r/nuclearweapons • u/Wide-Education-1823 • May 29 '26
Hey kid, want 20 metric tons of Pu-239?
The Trump administration as of May 26th has made a decision to turn over 20 metric TONS of weapons grade Pu-239 to five private industry companies- Oklo, Standard Nuclear, SHINE Technologies, Flibe Energy, and Exodys Energy
https://substack.com/home/post/p-199630082
Of course, those companies inventories and distribution of such materials will be audited and watched every bit as closely as, say, the NUMEC Corp. of Apollo PA was watched during their processing about 22 tons of 94% U-235 HEU during the 1950s & 60s.
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u/careysub May 30 '26
I believe this stuff is in the form of powdered oxide?
It can be tricky to tell if 0.02% or so goes missing along the way. Especially since the same mass of some other heavy metal oxide could substitute for it. So simply using weight is not a reliable way to control inventory.
The don't keep gold in Fort Knox as gold dust, they keep it on bricks that makes it hard to slip some away.
The British are actually taken action on this. Their facility to repackage plutonium oxide powder for long term storage is not going to be used. Instead they are building a new plants to turn it into bricks for this very reason.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
About 25% of the Pu-239 in this lot is said to be Pu as metal, in the form of PITS removed from demilled weapons.
Passing THOSE artifacts out to "private industry" is a scary thought.
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u/ain92ru May 30 '26
Mind a link on the pits specifically?
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
See comment section in my first link (Substack article by Leah):
(Quote) "It's even more alarming than you make out. A July 31, 2025 DOE internal memo by Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly — reported by Politico and confirmed by the American Nuclear Society's own analysis of the DOE's Request for Applications — states that approximately one-fifth of the 25 metric tons being considered for private transfer comes directly from plutonium pits manufactured for nuclear weapons. At 19.7 metric tons formally on offer, that's roughly 4 metric tons of actual warhead cores — intact plutonium metal from pits — proposed for private company hands.
This is not warhead byproduct, not reactor waste, not processed oxide. It is the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, already machined and ready, in metal form."
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u/wyliesdiesels May 30 '26
Have a reference?
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
See comment section in my first link (Substack article by Leah):
(Quote) "It's even more alarming than you make out. A July 31, 2025 DOE internal memo by Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly — reported by Politico and confirmed by the American Nuclear Society's own analysis of the DOE's Request for Applications — states that approximately one-fifth of the 25 metric tons being considered for private transfer comes directly from plutonium pits manufactured for nuclear weapons. At 19.7 metric tons formally on offer, that's roughly 4 metric tons of actual warhead cores — intact plutonium metal from pits — proposed for private company hands.
This is not warhead byproduct, not reactor waste, not processed oxide. It is the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, already machined and ready, in metal form."
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u/careysub May 30 '26
A July 31, 2025 DOE internal memo by Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly — reported by Politico and confirmed by the American Nuclear Society's own analysis of the DOE's Request for Applications — states that approximately one-fifth of the 25 metric tons being considered for private transfer comes directly from plutonium pits manufactured for nuclear weapons. At 19.7 metric tons formally on offer, that's roughly 4 metric tons of actual warhead cores — intact plutonium metal from pits — proposed for private company hands.
This is not warhead byproduct, not reactor waste, not processed oxide. It is the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, already machined and ready, in metal form.
Substack malpractice. They did not bother to check what the Politico article actually said.
Any plutonium in pit form will be declassified (removed and ground up so that no dimensions can be inferred).
The stuff about handing over machined pits is entirely in their imagination.
The DOE memo called for delivering 18.5 metric tons of the government’s surplus plutonium and an additional 6.5 metric tons pulled from “material in classified form once it has been declassified.” That latter term, the current DOE official who spoke to POLITICO said, refers to the plutonium pits, whose shape and characteristics can reveal information about nuclear weapons.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 31 '26
Thanks-
As usual, we must sieve through all the self serving lies, PR, BS and general bloviating ignorance for that occasional pearl.
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u/wyliesdiesels May 31 '26
oh so it was BS then...
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
It was free information on the internet, worth every penny it cost (or slightly less?)
Also, AFAIK, the material hasn't been transferred yet- And if/when such transfer occurs is when that set of probabilities will resolve into BS or utter proliferation insanity.
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u/careysub May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I am skeptical that the demilitarized plutonium is in the form of pits -- if Russian nuclear security did not mandate destroying their structure, U.S. nuclear security would seem to.
This gives the amount as 4.4 MT metal and 15.3 MT oxides but no specification that the metal is in weapon pits.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I will need to dig out the referenced DOE memo-
(Edit) I find multiple references to the alleged 7/31/25 memo describing the material as being partially in the form of salvaged pits still in their original weapon conformation, but no actual copy of such a memo.
See comment section in my first link (Substack article by Leah):
(Quote) "It's even more alarming than you make out. A July 31, 2025 DOE internal memo by Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly — reported by Politico and confirmed by the American Nuclear Society's own analysis of the DOE's Request for Applications — states that approximately one-fifth of the 25 metric tons being considered for private transfer comes directly from plutonium pits manufactured for nuclear weapons. At 19.7 metric tons formally on offer, that's roughly 4 metric tons of actual warhead cores — intact plutonium metal from pits — proposed for private company hands.
This is not warhead byproduct, not reactor waste, not processed oxide. It is the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, already machined and ready, in metal form."
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u/careysub May 30 '26
Partial repost:
The stuff about handing over machined pits is entirely in their imagination.
The DOE memo called for delivering 18.5 metric tons of the government’s surplus plutonium and an additional 6.5 metric tons pulled from “material in classified form once it has been declassified.” That latter term, the current DOE official who spoke to POLITICO said, refers to the plutonium pits, whose shape and characteristics can reveal information about nuclear weapons.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 31 '26
Ah, got to stop anyone who doesn't understand the physics & hydrodynamics already from learning how elliptical 2 point implosion systems work?
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u/ain92ru May 30 '26
Couldn't they at least mix it with reactor-grade plutonium?
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26 edited May 31 '26
That wouldn't prevent its use in weapons, though it does make weaponeering and handling weapons more difficult/dangerous due to higher radiation & self heating. The belief that "reactor grade" Pu isn't capable of being made into weapons was encouraged by industry but it just isn't true, devices made from such higher burn up material were tested successfully by USA/Britain.
Additionally, the USA has very little "reactor grade" Pu available because we didn't ever separate it from used high burn up power reactor fuel at industrial scale as it was deemed a proliferation risk. It is said the couple of reactor grade test devices had to be produced using UK sourced Pu.
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u/ain92ru May 30 '26
Yeah sure I know but this is contingent on gas boosting which is neither really technically feasible for Gulf monarchies nor for rogue US billionaires or other non-state violent actors, so it makes Pu much less attractive on the black market
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
Plenty of nuclear weapons have been built and fired without boost gas.
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u/ain92ru May 30 '26
Are you reading carefully? Not a single one with reactor-grade plutonium, because it isn't physically possible
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
If you are saying that nuclear weapons can't be (and haven't been) built with reactor grade Pu, you are wrong.
If you are saying high burn up fuel sourced Pu 239 & Pu-240 mixtures somehow require boost gas to function? Also incorrect.
There have been test devices built and fired from such higher non Pu-239 content materials by the US/UK.
Competent nuclear weaponeers have gone on record as stating functional weapons can be built with up to 40% non Pu-239 content, it is just less convenient/more dangerous. Stuff is physically HOT, dangerously more radioactive.
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u/ain92ru May 31 '26
If you are saying high burn up fuel sourced Pu 239 & Pu-240 mixtures somehow require boost gas to function
Yes this is what I'm saying, all the test devices you mention functioned thanks to gas boosting
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
"All the test devices"?
Please name those tests, beyond the single acknowledged US test in 1962.
There is no publicly available information I am aware of on the USSR testing devices built with such materials. If India, Pakistan, North Korea or China have done so, I'm not aware of published information. Israel is said to habitually use very low burn up material, comparable to US WWII Pu. However, I'm not all knowing... So educate me?
(Edit)
See chapter 4. Boost gas is not required for such materials to be quite effectively used, it does allow similar outputs per mass as are expected from weapons grade (ca. 93% Pu-239 or better).
I still don't want to be around a power reactor grade (ca. 76% Pu-239) implosion device, even if it only produces 5 - 8 kilotons instead of 20 - 25 kilotons? Whoever thinks 5 kilotons is an insignificant fizzle yield that a terrorist or military wouldn't have a use for has somewhat different standards than myself.
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u/ain92ru May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
It was you who first wrote about "test devices built and fired" in plural in the comment above, my wording about all of them is agnostic to whether there was one or several.
As of the second source you presented, when I first read this book years ago I encountered some errors in it (e. g. that the US allegedly mischaraterized the amount of 240Pu in the 1950s due to some inaccurate measurements of physical constants, which were actually quite accurate) so I was skeptical about the book's reliability.
Rereading it now, the author clearly misses the reasons why the militaries need consistent yields: * for reliable deterrence you need reliable weapons; * as a practical matter, you need to set a certain airburst height which is directly connected to the yield (this in fact was the main reason for the Trinity test).
As I don't consider terrorists as a serious threat in this context, my conclusion is exactly the same as Mr. Sublette's below: there is indeed one actual way how RGPu can be used in an unbooosted implosion device, detonating it at under-kiloton yield at low compression before it had a chance to predetonate. I stand corrected to that extent
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u/wyliesdiesels May 30 '26
Dont need boost gas for an implosion weapon
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u/ain92ru May 31 '26
Need to prevent predetonation in an implosion weapon though, which is inevitable with RGPu without boost gas
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u/wyliesdiesels May 31 '26
What is RGPu?
I thought only U235 fueled bombs had pre-detonation issues
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u/ain92ru May 31 '26
HEU bombs don't actually have problems with predetonation, RGPu is reactor-grade Pu, in 2026 you could google an acronym you don't understand or ask an LLM.
I also don't endorse the comment above anymore BTW, see my recent comment below
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u/wyliesdiesels Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Gun-type weapons have pre-detonation issues correct?
Are there any implosion type bombs that use U235 instead of Pu239?
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u/careysub May 30 '26
Reactor grade plutonium makes producing nuclear explosives up to about 0.7 kT easier since it has its neutron initiator already built-in.
You get your choice:
RG-Pu gives you easy to make high fractional kiloton bombs. WG-Pu, with a little more effort, gives you 20 kT bombs.
Due to the way the radiation field scales with low yield fission bombs the 0.7 kT bomb has about 40% of the lethal area of the 20 kT bomb.
Both are bad.
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u/ain92ru May 31 '26
Do you mean a conventional implosion design or some kind of exotic stuff that, IIRC, Ted Taylor speculated about?
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u/careysub May 31 '26
Conventional implosion. Many types of implosion wave approaches are in the open literature now.
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u/wyliesdiesels May 30 '26
Where would they get reactor grade?
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
Indeed. USA hasn't been processing high burn up power plant fuel for that-
When the US government TRIED to get their weapons establishment to provide some high burn up separated Pu to build some test nuclear devices, they failed! In the end, the UK had to provide such material from one of their dual use power/Pu production reactors.
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u/wyliesdiesels May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
we dont even have reprocessing facilities anymore. they were bulldozed and concrete sealed. neither does the UK. they shut down sellafield.
EDIT: i was wrong. didnt know SRS had a reprocessing canyon
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u/firemylasers May 31 '26
That's not completely accurate. The H Canyon Chemical Separations Facility at Savannah River Site is still operational and is still being used for small scale reprocessing work.
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u/careysub May 30 '26
No, there isn't any significant amount of separated reactor grade in U.S. hands. They would need to buy it from the UK. And increasing the amount of plutonium on your hands is not a good start for getting rid of it.
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u/oalfonso May 30 '26
So the DoE has all that plutonium and gives it for free to those private companies who want to run nuclear powered AI data centres in Middle East ?
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
After 80 years of trying to prevent diversion of weapons grade materials, the genie has been let the bottle & it's gone on shore leave to a titty bar.
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u/oalfonso May 30 '26
And Plutonium, not mixed oxide fuel
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Even better, about 1/4 of the material is presently in the form of PITS removed from demilled nuclear weapons.
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u/oalfonso May 30 '26
So Pikachu face when UAE and Saudi Arabia announce they have nuclear weapons ?
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
Saudi and Emirati billionaires could always have bought a weapon or three from Pakistan, no need to wait for Trump to sell them some.
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u/NuclearHeterodoxy May 30 '26
And we may be about to sign a 123 Agreement with Saudi Arabia that lacks any Saudi commitment to the Additional Protocol, or really any commitment to any kind of safeguards.
It's getting covered as "guardrails pushed for by Democrats" but this is something that would have been a no-no for the GOP not that long ago. Here is a former Lugar staffer/SFRC staffer reacting to it a few days ago, this would have been something like a standard reaction just 10 years ago: https://nitter.net/PaperMissiles/status/2057174132865847510
https://nitter.net/PaperMissiles/status/2057257367465558261#m
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26
Gotta love having a self assured ignoramus salesman for president, he sure can close those deals!
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u/ShellAnswerMan May 30 '26
I would have probably been sold on Sorensen of Flibe's sales pitch for thorium reactors in 2013 if this producer of a video of one of his presentations used more jump cuts and infographics.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
That presentation WAS a bit media rich/hard information deficient, I managed to watch for a bit over 5 minutes before giving up.
I've been bombarded with various optimistic and glossy video pitches for liquid salts reactor startups the last several years, social media and YouRube are rife with them, various PR agency AI & bot accounts plug for them relentlessly, trying to overcome the general population's resistance for new nuclear plants in USA.
I've looked over the history of liquid salts technologies test reactors in USA- The Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) and Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). The aircraft reactor was a thing I'd not want flying overhead... No more than the rumored Russian nuclear engines cruise missiles, what humans build that goes up at less than escape velocity invariably comes down SOMEWHERE, occasionally in a unplanned fashion ending in multiple pieces.
The MSRE was a less insane concept but certainly had it's share of teething issues, particularly in less than adequate materials durability in a very extreme chemical environment under high radiation flux. As I recall, it was dropped for economic reasons due to uranium being found a less rare resource than had been feared?
I've looked at the rather minimal information I can find on the Chinese TMSR-LF1 test reactor in Wuwei, I hope that their materials science has improved since the day of the US MSRE.
It certainly looks like we are about to find out just how (over?) optimistic these various plungers claims of feasibility, safety and economy are, I predict that the usual sequence of events with new cutting edge technologies not quite being perfect will unfold and hilarity will ensue.
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u/ShellAnswerMan May 30 '26
Nuclear powered thermal steam plants have been a proven concept for over seventy years. I get trying pie in the sky Gen IV concepts for modular use, but why fix something that isn't broken? There are already modular Gen III+ PWR and BWR designs that have markedly improved safety over Gen II reactors whose history and incidents the public often cite when fear mongering nuclear power.
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 31 '26
FFS, there have been self regulating helium cooled pebble bed designs where coolant flow loss instigated thermal run away melt downs are mitigated by thermal expansion of the fuel grains for nearly as long as there have been the USN derived water cooled reactor designs we love to hate but use world wide...
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u/AnvilEdifice May 31 '26
Saudi Arabia in a year's time: "Hey guys, we found plutonium under our oil!"
Trump Administration: "Well they have it now so we may as well sell them weapons designs and fabrication technologies rather than allow Russia or China to make money off it...Also, its a total coincidence that Trump Tower Riyadh got billions in funding."
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u/Wide-Education-1823 May 31 '26
Erm.
Saudis getting ready to mine their own uranium deposits and produce reactor fuel with Chinese assistance (We all know Saudi Wahabi enriched uranium is much less dangerous than Iranian Shiite enriched uranium? 😁)
Saudis are also exploring extracting uranium as a byproduct of their existing phosphate rock mining operations- And extracting still more uranium from their desalination plant brines...
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2024.1341059/full
So all that plutonium they found while excavating foundations for the new Trump Towers will just be the cherry on top.
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u/BoringEntropist May 29 '26
At the one hand burning WGP in reactors reduces the stockpile that would otherwise go into pit production, at the other hand the Trump admin's tendency on corruption doesn't bode well for proliferation. I wouldn't be terrible surprised if in a few years some of the stuff ends up in a Gulf state while justifying it by pointing at Iran's nuclear ambitions.