The danger and low economic convenience of heating water with nuclear
energy to produce electricity is obvious: no one would use an atomicbomb to heat a pot of pasta. But beyond these elementary considerations,
there is a close link between civil nuclear power and military nuclear
power. ---- To cause a fission reaction that will produce energy,
uranium 235 is used - "the only fissile nucleus that exists in its
natural state". When uranium is extracted, however, it is only composed
of 0.7% uranium 235. The rest, that is, 99.3% of the material, is
uranium 238. Thus, to produce energy, it is necessary to "enrich
uranium", that is, increase the concentration of uranium 235. For this,
the main technique used is the centrifuge.
To operate, a nuclear power plant must use low-enriched uranium (EnU235
containers above 0.71% and strictly below 20%). This requires
significant use of centrifuges, but is nothing compared to the level of
uranium 235 needed to operate a nuclear research reactor. In this case,
highly enriched uranium is used, that is, with a U 235 content greater
than or equal to 20%. Once 20% is reached, 90% can be achieved very quickly.
This is how the 2018 World Nuclear Industry Situation Report put it:
"Nuclear-weapon states remain the main supporters of nuclear energy
programs. WNISR2018 offers a first look at whether military interests
serve as one of the factors driving the extension of the life of
existing facilities and new construction in some countries. Why is
nuclear power proving surprisingly resilient in particular parts of the
world to dramatically changing global energy market conditions and
electricity supply structures? In a context of the decline of the global
nuclear industry as a whole, life extension plans and new nuclear builds
remain major areas of investment in specific countries. Strong links to
projects such as Hinkley Point C in the UK persist, despite five-fold
increases in costs from original estimates, a number of unresolved
technical difficulties and demands for increasing financial concessions
and government guarantees.
Evidence is beginning to emerge in a number of major nuclear power
states of significant further industrial interdependencies in the
capabilities to support naval nuclear propulsion programmes. With the
decline of civil nuclear power in the United States, a number of recent
reports have highlighted the importance for the "nuclear navy" of a
continuing national nuclear engineering base supported by policies to
support the civil nuclear sector. The UK Nuclear Industry Council's
"Nuclear Sector Deal" states that "the sector is committed to increasing
opportunities for transferability between civil and defence industries
and to increasing mobility generally to ensure resources are placed in
the places they are needed" and that 18% of the projected skills gaps
can be filled by "transferability and mobility". In several countries,
military factors may play a significant role in the persistence of what
is otherwise increasingly recognised as the growing obsolescence of
nuclear power as a low-carbon electricity generation technology".
Thus, a civilian power site can be rapidly transformed into a military
installation under a false name.
It is in this context that the news that ENI and UKAEA (United Kingdom
Atomic Energy Authority), the United Kingdom authority responsible for
atomic energy, have signed a collaboration agreement to conduct research
and development activities in the field of fusion energy, which first of
all starts the construction of the largest and most advanced plant in
the world for the management of the tritium cycle, a key fuel in the
fusion process, as stated in the press release issued by the Italian
multinational energy company. The press release then dwells on the
benefits that the production of tritium will bring to the generation of
fuel in fusion power plants, still to come.
Much more current, according to the "World Nuclear Industry Status
Report 2024", is the production of tritium for military uses, which
currently represents the main contribution of civil reactors to war
production. Modern thermonuclear weapons use tritium, a radioactive
isotope of hydrogen, to "boost" the nuclear yield of the explosive
fission, or "primary," well that generates the intense energy to ignite
the "secondary" fusion. The radioactive half-life of tritium is 12.3
years, and each year a given amount of tritium will decrease by 5.5%.
Therefore, to maintain a given stockpile of tritium for weapons, the
isotope must be continually produced to replace material lost to
radioactive decay. Historically, this has been done by the United
States, France, and other nuclear weapons states by irradiating lithium
targets in dedicated military reactors and chemically processing the
targets to extract the tritium.
In the United States, tritium was produced in government-owned reactors
at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina until the last operating
reactor was shut down in 1988 for safety reasons. Since 2003, the United
States has been producing tritium for weapons using neutrons generated
by civilian nuclear power plants, notably the two Watts Bar reactors in
Tennessee.
In March 2024, the French government announced that, after closing its
own tritium-producing reactors, it was working with energy giant EDF to
produce tritium for its nuclear weapons program at the Civaux
twin-reactor nuclear power plant. The program has not yet been approved
by French nuclear safety authorities. EDF is expected to submit a
technical dossier in the fall of 2024 with a first test planned for 2025.
In thermonuclear weapons, tritium is used to initiate the reaction, when
a mixture of tritium and deuterium is injected into the firing chamber,
then compressed and undergoes fusion reactions, releasing high-energy
neutrons. This process greatly improves the efficiency of the primary
fuel (plutonium and/or highly enriched uranium) undergoing fission. This
allows for a reduction in the mass of the fuel and other primary
components (reflector, high explosive) needed to generate a sufficiently
high yield (on the order of ten kilotons) to ignite the secondary.
Tritium also makes nuclear fission weapons "predetonation-proof,"
allowing the use of fissile materials with higher spontaneous background
neutron rates (such as reactor-grade plutonium) without any reduction in
the expected yield. Independent estimates of the historical tritium
requirement for thermonuclear weapons range on average from two to four
grams per warhead. Some weapons (known as "dial-a-yield") can use
variable amounts of tritium to adjust their explosive yield. However,
overall, demand for tritium has increased in recent years for the U.S.
stockpile, presumably to increase performance margins.
The Italian government, whatever its color, is always available to
support ENI's exploitation aims, and here in record time a bill of
delegation has been launched that would also allow the Italian State, in
defiance of the conquests obtained by the anti-nuclear movement with
direct action, to participate in the military nuclear cake, passing it
off as civilian.
Once again the government proves to be the worst enemy of society.
Avis Everhard
https://umanitanova.org/trizio-giorgia-e-descalzi-il-nucleare-civile-passaggio-obbligato-per-lo-scudo-atomico-europeo/
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