From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 11:10:07 MDT
Chuck Kuecker wrote:
> Again, to get "30" or even "20" pounds of sufficiently pure fissionable
> from reactor waste is NOT EASY. The people doing the extraction need to
> have very specialized knowledge, and without a very expensive and complex
> facility, they will be committing suicide. You don't just dump the waste
> into a neat machine and get shiny Pu chunks out the other end.
Ach, come on. Purex process isotope enrichment is not, and if you let
the ash cool for a while (like a few years, the longer the better)
and have a few expendable people you can very easily extract the
plutonium under most low-tech conditions, like what Marie Curie did
when she cooked her ore in an open pot in nitric acid (and these
pioneers did saw the Cherenkov glow of solutions on lab benches,
and remember the "volunteers" who attempted to contain Chernobyl,
essentially a reactor core blown open with burning graphite
inside, so a monkey won't keel over immediately, if you can
contain the dosage).
As to isotopic composition, you won't get too much yield in a single
device (but it will be the more dirty for that), and of course you
can build several of them, and detonate them synchronously, but it's not
very relevant if you just want to do a terror act, or use the fission
primary to ignite the fusion secondary (from what I've read recently
fusion nukes are not that hard to do -- I'm not sure I would be
able to do it, but there are probably people on this list who could).
Proliferation is another major can of worms. You sure won't get
anything like that from photovoltaics, hydrogen, or natural gas
turbine generators. Some technologies are isolated, some intermesh
with others synergistically. E.g. hydrogen is not just an energy
carrier but it also a storage form and a synthetic agent, and
solar satellites require a nonnegligable bridgehead on the Moon,
which is surely worthwhile on its own.
Some tech is just better than other tech, so let's drop nuke, at least
until we get out into space, as it's a nasty, sterile form of tech.
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