4 ms·
> 1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build nuclear weapo
by erentz 8y ago
> 1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build nuclear weapon.
All of the plutonium production for weapons was done in special purpose reactors at Hanford, WA. It takes a pretty specialized process to extract the plutonium from the fuel slugs. And btw most used nuclear fuel in the US is still sitting in tanks next to the power plants that they were used in.
We also stopped producing plutonium a fairly long time ago because we have more than enough for all the weapons we could ever conceivably want to produce.
The reason we have the reactors we do is probably more to do with the US navy than anything.
- mikevp 8y agoThe reason you don't try to make bombs from power reactor plutonium: The long fuel cycle of power reactors produces too much Pu240 and Pu242. It's dang near impossible to get a nuclear explosion if there's much of those isotopes; their high spontaneous fission rate makes the bomb "fizzle" before the core can be sufficiently compressed. Those who pretend to believe that industrial civilization can be run on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy are engaged in arithmetic denialism.