Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
shalafi@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I’m thinking it would be a great idea to power nuclear plants, which are desperately needed, but…
“If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn’t be such a great concern, but it just doesn’t seem feasible,”
Trump’s selling plutonium as if it’s a regular resource, like iron ore or timber.
So what if any of this material slips out? Dirty bombs aside, I don’t think it’s too hard to make an implosion device. 3-stage thermonuclear is a whole different game, but a Trinity style bomb is 80-yo tech. Don’t think one needs the hyper-precise tooling, timers, exotic materials, etc. Anyone know more than I?
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
You don’t want to look up how many orphan nuclear devices exist in the world.
Just to whet your whistle a bit… this is by no means an exhaustive list. en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_orphan_source_incident…
We’re still discovering lost nuclear power devices from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nuclear accidents have happened from abandoned medical radiotherapy machines, and from radio imaging equipment used in industrial applications. It’s not actually that hard to find nuclear material in the wild you could use in a dirty bomb.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 5 hours ago
Really? AFAIK, it’s not like people who found orphan sources used special skills, they were just (un)lucky. If it were that easy to consistently find and collect them, governments would have done that. And Russia has a database of nuclear-powered remote sensors deployed in the Soviet era.
boydster@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Yeah, but those things are not weapons-grade plutonium, either.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
That just means it is purified enough to be usable in a weapon. There’s also lots of different plutonium isotopes, each with various suitability to weapons vs energy.
We need a lot more info to have an informed conversation than a blanket statement like “weapons-grade plutonium”. And I definitely don’t trust any major media outlet journalist at this point to have any idea what the fuck they’re talking about, especially with regards to anything nuclear. They regularly get things wrong or even completely backwards from reality with less complicated topics.
Mirshe@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
There’s also just the fact that “weapons grade” just means it’s useful for a fission weapon. Nothing’s stopping you from taking that cobalt-60 you found in that Therac at Daryl’s junkyard, strapping it to an IED, and using that as a dispersal device to give a lot of people radiation poisoning or whatever (the traditional “dirty bomb”).