Comment on China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’
Rakonat@lemmy.world 1 week agoThis excuse doesn’t make any sense. This myth also needs to die. You can’t get weapons grade materials from fission reactors, and you certainly aren’t converting spent fuel into weapons. The process of refining weapons grade uranium or synthesizing plutonium have nothing to do with energy producing reactors
Uranium was endorsed because it was easier to create a reactor with and didn’t have to deal with the corrosive issue that metallurgy of the early nuclear age into the 50s couldn’t really handle economically.
Atomic@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
It gives you a reason to access the materials you need for nuclear weapons.
Who is saying they’re using the fuel for reactors to make the weapons? Just you.
And not that I count it. But they do infact make weapons from spent uranium. They make artillery shells from it. Buy like I said. I don’t even count that.
Rakonat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There is no correlation between nuclear weapons production and nuclear power generation. If anything they compete for the same raw materials. They were developed in the same era because that’s when we discovered how to harness fission.
Also depleted uranium is not spent fuel. Depleted uranium is the byproduct of enriching uranium to weapons grade. Given the natural ratios of u238 to u235, there’s an abundance of it from refining nuclear weapons hence why some weapons and armor utilize it.
Atomic@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yes. They compete for the same raw material. That’s the whole point. Gives you a perfectly good reason to excavate it.
Rakonat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s not a point in favor of why they coexist. The military is going to fund uranium mining one way or the other, given the potency of nuclear weapons as a deterrence, as well as their own militarized applications of nuclear reactors powering aircraft carriers.
The only valid argument for why military planning influenced civilian nuclear power because the military also tested and decided on nuclear power for various applications because it was efficient, reliable and had long term viability with minimal space investment. But even the military came to the conclusion it wanted nuclear power where it could get independent of wanting nuclear weapons.