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Could a Rogue Billionaire Make a Nuclear Weapon?
- sea-gold 3y agohttps://archive.ph/K6muo https://archive.ph/K6muo
- pfdietz 3y agoThe plutonium avenue for making a nuclear weapon may get easier if Helion's approach to fusion pans out. Helion's reactors use a combination of DD fusion and D3He fusion. DD fusion is used to make the 3He used by the second part. But in DD fusion, a large number of excess neutrons are inevitably produced. Unlike in a DT reactor, these neutrons do not have to be captured to regenerate tritium. Helion's idea would be to just capture them in shielding (in boron). But there's space where they could instead be captured in natural uranium to breed plutonium. A 50 MW reactor might produce enough neutrons to breed as much as a half a ton of plutonium per year. One could imagine an entrepreneur selling retrofit kits for these reactors to make them also operate as Pu production reactors.