3 ms·

While the operational safety sounds excellent, I am worried about what a generalization of this kind of reactor would entail. Your typical reactor is under hea

While the operational safety sounds excellent, I am worried about what a generalization of this kind of reactor would entail. Your typical reactor is under heavy surveillance and 200 (67?) times more powerful : we are very unlikely to "lose track" of the fuel. Let's say this becomes moderately popular and we soon have a million of them across the world (enough for about 10% of our today's energy needs)... who is going to keep track of all of them ?! The High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium required here is enriched between 5% and 20% compared to a conventional reactor using between 3% and 5% fuel. Because enriching from the natural 0.7% to 20% is 90% of the effort, 20% is considered to be the line separating civilian and military uses. And we're much closer to that limit with these reactors. I am baffled that this is not being even mentioned in the article, nor the pdf ? (I guess they are not particularly willing to disclose just how many of those would need to be gathered for the minimum 25 kg of 90% enriched Uranium for a bomb ?) And as safe as these might be under normal operation, how many decades for a forgotten abandoned one, exposed to the weather, to leak ? How much and what kind of radiation release can we expect ? (Carried by water to the closest steam I assume?)

XorNot 4y ago
You need over 90% enriched for practical nuclear weapon use. It is not "most of the effort" to get to 20%: in fact, if you're stealing it then it's none of the effort: you don't have a centrifuge operation, so whether it's natural or 20% or 70% it is all equally useless. The difficulty of enrichment is the plant and logistics of doing it, none of which you can steal.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  I should have been more clear that I am assuming an hostile nation-state with some minimal capabilities : the biggest difficulty is probably to be able to deliver the bomb to a target once you have one, which gets even worse if you want to use it as an open threat for deterrence rather than a (frankly suicidal) surprise attack : you pretty much need an ICBM (see all the North Korean failures before they (supposedly) stole SSR-Ukrainian tech). Difficulty of enrichment seems to be heavily proportional to time : the whole "game" around Iran's enrichment seems to be about not letting them get it high enough that they can go from weapons-useless uranium to a ready bomb in a short enough amount of time for the other countries not being able to react. (There's also a possibility of a much smaller actor to make a dirty bomb from that mildly enriched uranium, but I have even less ideas about how likely that is.)

XorNot 4y ago

You need over 90% enriched for practical nuclear weapon use. It is not "most of the effort" to get to 20%: in fact, if you're stealing it then it's none of the effort: you don't have a centrifuge operation, so whether it's natural or 20% or 70% it is all equally useless. The difficulty of enrichment is the plant and logistics of doing it, none of which you can steal.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
I should have been more clear that I am assuming an hostile nation-state with some minimal capabilities : the biggest difficulty is probably to be able to deliver the bomb to a target once you have one, which gets even worse if you want to use it as an open threat for deterrence rather than a (frankly suicidal) surprise attack : you pretty much need an ICBM (see all the North Korean failures before they (supposedly) stole SSR-Ukrainian tech). Difficulty of enrichment seems to be heavily proportional to time : the whole "game" around Iran's enrichment seems to be about not letting them get it high enough that they can go from weapons-useless uranium to a ready bomb in a short enough amount of time for the other countries not being able to react. (There's also a possibility of a much smaller actor to make a dirty bomb from that mildly enriched uranium, but I have even less ideas about how likely that is.)