An asteroid worth more than its mass in gold....

[Sarevok]

An asteroid is discovered that contains uranium at concentrations beyond imaginable. I would provide figures but being chemically illiterate I will have to resort to a crude description. Assume minerals present is of such high quality it could go right into weapons with minimal processing. The asteroid is also massive at about 3 kilometers wide. It's orbit lies between that of Venus and Earth and it makes closest approaches to Earth every 9 years at 7 million kilometers.

Would it be possible to reach this planetoid and use it's unimaginable bounty of nuclear fuel ? Will there even be an incentive to do so on part of government and privately owned industries ? Also given the dual destructive/constructive nature of atomic power how would the world deal with the risk of abuse ?

Edit : To give credit where credit is due this is inspired by the Helium-3 comet threat at SB not my own idea.

Fixed your title. "Its" is possessive; "it's" is "it is".

[Lord of the Abyss]

Assume minerals present is of such high quality it could go right into weapons with minimal processing.

There's an upper limit on how concentrated it can be; if it's too high it'll turn into a natural nuclear reactor.

Will there even be an incentive to do so on part of government and privately owned industries ?

Right away ? Not really; nuclear fuel isn't that expensive. It would certainly be valuable in the future, as a source of fuel for nuclear rockets and power plants that doesn't have to be hauled up Earth's gravity well. Or to put it another way, I think it's more valuable up there than down here.

[Solauren]

I can see the asteroid being a cause for some concern. A rock that big, that close to earth, made up of that much nuclear material could represent a problem.

If anything, it should spur a 'get space ships' movement.

[NoXion]

Is gold any good at blocking/absorbing radiation? Perhaps the asteroid could be laced with that or other valuable metals in order to maintain it's value without turning into some kind of nuclear reactor.

[PeZook]

Um, if the rock contains so much weapons-grade uranium then it won't turn into a nuclear reactor: it's a floating nuclear BOMB. It's not easy to get weapons-grade fissile material because it's very raective and, well, blows up when it reaches critical mass. Hence, U-235 is only found in minute quantities in naturally occurring ores and has to be separated in a complicated technological process.

If the asteroid is actually composed of U-235 which would only require minimal processing to be used for bombs, then it's bound to literally be an unstable gigantic bomb or a wholly artificial creation.

Which doesn't preclude it from being a bomb, of course.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

No, it will likely fissile on its own. There are natural nuclear reactors out there, with one theorised to be in S. Africa.

Of course, the issue is the lack of moderator, but that would mean possibly a run away reaction. Bombardment by gamma rays etc. might stimulate the process.

[PeZook]

No, it will likely fissile on its own. There are natural nuclear reactors out there, with one theorised to be in S. Africa.

If it had just a high proportion of U-235 then yeah, it would fissile.

But, here's the quote from the OP:

Assume minerals present is of such high quality it could go right into weapons with minimal processing.

(bolding mine)

I assume "minimal processing" involves something less than the giant facilities needed to process ordinary ore to high U-235 content, and the mass of the asteroid is, well, a bit over critical mass

If it's that pure, that huge and that stable, I'd take a bet that some alien civilization wants to blow us up on purpose...

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

It's hard to imagine it stable for long. Stray gamma rays or some stray photons with just enough energy might even set off the chain reaction. I mean, there was this accident at a Japanese processing plant where they put too much Uranium oxide together in one cylinder (my memory is very hazy on the details) and that set off a chain reaction and resulted in exposure for many workers there.

[Kon_El]

On a side note. If what I have read from people who trade in space rocks is true. A lot of them are worth more than gold anyway.

[Stark]

Probably due to rarity, not any resource value.

[Sea Skimmer]

It's hard to imagine it stable for long. Stray gamma rays or some stray photons with just enough energy might even set off the chain reaction. I mean, there was this accident at a Japanese processing plant where they put too much Uranium oxide together in one cylinder (my memory is very hazy on the details) and that set off a chain reaction and resulted in exposure for many workers there.

Something like that yeah, it’s called a criticality accident. A fairly large number have occurred, usually caused by huge mistakes in nuclear materials handling. The first two ever though occurred during the Manhattan Project when scientists did work placing neutron reflectors around the prototype U-235 bomb spheres. Too many blocks reflected too many neutrons and a criticality accident happened the moment the last block was placed. Both accidents were fatal, but led to the first yield enhancement features for a nuclear device. When such a thing happens you get a radiation pulse including visible light, and the chain reaction may continue for hours. The 1997 incident in Japan went on for 20 hours on and off. When the material heated up it would boil the solution it was in and form gas bubbles, which acted as voids shutting down the chain reaction. Then it would cool down… start up, make more gas bubbles and then kill its self ect…


If anything remotely like a 3km wide chunk of near weapons grade U-235 materialized into existence it would go critical near instantaneous. You almost certainly would get an explosion, and a partial nuclear yield may well be possible. Neutron inhibitors could prevent this, but then the material is hardly easy to process.

[dragon]

Like several of the others have stated that much nuclear material in one location is almost begging for a accident. But assume same concentration as in a uranium mine with current space assets it would not be worth it to mine. However once we start building space craft in orbit for interplantary missions then a source of fuel already up there would be a significant boost.

[Sea Skimmer]

The act of mining isn’t the problem if you want to do things in space; it’s the processing to make uranium fuel. You have to concentrate the uranium, enrich it and then fabricate it into fuel rods, a rather complicated and lengthy process. Also finding a uranium rich asteroid in the first place wont be easy, if they exist at all.

It would still easily be cheaper to mine uranium on earth and fabricate it into nuclear fuel on earth and then blast the fuel rods into space then to move all the equipment needed to do that into space. We’d need a colossal level of space demand to make it economical to do everything in space. I mean you could easily need to blast five thousand tons of stuff into space just to build a small scale fuel fabrication facility, and ten thousand tons of fuel rods would go a rather long way.

[Shroom Man 777]

I wonder how big a blast such a nuclear space rock would make.

[Sky Captain]

I wonder how big a blast such a nuclear space rock would make.

I think it`s more likely the asteorid is going to fizzle and shatter in million pieces than explode like a proper atomic bomb since there is no elaborate containment for nuclear material like in a real bomb.