Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 7 hours 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.
boydster@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
Yeah, but those things are not weapons-grade plutonium, either.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 6 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.