Looking into this PUREX/Hanford stuff, I was curious to see if I could find what the Pu production rates were in the 1950s. And I did:pic.twitter.com/rKvdPo95mI
By comparison, B Reactor was meant to at most produce 6.7 kg per *month.*
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And by comparison again, each Fat Man bomb required a little over 6 kg of Pu. So 7.5 kg of Pu per day is quite a lot!
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But are these actual production rates? They seem to be estimates of production/recovery.
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Right — but they also state that they've designed the plant to handle 75-200 tons of U per month. So that gives some sense of the rate.
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They only got to 7.5 kg/d (about 2700 kg/y) by 1958. This is from "The First 50 Years", p. 29pic.twitter.com/tD1LlLC0HB
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Recovery of the uranium? I assume to be reused in the reactors? How many run-throughs could they get I wonder?
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Probably a few— Pu-production reactors cycle fuel through relatively quickly, to avoid Pu-240 buildup. So much of the U-235 is unburnt.
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235? I thought it was 238 in the plutonium reactors? Or is it both?
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It still needs U235 fissioning to create the neutrons that turn U238 into Pu239. The fuel was unenriched (<1% U235).
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