British ship believed to be carrying 730 lbs of plutonium leaves Japan for US. https://t.co/1oGUMExY44 pic.twitter.com/Lj8wS9pGvt
— KSL (@KSLcom) March 22, 2016
An armed British ship carrying 730 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium left a port in Japan Tuesday, destined for a secret mission to South Carolina.
Authorities have declined to say anything about the trip, citing security concerns. But Kyodo News has reported that the shipment is part of a 2014 agreement Japan struck with the U.S. to decrease its massive stockpile of plutonium.
The ship, accompanied by a second vessel, is headed for the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation in South Carolina, where the plutonium is to be downgraded and stored.
Both vessels, named Pacific Egret and Pacific Heron, are equipped with naval guns, the Associated Press reported, and departed from a port in Tokai village, a coastal town about 80 miles northeast of Tokyo.
The ships first arrived in Japan Monday, taking several hours to load plutonium-filled casks. There was no word when they were to arrive in South Carolina, or even what port they were destined for.
The plutonium handed over by Japan is no small amount, but still barely puts a dent into the country's huge plutonium stockpile. Ostensibly for research into nuclear power, the island country owns nearly 50 metric tons, or enough for almost 6,000 atomic bombs.
Reader Comments
Did they have the "bomb" before the US dropped it?
from wikki:
[Link]
Trinity and Fat Man atomic bombs
Two diagrams of weapon assembly. Top: "gun-type assembly method" — an elliptical shell encloses conventional chemical explosives on the left, whose detonation pushes sub-critical pieces of uranium-235 together on the right. Bottom: "implosion assembly method" — a spherical shell encloses eight high-explosive charges which upon detonation compress a plutonium charge in the core.
Because of the presence of plutonium-240 in reactor-bred plutonium, the implosion design was developed for the "Fat Man" and "Trinity" weapons
The first atomic bomb test, codenamed "Trinity" and detonated on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, used plutonium as its fissile material.[42] The implosion design of "the gadget", as the Trinity device was code-named, used conventional explosive lenses to compress a sphere of plutonium into a supercritical mass, which was simultaneously showered with neutrons from the "Urchin", an initiator made of polonium and beryllium (neutron source: (α, n) reaction).[31] Together, these ensured a runaway chain reaction and explosion. The overall weapon weighed over 4 tonnes, although it used just 6.2 kg of plutonium in its core.[77] About 20% of the plutonium used in the Trinity weapon underwent fission, resulting in an explosion with an energy equivalent to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT.[78][note 7]
So the first atomic bomb used just 6.2 kg of plutonium. Just what is going one here? Why so secret?