5 ms·

>It was developed out of government driven military technology That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley

>It was developed out of government driven military technology That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.

Retric 9y ago
Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet. PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  "Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons." Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
  - lispm 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear... Early commercial nuclear reactors, here the British Calder Hall Power Station, were producing plutionium and electricity.
    - Turing_Machine 9y ago
      That was more or less a prototype. No one uses power reactors to produce plutonium. It just isn't done.
      - lispm 9y ago
        The UK had 26 of these Magnox reactors for electricity production. These nuclear reactors were coming out of military technology and some of them were built and operated for dual use: Plutonium production and energy production. The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
        Turing_Machine 9y ago
        The UK has about 200 warheads. The US has almost 7,000. The US has never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium, because they simply aren't well-suited for the purpose.
        Retric 9y ago
        >never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj...
        valuearb 9y ago
        How did west valley produce power? Your link is unclear.
        Retric 9y ago
        No, it simply reprocessed spent nuclear fuel. It was not economically useful to do so, but we only really learned that by trying.
        DrScump 9y ago
        I think it is true (in the USA) but rather meaningless. I don't think we want commercial entities producing plutonium unsupervised by the military.
        Turing_Machine 9y ago
        That was essentially a demonstration plant. Note that it only ran for six years, only produced 1,926 kg of plutonium over its entire lifespan, and was shut down because producing plutonium from spent fuel from commercial power reactors proved to be uneconomic. 2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.
  - Retric 9y ago
    In terms of manufacture, I agree. Further, Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years so we don't currently need anything in the way of production. So, yes direct production was mostly from dedicated reactors. However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach. Further, there was an actual attempt to extract plutonium from civilian reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj... was really a legacy of this failure as it only produced 4,373 lb of plutonium vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site which produced most of the US's plutonium for nuclear weapons. Which is why I feel this is a little more nuanced than your suggesting.
- hueving 9y ago
  >Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. ARPANET was designed, built, and operated to enable the exchange of information in the face of nuclear annihilation of cities. The big famous radio dish on top of the hill behind Stanford and the signals research that went into it was placed there to look for anti-ICBM radar signals bouncing off of the moon from Russia. We are standing on a mountain of tech based on research driven by the cold war. Nuclear energy is no different.
sliverstorm 9y ago
My favorite bit is, the first customer & funding grant of the transistor was for a particular application that needed something far more resilient to vibration, temperature, etc than vacuum tubes - ICBM's.
thevardanian 9y ago
Well most of the internet and internet companies continue to exist because of military tech, and military strategy. It turns out the internet is a wonderful tool for psy-ops, and social influence, a la Arab Springs. Even Tor, and decentralization technologies are/were military tools.
agumonkey 9y ago
Come on, network communication and nuclear energy are different planets. I kinda agree that without national plants things might have been better, but these kinds of efforts and risks cannot exist outside of govt for a while. It will take some guys to figure out MSR designs if possible, and then they'll be small and safe enough to access the private market.
e12e 9y ago
It's a bit different when you use it for terrorbombing not one, but two cities - to make sure the design works. I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Given Hiroshima and Nagasaki likely saved at least a million Japanese lives, your point is unclear.
  - e12e 9y ago
    That is assuming Hiroshima and Nagasaki sped up the process of surrender (and probably assuming that most of that million of lives would have been lost to firebombing civilian targets). I don't think the point is unclear - but it could very well be wrong. I don't think alternate-history fables is much of a defense for war crimes, however. You might hold that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done to speed up Japan's surrender, and/or that they did speed up Japan's surrender by a meaningful amount. Further, you might argue that somehow two bombs was meaningfully better than one for this purpose. From historical record, I'd say it's more likely Japan would've surrendered quickly either way - and that the motivation was more on establishing the USA as a superpower for the post-war era. Either way, I think it's hard to argue that dropping of nuclear bombs on cities was done "for the sake of their people". After all, no-one was forcing the US to continue the war in the Pacific - or to capture Japan. The US could have sought a cease-fire and withdrawn to Hawaii or similar earlier borders. If the goal was to "save lives".
HeavyStorm 9y ago
Agree, but he has a point. First application of the internet wasn't mass destruction.

Retric 9y ago

Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet. PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.

Turing_Machine 9y ago
"Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons." Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
- lispm 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear... Early commercial nuclear reactors, here the British Calder Hall Power Station, were producing plutionium and electricity.
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    That was more or less a prototype. No one uses power reactors to produce plutonium. It just isn't done.
    - lispm 9y ago
      The UK had 26 of these Magnox reactors for electricity production. These nuclear reactors were coming out of military technology and some of them were built and operated for dual use: Plutonium production and energy production. The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
      - Turing_Machine 9y ago
        The UK has about 200 warheads. The US has almost 7,000. The US has never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium, because they simply aren't well-suited for the purpose.
        Retric 9y ago
        >never used commercial power reactors to produce plutonium That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj...
        valuearb 9y ago
        How did west valley produce power? Your link is unclear.
        Retric 9y ago
        No, it simply reprocessed spent nuclear fuel. It was not economically useful to do so, but we only really learned that by trying.
        DrScump 9y ago
        I think it is true (in the USA) but rather meaningless. I don't think we want commercial entities producing plutonium unsupervised by the military.
        Turing_Machine 9y ago
        That was essentially a demonstration plant. Note that it only ran for six years, only produced 1,926 kg of plutonium over its entire lifespan, and was shut down because producing plutonium from spent fuel from commercial power reactors proved to be uneconomic. 2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.
- Retric 9y ago
  In terms of manufacture, I agree. Further, Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years so we don't currently need anything in the way of production. So, yes direct production was mostly from dedicated reactors. However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach. Further, there was an actual attempt to extract plutonium from civilian reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Valley_Demonstration_Proj... was really a legacy of this failure as it only produced 4,373 lb of plutonium vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site which produced most of the US's plutonium for nuclear weapons. Which is why I feel this is a little more nuanced than your suggesting.
hueving 9y ago
>Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. ARPANET was designed, built, and operated to enable the exchange of information in the face of nuclear annihilation of cities. The big famous radio dish on top of the hill behind Stanford and the signals research that went into it was placed there to look for anti-ICBM radar signals bouncing off of the moon from Russia. We are standing on a mountain of tech based on research driven by the cold war. Nuclear energy is no different.

sliverstorm 9y ago

My favorite bit is, the first customer & funding grant of the transistor was for a particular application that needed something far more resilient to vibration, temperature, etc than vacuum tubes - ICBM's.

thevardanian 9y ago

Well most of the internet and internet companies continue to exist because of military tech, and military strategy. It turns out the internet is a wonderful tool for psy-ops, and social influence, a la Arab Springs. Even Tor, and decentralization technologies are/were military tools.

agumonkey 9y ago

Come on, network communication and nuclear energy are different planets. I kinda agree that without national plants things might have been better, but these kinds of efforts and risks cannot exist outside of govt for a while. It will take some guys to figure out MSR designs if possible, and then they'll be small and safe enough to access the private market.

e12e 9y ago

It's a bit different when you use it for terrorbombing not one, but two cities - to make sure the design works. I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.

valuearb 9y ago
Given Hiroshima and Nagasaki likely saved at least a million Japanese lives, your point is unclear.
- e12e 9y ago
  That is assuming Hiroshima and Nagasaki sped up the process of surrender (and probably assuming that most of that million of lives would have been lost to firebombing civilian targets). I don't think the point is unclear - but it could very well be wrong. I don't think alternate-history fables is much of a defense for war crimes, however. You might hold that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done to speed up Japan's surrender, and/or that they did speed up Japan's surrender by a meaningful amount. Further, you might argue that somehow two bombs was meaningfully better than one for this purpose. From historical record, I'd say it's more likely Japan would've surrendered quickly either way - and that the motivation was more on establishing the USA as a superpower for the post-war era. Either way, I think it's hard to argue that dropping of nuclear bombs on cities was done "for the sake of their people". After all, no-one was forcing the US to continue the war in the Pacific - or to capture Japan. The US could have sought a cease-fire and withdrawn to Hawaii or similar earlier borders. If the goal was to "save lives".

HeavyStorm 9y ago

Agree, but he has a point. First application of the internet wasn't mass destruction.