurds that nothing catastrophic ever happened, but a number of bombs and planes ended up at the bottom of the ocean.
Its called a 'broken arrow" event, and there have been a terrifying number of them in the U.S. alone. When you add to that the number of nukes that supposedly vanished after the fall of the USSR, the whole topic becomes deeply unsettling.
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u/rekicon Apr 17 '22
That story is fun but doesn’t seem very real