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> None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their plutonium from nuclear waste Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't

> None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their plutonium from nuclear waste Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future. You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not.

tbrownaw 12y ago
You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. So which is worse for that, having a fuck-ton of seriously nasty stuff sitting around forever, or concentrating the nasty stuff to a much more manageable volume and then fairly quickly shipping it off to be destroyed (in a way that just happens to provide useful energy out of the deal).
regularfry 12y ago
Plutonium makes a rubbish dirty bomb, it's too heavy to disperse.
opo 12y ago
>Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future. It isn't random chance that no one has developed nuclear weapons using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. It is because it would be far more expensive, a far bigger engineering challenge and far more difficult to hide than any of the other ways to create a nuclear bomb. >You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. I didn't talk about dirty bomb because the original statement I was replying too was saying that reprocessing akes plutonium easy to separate out and was a nuclear proliferation risk. It is impolite to criticize me for not bringing up a different issue. In the case of a dirty bomb, it would be many times less dangerous than a nuclear weapon would be and there are many, many potential sources of material for a dirty bomb that would be much easier to obtain and work with than the waste from a commercial nuclear reactor. As I said before, a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be recycle it.

tbrownaw 12y ago

You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. So which is worse for that, having a fuck-ton of seriously nasty stuff sitting around forever, or concentrating the nasty stuff to a much more manageable volume and then fairly quickly shipping it off to be destroyed (in a way that just happens to provide useful energy out of the deal).

regularfry 12y ago

Plutonium makes a rubbish dirty bomb, it's too heavy to disperse.

opo 12y ago

>Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future. It isn't random chance that no one has developed nuclear weapons using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. It is because it would be far more expensive, a far bigger engineering challenge and far more difficult to hide than any of the other ways to create a nuclear bomb. >You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. I didn't talk about dirty bomb because the original statement I was replying too was saying that reprocessing akes plutonium easy to separate out and was a nuclear proliferation risk. It is impolite to criticize me for not bringing up a different issue. In the case of a dirty bomb, it would be many times less dangerous than a nuclear weapon would be and there are many, many potential sources of material for a dirty bomb that would be much easier to obtain and work with than the waste from a commercial nuclear reactor. As I said before, a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be recycle it.