3 ms·

Good thing no-one who has incentive to build an A bomb or dirty bomb had any U238 shot into their house and/or children or anything. There's absolutely no risk

• cryptonector 4y ago
  My comment was really about uranium 233, which is very hard to work with because it emits a ton of gamma rays, which means you need great care in handling it as you purify it from thorium waste. Yes, if you got a hold of a ton of depleted uranium and had a ton of money to burn and somehow hide what you were doing, you could breed it. I suspect you could use a neutron generator to do it at a staggering cost in electricity (at least until you bred enough fissile material that you could then sustain the rest of the breeding). But these things are not remotely trivial, and they're definitely not cheap. They're within reach of large corporations, but not small ones or individuals.
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    And my comment was about what happens if one of the proposed millions of megawatt reactors required for this to contribute meaningfully to decarbonisation gets under the control of someone powerful with motives to become a nuclear threat. If you can run it on thorium and U233, then it's much easier to run on U238 and Pu. Also you wouldn't need 'heaps' of depleted uranium, just the number of depleted uranium bullets lodged in the wall in the average afghani kindergarten