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 RaisedByWolves
I french kiss Bacon!
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Posted: 5/14/2012 7:13:55 AM
Originally Posted By Gamma762: Originally Posted By Tony-Ri: Originally Posted By Danj: So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? ETA: I assume that Kodak had some involvement in the spy satellite business so Kodak Park was probably already pretty secure. DOE probably provided them with the uranium. Probably so. Research reactors were no big thing back in the day. And frankly the post-9/11 hyperparanoia is a bit ridiculous. Princeton University has a reactor. One of my Tool&Die instructors worked in the Plasma Physics lab and made all sorts of apparatus for it do do specialized tests in the reactor. |
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gaweidert
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Posted: 5/14/2012 7:47:16 AM
Originally Posted By 95thFoot:
Originally Posted By WinstonSmith:
It'll be interesting to see what chemical messes emerge as Kodak fizzles. I've driven through Rochester. I'm always amazed by The Lake That Never Freezes™. Better living through chemistry!  And what lake is that? |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:07:44 AM
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
Kodak may be going under, but apparently they could have started their own nuclear war if they wanted, just six years ago. Down in a basement in Rochester, NY, they had a nuclear reactor loaded with 3.5 pounds of enriched uranium—the same kind they use in atomic warheads.
But why did Kodak had a hidden nuclear reactor loaded with weapons-grade uranium then? And how did they get permission to own it, let alone have it in a basement in the middle of a densely populated city? Nobody really knows. Kodak officials now admit that they never made any public announcement about it. In fact, nobody in the city—officials, police or firemen—or in the state of New York or anywhere else knew about it until it was recently leaked by an ex-employee. Its existence and whereabouts was purposely kept vague and only a few engineers and Federal employees really knew about it. It's extremely strange that Kodak managed to get this. According to Miles Pomper, from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. it's "such an odd situation because private companies just don't have this material." Kodak didn't use it or anything sinister (although the red in those Kodak moments was suspiciously radioactive looking). They used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core. The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. According to the company, no employees were ever in contact with the reactor. Apparently, it was operated by atomic fairies and unicorns. It wasn't until 2006, well after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that it was decided to dismantle it. http://gizmodo.com/5909961/kodak-had-a-secret-weapons+grade-nuclear-reactor-hidden-in-a-basement You don't have these without explicit Department of Energy Approval. Since it was Secret, the Department of Energy owned / operated the Reactor for .Gov purposes they don't want released. |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:18:43 AM
Originally Posted By visualoddity: Originally Posted By Houstons_Problem: Originally Posted By visualoddity: Kodak may be going under, but apparently they could have started their own nuclear war if they wanted, just six years ago. Down in a basement in Rochester, NY, they had a nuclear reactor loaded with 3.5 pounds of enriched uranium—the same kind they use in atomic warheads. But why did Kodak had a hidden nuclear reactor loaded with weapons-grade uranium then? And how did they get permission to own it, let alone have it in a basement in the middle of a densely populated city? Nobody really knows. Kodak officials now admit that they never made any public announcement about it. In fact, nobody in the city—officials, police or firemen—or in the state of New York or anywhere else knew about it until it was recently leaked by an ex-employee. Its existence and whereabouts was purposely kept vague and only a few engineers and Federal employees really knew about it. It's extremely strange that Kodak managed to get this. According to Miles Pomper, from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. it's "such an odd situation because private companies just don't have this material." Kodak didn't use it or anything sinister (although the red in those Kodak moments was suspiciously radioactive looking). They used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core. The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. According to the company, no employees were ever in contact with the reactor. Apparently, it was operated by atomic fairies and unicorns. It wasn't until 2006, well after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that it was decided to dismantle it. http://gizmodo.com/5909961/kodak-had-a-secret-weapons+grade-nuclear-reactor-hidden-in-a-basement That article is ridiculous. Oh? While it may be a reactor, it is not a power reactor, it is more of a nuclear instrument. You didn't get the faeries reference as proving the article was written by an idiot who took no time to understand anything about the device? This article is a lot more informative: http://www.stargazette.com/article/20120513/NEWS01/205130344/For-decades-Kodak-ran-little-known-nuclear-reactor-Rochester-business-park?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE&nclick_check=1 Back in the 80's a lot of work was done to shut down nuclear research reactors at universities all over America. A lot of them had high enriched uranium and it wasn't guarded like you would think. It sounded crazy the way the material wasn't heavily secured even back then. |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:31:37 AM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is idiotic in the extreme. There is no way you could build one in your apartment. You need nuclear material of specific isotopes and purity. This is the main barrier to construction because it requires a huge industrial base to achieve. Beyond that, the critical mass must be of an extremely accurately designed dimension meaning you need equipment designed to allow you to do precision machining without being exposed to the radioactive dust. Fail at any one of these tasks and you get no boom, not even a fizzle. I can guarantee you that whatever materials you have read with regards to constructing a nuclear weapon have had some extremely important details omitted. It's difficult in the extreme to build these things. If it wasn't, every tin pot dictator in the world would have them. Besides, you don't even need an actual reaction to create terror and mayhem, all you need is to build a dirty bomb to scatter radioactive materials over a wide area. |
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tc556guy
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:34:49 AM
Cornell had a small one as well until a few years ago
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FrankSymptoms
Veteran of the Third Battle of Tannhauser Gate.
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:37:35 AM
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By Tony-Ri:
Originally Posted By Danj:
So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? ETA: I assume that Kodak had some involvement in the spy satellite business so Kodak Park was probably already pretty secure. DOE probably provided them with the uranium. Probably so. Research reactors were no big thing back in the day. And frankly the post-9/11 hyperparanoia is a bit ridiculous. I won't name any names, but a certain aircraft contractor I used to work for used to have a reactor on its premises... smack in the middle of town! It's been deactivated and removed now but there's a suspicious pile of dirt in the middle of a large parking lot nearby... I've been emphatically told that it doesn't contain "hot" building materials. |
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Gregory_K
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:44:23 AM
Originally Posted By gaweidert:
Originally Posted By 95thFoot:
Originally Posted By WinstonSmith:
It'll be interesting to see what chemical messes emerge as Kodak fizzles. I've driven through Rochester. I'm always amazed by The Lake That Never Freezes™. Better living through chemistry! And what lake is that? Lake Ontario |
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visualoddity
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:46:17 AM
Originally Posted By Houstons_Problem:
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
Originally Posted By Houstons_Problem:
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
Kodak may be going under, but apparently they could have started their own nuclear war if they wanted, just six years ago. Down in a basement in Rochester, NY, they had a nuclear reactor loaded with 3.5 pounds of enriched uranium—the same kind they use in atomic warheads.
But why did Kodak had a hidden nuclear reactor loaded with weapons-grade uranium then? And how did they get permission to own it, let alone have it in a basement in the middle of a densely populated city? Nobody really knows. Kodak officials now admit that they never made any public announcement about it. In fact, nobody in the city—officials, police or firemen—or in the state of New York or anywhere else knew about it until it was recently leaked by an ex-employee. Its existence and whereabouts was purposely kept vague and only a few engineers and Federal employees really knew about it. It's extremely strange that Kodak managed to get this. According to Miles Pomper, from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. it's "such an odd situation because private companies just don't have this material." Kodak didn't use it or anything sinister (although the red in those Kodak moments was suspiciously radioactive looking). They used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core. The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. According to the company, no employees were ever in contact with the reactor. Apparently, it was operated by atomic fairies and unicorns. It wasn't until 2006, well after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that it was decided to dismantle it. http://gizmodo.com/5909961/kodak-had-a-secret-weapons+grade-nuclear-reactor-hidden-in-a-basement That article is ridiculous. Oh? While it may be a reactor, it is not a power reactor, it is more of a nuclear instrument. You didn't get the faeries reference as proving the article was written by an idiot who took no time to understand anything about the device? This article is a lot more informative: http://www.stargazette.com/article/20120513/NEWS01/205130344/For-decades-Kodak-ran-little-known-nuclear-reactor-Rochester-business-park?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE&nclick_check=1 Back in the 80's a lot of work was done to shut down nuclear research reactors at universities all over America. A lot of them had high enriched uranium and it wasn't guarded like you would think. It sounded crazy the way the material wasn't heavily secured even back then. Great article! Thanks.  |
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bullyforyou
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:46:40 AM
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
*snip* It's extremely strange that Kodak managed to get this. According to Miles Pomper, from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. it's "such an odd situation because private companies just don't have this material." *snip* http://gizmodo.com/5909961/kodak-had-a-secret-weapons+grade-nuclear-reactor-hidden-in-a-basement[/quote] 
he must have been commenting on something else when he made that statement. |
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SV650Squid
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:51:51 AM
Weapons grade or enriched uranium? They're not the same thing. Which one is it?
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Mall-Ninja
........"BANG"........
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:52:06 AM
Screw that, I want to find Aperture Laboratories!
Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:04:10 AM
Originally Posted By Jacketch: Thank God we never had a Kodak moment  Say Cheese!  |
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Flakchak
Nobody Expects the Lego Inquisition!
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:27:33 AM
Originally Posted By Gregory_K: Originally Posted By gaweidert: Originally Posted By 95thFoot: Originally Posted By WinstonSmith: It'll be interesting to see what chemical messes emerge as Kodak fizzles. I've driven through Rochester. I'm always amazed by The Lake That Never Freezes™. Better living through chemistry! And what lake is that? Lake Ontario Lake Ontario does freeze. However, because of it's depth, it usually never "completely" freezes. There have been years where the weather has been so severe that the entire lake has frozen over. As for the chemicals released by Kodak, you can see what the color of the day is when they dump whatever it is they dump over by high falls on the Genesee |
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LuvBUSHmaster
ESTO VIR "Be a Man"
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:33:10 AM
Originally Posted By offctr:
Originally Posted By Danj:
So it's safe to assume they at least had guards armed with handguns? Probably not ––for many years Georgia Techs reactor was wide open to anyone who happened to walk in off the street and if you wanted to you could access the building at any hour of the day or night. I seriously doubt Kodak had a reactor "no-one knew about". For years they had close ties with the Air Force and intelligence agencies ––they developed and supplied cameras and film for planes and satellites. Plus they used to make x-ray film among other things. There were and in some cases still are nuclear facilities around that fly under the radar by sheer anonymity. In their defense, their was a pistol range in the basement of the building, so maybe the employees would be able to run to their cars and get their Ruger Mk 1's and defend the reactor. 
True story, their was/is a gun range in the basement their. Dunno how close it is to the reactor, but its there. Plus, people knew of the reactor, it was sort of an urban legend in the area/community of Kodak. I lived less than a mile from it during the early 2000's and the place is not guarded like it should've been, but who cares, its all done and gone now. |
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TxLewis
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:34:26 AM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By Tony-Ri:
Originally Posted By Danj:
So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? ETA: I assume that Kodak had some involvement in the spy satellite business so Kodak Park was probably already pretty secure. DOE probably provided them with the uranium. Probably so. Research reactors were no big thing back in the day. And frankly the post-9/11 hyperparanoia is a bit ridiculous. Not really paranoia. After the Khintsagov deal we learned that 500g of enriched uranium sells for a million dollars on the black market. Can you guess why the cost is so high? The threat will seem a lot more real after a city gets vaporized. Dirty bombs don't vaporize cities. TXL |
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LightningII
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:41:13 AM
Originally Posted By WinstonSmith:
It'll be interesting to see what chemical messes emerge as Kodak fizzles. It wouldn't be the first time. Kodak had to buy a block of houses ( around 1988-89 ) by the Kodak Park plant because underground chemical tanks were leaking bad stuff into basements next door. I remember driving into the facility and driving past guys in environmental suits walking around. Another time, there was a radio announcement to close your windows and turn off outside air when driving up Mt. Read blvd, as some kind of gas leak was happening. |
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LightningII
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:43:14 AM
Originally Posted By Danj:
So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? ETA: I assume that Kodak had some involvement in the spy satellite business so Kodak Park was probably already pretty secure. I thought all the spy stuff was at the Lincoln Plant. That place was pretty tight. |
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THR-Thumper
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:53:29 AM
Originally Posted By 95BLuv:
Originally Posted By Jacketch:
Thank God we never had a Kodak moment Say Cheese! http://i.imgur.com/qoNST.png I see what you did there. Actually, it's kind of interesting that, so far, none of our well-funded, well-educated zealot enemies have been able to make use of 68 year old technology. |
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California_Kid
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:55:24 AM
We cannot allow a Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier Gap!
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Posted: 5/14/2012 10:43:20 AM
Originally Posted By BWood:
Originally Posted By mattsd:
"weapons grade" huh? I have a very hard time believing they had "weapons grade uranium". my background does include working with weapons grade uranium. It simply is not something that a company (even with a large checkbook) says...I think I need some 90+% enriched uranium U-235 and is able to get it. Of course that was before Ebay and Amazon.
Would love to know the % enrichment that is in that reactor. Would also love to see the building design to determine if it was planned at that location....those two items would be very revealing about the intention. the Atomic Energy Act would have put a pretty hard stop on the acquisition of weapons grade fissile material. That act has been in place since at least '54. Scroll down to page 49 They are licensed for less than or equal to 93.4% U-235. It is a Uranium-Aluminum Alloy clad in Aluminum. It was hardly a "secret", numerous articles have been written about it in magazines and newspapers since it was installed in the mid 70's. |
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Justin-Kase
Six foot tall and bullet resistant
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Posted: 5/14/2012 10:43:45 AM
Originally Posted By Danj: So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? Prior to 1986 yes they could have. Somewhere way back I read about some registered Thompsons that Ford motor company purchased for their security guys to deal with strikes. Perhaps one of the NFA historians recalls it or has a link. |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 11:00:38 AM
Originally Posted By Justin-Kase: I think WAY back there were a few companies that had belt feds for strike security. Originally Posted By Danj: So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? Prior to 1986 yes they could have. Somewhere way back I read about some registered Thompsons that Ford motor company purchased for their security guys to deal with strikes. Perhaps one of the NFA historians recalls it or has a link. |
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GarandM1
"Help, help, I'm being repressed!"
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Posted: 5/14/2012 11:03:01 AM
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74HC
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Posted: 5/14/2012 11:13:54 AM
Originally Posted By Tony-Ri:
Originally Posted By Danj:
So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? ETA: I assume that Kodak had some involvement in the spy satellite business so Kodak Park was probably already pretty secure. DOE probably provided them with the uranium. And probably still owns it. |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 11:14:46 AM
Originally Posted By Gamma762: Originally Posted By Tony-Ri: Originally Posted By Danj: So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? ETA: I assume that Kodak had some involvement in the spy satellite business so Kodak Park was probably already pretty secure. DOE probably provided them with the uranium. Probably so. Research reactors were no big thing back in the day. And frankly the post-9/11 hyperparanoia is a bit ridiculous. Many universities had research reactors. I assume some still do. Not surprising that a company with a major R&D unit had one. |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 11:17:51 AM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR: Originally Posted By Gamma762: Originally Posted By SKSLVR: And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Which is not made in little research reactors. |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 11:33:20 AM
You conspiracy guys would crap your pants if you knew *HALF* of what lurked in the bowels of modern universities...
And, from my limited experience, hajji and the Chinese grad students have responsibility for most of it... |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 11:49:06 AM
Originally Posted By chadwimc: Biowarfare capable stuff? You conspiracy guys would crap your pants if you knew *HALF* of what lurked in the bowels of modern universities... And, from my limited experience, hajji and the Chinese grad students have responsibility for most of it... |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 12:39:30 PM
[Last Edit: 5/14/2012 12:40:52 PM by SKSLVR]
Originally Posted By ceverett:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Which is not made in little research reactors. ...Okay? I'm not even talking about reactors. Originally Posted By Bones45:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is idiotic in the extreme. There is no way you could build one in your apartment. You need nuclear material of specific isotopes and purity. This is the main barrier to construction because it requires a huge industrial base to achieve. Beyond that, the critical mass must be of an extremely accurately designed dimension meaning you need equipment designed to allow you to do precision machining without being exposed to the radioactive dust. Fail at any one of these tasks and you get no boom, not even a fizzle. I can guarantee you that whatever materials you have read with regards to constructing a nuclear weapon have had some extremely important details omitted. It's difficult in the extreme to build these things. If it wasn't, every tin pot dictator in the world would have them. Besides, you don't even need an actual reaction to create terror and mayhem, all you need is to build a dirty bomb to scatter radioactive materials over a wide area. Thanks for rehashing a bunch of things that I already know and calling me idiotic for no particular reason. Oh my, equipment designed to do precision machining... where ever would we find such a thing? Harbor freight. Have you even seen the place that the Russians use to machine their fuel for bombs and reactors? It looks worse than a sweat shop and is filled with ancient manual lathes and mills. What are you going to do about the dust? How about a fucking 3 dollar N95 mask? Who would care if they got cancer from it? These guys fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up for fun. Machine the material and the device at a separate location and bring it in in pieces. Once again, it's not "difficult in the extreme" to build a nuclear weapon, the problem is sourcing the material, just like the was the problem during the Manhattan project (that material was obtained from a University, btw). Radical Muslims in the Arab world have an extremely large pool of very bright engineers, physicists, and others to utilize to achieve its goals. The CIA has acknowledged that building a nuclear weapon isn't difficult and a test was performed that verified their fears where some graduate students built an entire full scale nuclear weapon out of commercially available parts that would function had it only had the HEU. Why do you think we're shitting ourselves about Iran building a nuclear enrichment facility? Because the material is the only thing that's hard to obtain in order to make a nuclear bomb. |
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cosmos556
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Posted: 5/14/2012 12:43:05 PM
Originally Posted By 95thFoot:
Originally Posted By WinstonSmith:
It'll be interesting to see what chemical messes emerge as Kodak fizzles. I've driven through Rochester. I'm always amazed by The Lake That Never Freezes™. Better living through chemistry!  |
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joemama74
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Team Member
Joined: Aug 2008 TX, USA
Posts: 7481 Feedback: 0% (0) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/14/2012 12:57:16 PM
So how would you go about getting it out of the reactor?
Unscrew a couple of drywall screws, grab it with a pair of pliers and put it in your lunchbox? |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 1:27:13 PM
Kodak worked with Eggerton to develop high speed photography of nuclear bomb blasts. Kodak also developed x-ray film for metallographic inspection. I could see where they needed a high neutron radiation source for part of that development. I do not think this is anything sinnester. There were many research reactors throughout the world during the 20th century.
The USDOE is currently working to corral and protect any and all bomb grade stuff throughout the world. The project gained public notice after the collapse of the USSR and further during DOE Sec O'Leary and Slick Willie's reign. |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 1:54:20 PM
NCSU still has one.
Originally Posted By ceverett:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By Tony-Ri:
Originally Posted By Danj:
So would Kodak have been able to acquire NFA guns for the security of the place? ETA: I assume that Kodak had some involvement in the spy satellite business so Kodak Park was probably already pretty secure. DOE probably provided them with the uranium. Probably so. Research reactors were no big thing back in the day. And frankly the post-9/11 hyperparanoia is a bit ridiculous. Many universities had research reactors. I assume some still do. Not surprising that a company with a major R&D unit had one. |
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jrollins
Crazy Trucker Dude
Team Member
Joined: Feb 2003 OR, USA
Posts: 3745 Feedback: 100% (4) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/14/2012 2:29:19 PM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR: Originally Posted By ceverett: ...Okay? I'm not even talking about reactors.Which is not made in little research reactors. Problem #1! So WTF is the purpose of these insane rants in a thread about small industrial/research reactors then? <snip> Thanks for rehashing a bunch of things that I already know and calling me idiotic for no particular reason. Oh my, equipment designed to do precision machining... where ever would we find such a thing? Harbor freight. Have you even seen the place that the Russians use to machine their fuel for bombs and reactors? It looks worse than a sweat shop and is filled with ancient manual lathes and mills. What are you going to do about the dust? How about a fucking 3 dollar N95 mask? Who would care if they got cancer from it? These guys fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up for fun. Machine the material and the device at a separate location and bring it in in pieces.
Keep it coming man, this shit is pure fucking gold! Those "ancient manual lathes and mills", even when worn out, are capable of so much more than a HF machine that has been rebuilt with high end parts it's not even funny to compare them.
Or did you think they had CNC mills during the Manhattan Project?
And no, an N95 is NOT sufficient, and the suicide hadjis aren't the ones that are going to be doing the manufacturing anyway.
You may be in Texas, but it's clear that you are not a nuclear physicist at Pantex  |
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g3shooter
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Joined: Aug 2005 VA, USA
Posts: 18055 Feedback: 0% (0) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/14/2012 2:31:19 PM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Read "The Atomic Bazaar"...it is a good bit more complicated than you make it seem. |
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Merlin
Member
Team Member
Joined: Feb 2001 AL, USA
Posts: 10816 Feedback: 100% (1) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/14/2012 4:09:51 PM
Originally Posted By Tony-Ri:
Everyone and their brother had a research reactor in their basement back in the 60's and 70's. Boeing in Seattle had a research reactor back in the '80's, the last time I saw it. It was located on the west side of the Duwamish across from the old Plant II site and south of the 14th street bridge. From the street, it just looked like an empty parking lot with a big hump in it. Have no clue if it's still there. |
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swede1986
The swedish version of Mr. T
Team Member
Joined: Sep 2007  SWE
Posts: 14623 Feedback: 0% (0) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/14/2012 5:46:05 PM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is weapons-grade stupid. |
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California_Kid
Team Member, Redneck, Hippie
Team Member
Joined: Jan 2001 CA, USA
Posts: 31237 Feedback: 0% (0) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/14/2012 6:13:05 PM
[Last Edit: 5/15/2012 9:09:34 AM by California_Kid]
Originally Posted By CCW: Kodak worked with Eggerton to develop high speed photography of nuclear bomb blasts. Kodak also developed x-ray film for metallographic inspection. I could see where they needed a high neutron radiation source for part of that development. I do not think this is anything sinnester. There were many research reactors throughout the world during the 20th century. The USDOE is currently working to corral and protect any and all bomb grade stuff throughout the world. The project gained public notice after the collapse of the USSR and further during DOE Sec O'Leary and Slick Willie's reign. Edgerton's Rapatronic photos are IMO some of the most fascinating images ever recorded.   |
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Posted: 5/14/2012 8:54:01 PM
I would love to know the other stuff Kodak has done in those massive buildings.
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Posted: 5/14/2012 9:22:30 PM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By ceverett:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Which is not made in little research reactors. ...Okay? I'm not even talking about reactors. Originally Posted By Bones45:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is idiotic in the extreme. There is no way you could build one in your apartment. You need nuclear material of specific isotopes and purity. This is the main barrier to construction because it requires a huge industrial base to achieve. Beyond that, the critical mass must be of an extremely accurately designed dimension meaning you need equipment designed to allow you to do precision machining without being exposed to the radioactive dust. Fail at any one of these tasks and you get no boom, not even a fizzle. I can guarantee you that whatever materials you have read with regards to constructing a nuclear weapon have had some extremely important details omitted. It's difficult in the extreme to build these things. If it wasn't, every tin pot dictator in the world would have them. Besides, you don't even need an actual reaction to create terror and mayhem, all you need is to build a dirty bomb to scatter radioactive materials over a wide area. Thanks for rehashing a bunch of things that I already know and calling me idiotic for no particular reason. Oh my, equipment designed to do precision machining... where ever would we find such a thing? Harbor freight. Have you even seen the place that the Russians use to machine their fuel for bombs and reactors? It looks worse than a sweat shop and is filled with ancient manual lathes and mills. What are you going to do about the dust? How about a fucking 3 dollar N95 mask? Who would care if they got cancer from it? These guys fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up for fun. Machine the material and the device at a separate location and bring it in in pieces. Once again, it's not "difficult in the extreme" to build a nuclear weapon, the problem is sourcing the material, just like the was the problem during the Manhattan project (that material was obtained from a University, btw). Radical Muslims in the Arab world have an extremely large pool of very bright engineers, physicists, and others to utilize to achieve its goals. The CIA has acknowledged that building a nuclear weapon isn't difficult and a test was performed that verified their fears where some graduate students built an entire full scale nuclear weapon out of commercially available parts that would function had it only had the HEU. Why do you think we're shitting ourselves about Iran building a nuclear enrichment facility? Because the material is the only thing that's hard to obtain in order to make a nuclear bomb. I didn't call YOU idiotic but you're giving me second thoughts. Now that you're agreeing with my point about fissionable nuclear material being incredibly difficult to manufacture, can we also agree that harbor freight does not sell equipment anywhere near precise enough to build a bomb? Can you make a kryton switch on one? Not to mention that anyone with machining skills good enough to do the work would be too valuable to waste by not providing adequate protective equipment? N95 will not suffice. Sure the Iranians can make a bomb. So can the norks but it's rather telling that the norks only attempt thus far was a fizzle, not a boom. Oh, and their rocket blew up, too. Science is hard, Yo. |
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swede1986
The swedish version of Mr. T
Team Member
Joined: Sep 2007 SWE
Posts: 14627 Feedback: 0% (0) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/15/2012 9:01:54 AM
Originally Posted By Bones45:
Sure the Iranians can make a bomb. So can the norks but it's rather telling that the norks only attempt thus far was a fizzle, not a boom. Oh, and their rocket blew up, too. Science is hard, Yo. The second one worked. |
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tojan19
Member
Team Member
Joined: Mar 2006 VA, USA
Posts: 3366 Feedback: 100% (81) Link To This Post |
Posted: 5/15/2012 9:21:47 AM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By ceverett:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Which is not made in little research reactors. ...Okay? I'm not even talking about reactors. Originally Posted By Bones45:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is idiotic in the extreme. There is no way you could build one in your apartment. You need nuclear material of specific isotopes and purity. This is the main barrier to construction because it requires a huge industrial base to achieve. Beyond that, the critical mass must be of an extremely accurately designed dimension meaning you need equipment designed to allow you to do precision machining without being exposed to the radioactive dust. Fail at any one of these tasks and you get no boom, not even a fizzle. I can guarantee you that whatever materials you have read with regards to constructing a nuclear weapon have had some extremely important details omitted. It's difficult in the extreme to build these things. If it wasn't, every tin pot dictator in the world would have them. Besides, you don't even need an actual reaction to create terror and mayhem, all you need is to build a dirty bomb to scatter radioactive materials over a wide area. Thanks for rehashing a bunch of things that I already know and calling me idiotic for no particular reason. Oh my, equipment designed to do precision machining... where ever would we find such a thing? Harbor freight. Have you even seen the place that the Russians use to machine their fuel for bombs and reactors? It looks worse than a sweat shop and is filled with ancient manual lathes and mills. What are you going to do about the dust? How about a fucking 3 dollar N95 mask? Who would care if they got cancer from it? These guys fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up for fun. Machine the material and the device at a separate location and bring it in in pieces. Once again, it's not "difficult in the extreme" to build a nuclear weapon, the problem is sourcing the material, just like the was the problem during the Manhattan project (that material was obtained from a University, btw). Radical Muslims in the Arab world have an extremely large pool of very bright engineers, physicists, and others to utilize to achieve its goals. The CIA has acknowledged that building a nuclear weapon isn't difficult and a test was performed that verified their fears where some graduate students built an entire full scale nuclear weapon out of commercially available parts that would function had it only had the HEU. Why do you think we're shitting ourselves about Iran building a nuclear enrichment facility? Because the material is the only thing that's hard to obtain in order to make a nuclear bomb. Absolutely laughable. You obviously have spent enough time reading Wikipedia to make one in your own garage! You think it's as simple as sending one slug into another chuck of material? Exactly what are the sizes of the individual pieces? Shape? How fast do they need to come together? Opps, to fast, it broke and didn't do shit. How are you going to control neutron leakage during the reaction? how about making sure the slug doesn't start a low level fission reaction when just sitting there assembled? What about a neutron source to kick of the reaction? Even if you could figure half of this stuff out, a crude gun type is going to be huge and heavy. The brightest minds in the world took a year designing Fat man, conducting hundreds of experiments. You think all that info is at the library or something? I'll tell you what, if its that easy, why don't you show us the proof for the required critical mass for a bare spherical assembly of 100% U235. That isn't to hard right? |
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Posted: 5/15/2012 9:25:42 AM
Originally Posted By Bones45:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By ceverett:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Which is not made in little research reactors. ...Okay? I'm not even talking about reactors. Originally Posted By Bones45:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is idiotic in the extreme. There is no way you could build one in your apartment. You need nuclear material of specific isotopes and purity. This is the main barrier to construction because it requires a huge industrial base to achieve. Beyond that, the critical mass must be of an extremely accurately designed dimension meaning you need equipment designed to allow you to do precision machining without being exposed to the radioactive dust. Fail at any one of these tasks and you get no boom, not even a fizzle. I can guarantee you that whatever materials you have read with regards to constructing a nuclear weapon have had some extremely important details omitted. It's difficult in the extreme to build these things. If it wasn't, every tin pot dictator in the world would have them. Besides, you don't even need an actual reaction to create terror and mayhem, all you need is to build a dirty bomb to scatter radioactive materials over a wide area. Thanks for rehashing a bunch of things that I already know and calling me idiotic for no particular reason. Oh my, equipment designed to do precision machining... where ever would we find such a thing? Harbor freight. Have you even seen the place that the Russians use to machine their fuel for bombs and reactors? It looks worse than a sweat shop and is filled with ancient manual lathes and mills. What are you going to do about the dust? How about a fucking 3 dollar N95 mask? Who would care if they got cancer from it? These guys fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up for fun. Machine the material and the device at a separate location and bring it in in pieces. Once again, it's not "difficult in the extreme" to build a nuclear weapon, the problem is sourcing the material, just like the was the problem during the Manhattan project (that material was obtained from a University, btw). Radical Muslims in the Arab world have an extremely large pool of very bright engineers, physicists, and others to utilize to achieve its goals. The CIA has acknowledged that building a nuclear weapon isn't difficult and a test was performed that verified their fears where some graduate students built an entire full scale nuclear weapon out of commercially available parts that would function had it only had the HEU. Why do you think we're shitting ourselves about Iran building a nuclear enrichment facility? Because the material is the only thing that's hard to obtain in order to make a nuclear bomb. I didn't call YOU idiotic but you're giving me second thoughts. Now that you're agreeing with my point about fissionable nuclear material being incredibly difficult to manufacture, can we also agree that harbor freight does not sell equipment anywhere near precise enough to build a bomb? Can you make a kryton switch on one? Not to mention that anyone with machining skills good enough to do the work would be too valuable to waste by not providing adequate protective equipment? N95 will not suffice. Sure the Iranians can make a bomb. So can the norks but it's rather telling that the norks only attempt thus far was a fizzle, not a boom. Oh, and their rocket blew up, too. Science is hard, Yo. Man, you don't know shit about machining or machines. I worked for a tier 1 (industry term, not arfcom bullshit) shop making parts that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with over 500 labor hours into each for Schlumberger's offshore drilling projects out of difficult to work with materials such as Nitronic-60 and Inconel. I watched guys with less than two years experience get to the point of being able to fabricate anything needed with only minor guidance and supervision. Machining isn't some mystical power. There's a number for everything; tool speeds, feed speeds, tool type; and if you follow everything correctly and know how to read and trig out your blueprint everything will work out correctly. You're also wrong if you think that only some zillion dollar super machine can make good parts. Cost invested into machines is invested into long term durability and repeatability. You can put me on pretty much any lathe or mill that even functions and I can make you whatever you want within +-.001". Don't think that everything on the planet is impossible just because you don't know how to do it. |
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Posted: 5/15/2012 9:30:07 AM
There is a small research reactor at one of my client sites. Not even a small deal.
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Posted: 5/15/2012 9:30:41 AM
Originally Posted By tojan19:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By ceverett:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Which is not made in little research reactors. ...Okay? I'm not even talking about reactors. Originally Posted By Bones45:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By Gamma762:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is idiotic in the extreme. There is no way you could build one in your apartment. You need nuclear material of specific isotopes and purity. This is the main barrier to construction because it requires a huge industrial base to achieve. Beyond that, the critical mass must be of an extremely accurately designed dimension meaning you need equipment designed to allow you to do precision machining without being exposed to the radioactive dust. Fail at any one of these tasks and you get no boom, not even a fizzle. I can guarantee you that whatever materials you have read with regards to constructing a nuclear weapon have had some extremely important details omitted. It's difficult in the extreme to build these things. If it wasn't, every tin pot dictator in the world would have them. Besides, you don't even need an actual reaction to create terror and mayhem, all you need is to build a dirty bomb to scatter radioactive materials over a wide area. Thanks for rehashing a bunch of things that I already know and calling me idiotic for no particular reason. Oh my, equipment designed to do precision machining... where ever would we find such a thing? Harbor freight. Have you even seen the place that the Russians use to machine their fuel for bombs and reactors? It looks worse than a sweat shop and is filled with ancient manual lathes and mills. What are you going to do about the dust? How about a fucking 3 dollar N95 mask? Who would care if they got cancer from it? These guys fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up for fun. Machine the material and the device at a separate location and bring it in in pieces. Once again, it's not "difficult in the extreme" to build a nuclear weapon, the problem is sourcing the material, just like the was the problem during the Manhattan project (that material was obtained from a University, btw). Radical Muslims in the Arab world have an extremely large pool of very bright engineers, physicists, and others to utilize to achieve its goals. The CIA has acknowledged that building a nuclear weapon isn't difficult and a test was performed that verified their fears where some graduate students built an entire full scale nuclear weapon out of commercially available parts that would function had it only had the HEU. Why do you think we're shitting ourselves about Iran building a nuclear enrichment facility? Because the material is the only thing that's hard to obtain in order to make a nuclear bomb. blah blah blah It wouldn't be as hard if I had a MS in nuclear science/engineering like thousands upon thousands of people in the middle east do. It wasn't too tough for A. Q. Khan to provide a bunch of shitrakers like the Pakistanis with nuclear weapons. |
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tojan19
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Posted: 5/15/2012 9:31:50 AM
Originally Posted By Houstons_Problem:
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
Originally Posted By Houstons_Problem:
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
Kodak may be going under, but apparently they could have started their own nuclear war if they wanted, just six years ago. Down in a basement in Rochester, NY, they had a nuclear reactor loaded with 3.5 pounds of enriched uranium—the same kind they use in atomic warheads.
But why did Kodak had a hidden nuclear reactor loaded with weapons-grade uranium then? And how did they get permission to own it, let alone have it in a basement in the middle of a densely populated city? Nobody really knows. Kodak officials now admit that they never made any public announcement about it. In fact, nobody in the city—officials, police or firemen—or in the state of New York or anywhere else knew about it until it was recently leaked by an ex-employee. Its existence and whereabouts was purposely kept vague and only a few engineers and Federal employees really knew about it. It's extremely strange that Kodak managed to get this. According to Miles Pomper, from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. it's "such an odd situation because private companies just don't have this material." Kodak didn't use it or anything sinister (although the red in those Kodak moments was suspiciously radioactive looking). They used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core. The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. According to the company, no employees were ever in contact with the reactor. Apparently, it was operated by atomic fairies and unicorns. It wasn't until 2006, well after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that it was decided to dismantle it. http://gizmodo.com/5909961/kodak-had-a-secret-weapons+grade-nuclear-reactor-hidden-in-a-basement That article is ridiculous. Oh? While it may be a reactor, it is not a power reactor, it is more of a nuclear instrument. You didn't get the faeries reference as proving the article was written by an idiot who took no time to understand anything about the device? This article is a lot more informative: http://www.stargazette.com/article/20120513/NEWS01/205130344/For-decades-Kodak-ran-little-known-nuclear-reactor-Rochester-business-park?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE&nclick_check=1 Back in the 80's a lot of work was done to shut down nuclear research reactors at universities all over America. A lot of them had high enriched uranium and it wasn't guarded like you would think. It sounded crazy the way the material wasn't heavily secured even back then. Guarding it isn't really to big of a problem. Prior to the paranoia induced by 9/11 it was recognized that it would take some extreme effort that would be noticed to steal used fuel rods. They were considered to be self protecting. With out 10 tons of shielding and a way to keep it shielded the entire time you are working with it, it would kill you mighty quickly. Even some of the small research reactor low enriched fuel would give you a lethal dose in less than a minute. The security alarm and the rad alarms going off would be notice enough that some moron is likely lying dead next to the reactor. |
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Posted: 5/15/2012 9:35:48 AM
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
Originally Posted By Houstons_Problem:
Oh?That article is ridiculous. Yep, it is. Nuclear fear mongering, plain and simple. Terribly written article. But what the hell, it's Gizmodo - what did you expect? If people knew how many nuclear sources were used in an industrial setting, they would shit their pants. I am not surprised at all by this. Oh, and Kodak's campus in Rochester has it's own private fire dept.
Oh, and the Californium-252 part of it... Wiki says it has a half-life of 2.64 years, and this line was pretty neat... The Atomic Energy Commission sold californium-252 to industrial and academic customers in the early 1970s for $10 per microgram[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium#cite_note-osti-26][23][/url] and an average of 150 mg of californium-252 were shipped each year from 1970 to 1990
eta Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Not really paranoia. After the Khintsagov deal we learned that 500g of enriched uranium sells for a million dollars on the black market. Can you guess why the cost is so high? The threat will seem a lot more real after a city gets vaporized. So I guess the real question is - will terrorists get access to high-quality nuclear engineers? North Korea? Iran? One can't even build a rocket, and I don't know if the early tests were ever confirmed to be successful - and the other is pretty doubtful as well. If you're talking a Hiroshima type weapon(which aside from obtaining the needed amount of enriched material, would be relatively simple for anyone with a brain to construct), you're gonna need a lot more than 500g of uranium. And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility in the US are going to be eating crow one day. They don't need a rocket. 400 tons of marijuana were seized at the Arizona-Mexico border in 2006 alone IN ONE STATE. That's probably less than 1/20th of what made it into this country from that single border. If I wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb within the country I'd just call the cartel and have it smuggled like everything else is smuggled. If you think all they have is 500g of uranium when countries like North Korea who are FAR less financed than the entire multinational cooperative of radical Islam have enough to build a kiloton bomb then you need to wake up. I could be completely off base here, because I'm not a nuclear expert, but wouldn't any radioactive material being smuggled int the US be A LOT harder than drugs? Considering it gives off a radioactive signal that can be easily detected? Unlike drugs. Then again, maybe that signal is easily concealed? I don't know, but the fact that a nuclear bomb hasn't been detonated in the US already tells me that it isn't that easy to get away with. Not that it couldn't happen, I just have my doubts that you can compare that to being as easy as smuggling drugs into the country. |
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Posted: 5/15/2012 9:38:01 AM
Originally Posted By LvFreeRDie:
Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Originally Posted By jrollins:
Originally Posted By visualoddity:
Originally Posted By Houstons_Problem:
Oh?That article is ridiculous. Yep, it is. Nuclear fear mongering, plain and simple. Terribly written article. But what the hell, it's Gizmodo - what did you expect? If people knew how many nuclear sources were used in an industrial setting, they would shit their pants. I am not surprised at all by this. Oh, and Kodak's campus in Rochester has it's own private fire dept.
Oh, and the Californium-252 part of it... Wiki says it has a half-life of 2.64 years, and this line was pretty neat... The Atomic Energy Commission sold californium-252 to industrial and academic customers in the early 1970s for $10 per microgram[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium#cite_note-osti-26][23][/url] and an average of 150 mg of californium-252 were shipped each year from 1970 to 1990
eta Originally Posted By SKSLVR:
Not really paranoia. After the Khintsagov deal we learned that 500g of enriched uranium sells for a million dollars on the black market. Can you guess why the cost is so high? The threat will seem a lot more real after a city gets vaporized. So I guess the real question is - will terrorists get access to high-quality nuclear engineers? North Korea? Iran? One can't even build a rocket, and I don't know if the early tests were ever confirmed to be successful - and the other is pretty doubtful as well. If you're talking a Hiroshima type weapon(which aside from obtaining the needed amount of enriched material, would be relatively simple for anyone with a brain to construct), you're gonna need a lot more than 500g of uranium. And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility in the US are going to be eating crow one day. They don't need a rocket. 400 tons of marijuana were seized at the Arizona-Mexico border in 2006 alone IN ONE STATE. That's probably less than 1/20th of what made it into this country from that single border. If I wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb within the country I'd just call the cartel and have it smuggled like everything else is smuggled. If you think all they have is 500g of uranium when countries like North Korea who are FAR less financed than the entire multinational cooperative of radical Islam have enough to build a kiloton bomb then you need to wake up. I could be completely off base here, because I'm not a nuclear expert, but wouldn't any radioactive material being smuggled int the US be A LOT harder than drugs? Considering it gives off a radioactive signal that can be easily detected? Unlike drugs. Then again, maybe that signal is easily concealed? I don't know, but the fact that a nuclear bomb hasn't been detonated in the US already tells me that it isn't that easy to get away with. Not that it couldn't happen, I just have my doubts that you can compare that to being as easy as smuggling drugs into the country. You have to be within at least a couple feet of contained nuclear material to set off detection devices. You can also store it in a thick lead pipe to conceal most of the reading. |
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Posted: 5/17/2012 10:04:11 PM
Originally Posted By tojan19: Originally Posted By SKSLVR: Originally Posted By ceverett: Originally Posted By SKSLVR: Originally Posted By Gamma762: Originally Posted By SKSLVR: And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Which is not made in little research reactors. ...Okay? I'm not even talking about reactors. Originally Posted By Bones45: Originally Posted By SKSLVR: Originally Posted By jrollins: Originally Posted By SKSLVR: Originally Posted By Gamma762: Originally Posted By SKSLVR: And they've been working gathering the material in Russia since the 1990s. You guys that think a nuclear attack is beyond the realm of possibility Good grief. Do people not realize that the act of removing partially spent fuel from a "used" reactor in some kind of snatch and run theft would be lethal in seconds? The fuel would be utterly useless for any kind of weapon unless you had some way to transport it and then reprocess it to an extremely high purity, as well as reduce it to pure metal and.... well I could go on. It'd be easier to start from ore. I'm not talking about partially spent fuel, I'm talking about weapons grade enriched uranium that was obtained and sold over the black market. Meh. As I was trying to say before, I don't see a terrorist group, or even a terrorist-supporting state, being able to create a reliable and efficient weapon any time soon. Now, the possibility of a missing Soviet warhead coming into their hands is a bit worrisome. I don't know that one of those could be guaranteed to go off as designed, nukes do need upkeep - but it would be a complex enough design and possibly small enough to be a legitimate concern for being smuggled into the country. OTOH, there are always shipping containers out of China for larger devices - but you'd have to shield them pretty well to avoid detection, or just get lucky. Sadly, inbound containers are not scrutinized nearly well enough through ANY US border entry. Either way, the fact that there are industrial, medical, and research reactors and sources scattered all over the country has absolutely NOTHING to do with the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists - nor is anyone going to do to well if they were to try and steal one(they don't exactly fit in a backpack). You should study how nuclear weapons actually work and see how easily they are made. Actual construction of a nuclear device is less complicated than designing a semi-automatic rifle, because all a simple nuclear device is is a single-shot rifle that fires a bullet made of fissile material. Now that the research has been done the only hard part is obtaining the material. I wouldn't smuggle the entire device here, I'd rent an apartment and bring it in piece by piece as I built it. *edit* You're talking about efficiency as if it matters in this context. A fusion or fission reaction in a major city is a big, big problem, it doesn't matter how efficient or inefficient it is after fusion is achieved. Your post is idiotic in the extreme. There is no way you could build one in your apartment. You need nuclear material of specific isotopes and purity. This is the main barrier to construction because it requires a huge industrial base to achieve. Beyond that, the critical mass must be of an extremely accurately designed dimension meaning you need equipment designed to allow you to do precision machining without being exposed to the radioactive dust. Fail at any one of these tasks and you get no boom, not even a fizzle. I can guarantee you that whatever materials you have read with regards to constructing a nuclear weapon have had some extremely important details omitted. It's difficult in the extreme to build these things. If it wasn't, every tin pot dictator in the world would have them. Besides, you don't even need an actual reaction to create terror and mayhem, all you need is to build a dirty bomb to scatter radioactive materials over a wide area. Thanks for rehashing a bunch of things that I already know and calling me idiotic for no particular reason. Oh my, equipment designed to do precision machining... where ever would we find such a thing? Harbor freight. Have you even seen the place that the Russians use to machine their fuel for bombs and reactors? It looks worse than a sweat shop and is filled with ancient manual lathes and mills. What are you going to do about the dust? How about a fucking 3 dollar N95 mask? Who would care if they got cancer from it? These guys fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up for fun. Machine the material and the device at a separate location and bring it in in pieces. Once again, it's not "difficult in the extreme" to build a nuclear weapon, the problem is sourcing the material, just like the was the problem during the Manhattan project (that material was obtained from a University, btw). Radical Muslims in the Arab world have an extremely large pool of very bright engineers, physicists, and others to utilize to achieve its goals. The CIA has acknowledged that building a nuclear weapon isn't difficult and a test was performed that verified their fears where some graduate students built an entire full scale nuclear weapon out of commercially available parts that would function had it only had the HEU. Why do you think we're shitting ourselves about Iran building a nuclear enrichment facility? Because the material is the only thing that's hard to obtain in order to make a nuclear bomb. Absolutely laughable. You obviously have spent enough time reading Wikipedia to make one in your own garage! You think it's as simple as sending one slug into another chuck of material? Exactly what are the sizes of the individual pieces? Shape? How fast do they need to come together? Opps, to fast, it broke and didn't do shit. How are you going to control neutron leakage during the reaction? how about making sure the slug doesn't start a low level fission reaction when just sitting there assembled? What about a neutron source to kick of the reaction? Even if you could figure half of this stuff out, a crude gun type is going to be huge and heavy. The brightest minds in the world took a year designing Fat man, conducting hundreds of experiments. You think all that info is at the library or something? I'll tell you what, if its that easy, why don't you show us the proof for the required critical mass for a bare spherical assembly of 100% U235. That isn't to hard right? Fat man was the plutonium weapon. Little Boy was the uranium weapon. |
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