Plutonium, which is part of spent nuclear fuel (SNF), can be separated to develop nuclear weapons, which Ukraine desperately needs in the context of a protracted war against aggressive Putin’s Russia.
“The most interesting component of spent nuclear fuel is plutonium. It is quite easily separated from other components and, if there are appropriate production facilities, can be used to make nuclear weapons,” said Yelisey Khodolovsky, a member of the NGO Anti-Corruption Ax.
According to him, Ukraine has accumulated a considerable amount of spent nuclear fuel.
Large stocks of spent nuclear fuel and plutonium
The fuel that was unloaded from Zaporizhzhya NPP units was stored in containers at a special site on the territory of ZNPP, so these stocks are currently located on the occupied territory.
However, spent fuel from other reactors at Khmelnytskyi, Rivne and South Ukrainian NPPs is stored in on-site spent fuel pools and then transported to the Centralized Spent Fuel Storage Facility located in the Chornobyl Reserve.
According to expert estimates, one modern 1000 MW power unit produces about 20-25 tons of irradiated fuel per year. It contains about 1% of plutonium, which is the most common component for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
“Unlike uranium-235, which requires cyclopean-sized plants with cascades of thousands of centrifuges, plutonium is produced in the reactor during its normal operation to generate electricity, as a nice bonus,” Khodolovsky writes.
Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing
Spent nuclear fuel is extremely radioactive, but technologies for its reprocessing and separation were developed in the 1940s at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory under the leadership of Glenn Seaborg. The process, called PUREX (Plutonium-Uranium Recovery by Extraction), involves the separation of these elements from solution by extraction with tributyl phosphate.
Typically, the fuel rods are crushed in a hot chamber with a remote-controlled cutter and dissolved in concentrated nitric acid. The resulting solution may contain plutonium in concentrations of up to 3 g/liter.
The elements are separated in several stages: first, uranium, neptunium, and plutonium are separated, and then they are separated. This is due to the property of tributyl phosphate to form compounds with actinoids that do not mix with the aqueous solution and can be easily separated.
Tributyl phosphate can also selectively separate uranium and plutonium from their nitric acid solutions.
Creation of nuclear weapons
The expert notes that at all stages it is important to monitor the neutron flux, preventing the formation of critical mass, and to comply with all safety measures, especially at the stage of separation of volatile radionuclides and highly radioactive fission debris. In general, a full-fledged radiochemical production is an extremely expensive and knowledge-intensive project.
However, if successful, the reward is also high: sovereignty and real, not imaginary, state security.
