Obtaining useful quantities of sufficiently pure U-235 and/or Pu-239 is so much easier that weaponizing U-233 will likely never be attempted again. Use of U-233 as a weapon core is so far from practical that it may as well be considered impossible.
I'm not sure what those effects would be but I assume it means a short shelf life for the weapon, a potential "fizzile" (extremely low yield), and possibly premature detonation. If one is dealing with U-232 by simply not caring about the radiation load then there is still the problem of the spontaneous fission. By "lengthy" I mean waiting out the ~70 year half life long enough that the unwanted isotopes decay away. Another way to deal with it is to allow the U-232 to decay away but that requires lengthy planning. The radiation from the weapon core might be dealt with by using heavy shielding or by not caring if the laborers get potentially lethal doses of radiation.
U-232 has a bad habit of decaying with it's (relatively) short half life and sometimes doing so with spontaneous fission. This still leaves the value of U-233 as a primary fission source as theoretical.Īnother problem with using U-233 as a weapon core is dealing with U-232 contamination. Other materials and methods, like common natural uranium as a second or third stage, are much more feasible.
The value of U-233 to "boost" the yield of a weapon is debatable because of the results of these tests. Those that did achieve fission with U-233 did so only with a mix with another fuel, U-235 or Pu-239, and with a yield lower than expected. The "failures" didn't mean they didn't explode since the conventional explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction is sufficient to cause considerable damage and turn the core into a dirty bomb. U-233 bombs are theoretical and the handful of times it has been tried were failures.
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