Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoSo what if any of this material slips out?
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.
It’s not actually that hard to find nuclear material in the wild you could use in a dirty bomb.
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.
Weapons grade nuclear material is a whole different ball game from the merelly highly radioactive material needed to merelly make a dirty bomb.
A bomb made with the stuff that’s not “weapons grade” won’t reach critical mass so there’re isn’t a nuclear detonation - all you have is a conventional bomb that spreads highly radioactive material.
With the weapons grade stuff you can actually make a nuclear bomb (rather than merelly a dirty bomb), so something powerfull enough to wipe out a city.
So weapons grade nuclear material is much more tightly controlled and way harder to get your hands on that merelly highly radioactive materials. Fortunatelly it’s also way harder to make (you need either a breeding nuclear reactor or special equipment to separate the U-235 isotope that can be used to make a nuclear bomb from the much more common U-236 one which cannot from uranium ore, and since these are two isotopes of the same heavy element, they are very hard to separate, hence all the talk about special “centrifugues” in nuclear weapons programs).
boydster@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yeah, but those things are not weapons-grade plutonium, either.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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 weeks 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”).