> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons

I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.

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lukan 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

"Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes."

Not an expert, but isn't all you basically need to do is running the centrifuges a bit longer?

Breeding plutonium is a different process than enriching uranium, sure, but with enough enriched uran you will have a nuclear bomb.

And a dirty bomb is bad enough and simple to construct as well.

	▲	marcosdumay 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You need more centrifuges, several times more, but not orders of magnitude more. And you need nuclear reactors to make plutonium. The weapons you can make with plutonium are qualitatively different from the ones you can make with uranium.

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ajross 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.

Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.

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jabl 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA.

If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.

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ajross 3 days ago | parent [-]

That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.

Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.

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jabl 3 days ago | parent [-]

> That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.

Oh, interesting! If so, can you provide an example of anyone producing HEU starting from spent fuel?

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ajross 3 days ago | parent [-]

That's... not the way the burden of proof works here. You don't do non-proliferation analysis by only worrying about it after someone has proliferated. I think if you want to announce that reactors are useless for building bombs you need to provide a cite. Certainly nuclear non-proliferation work by real professionals does include the existence of a domestic nuclear industry.

	▲	jabl 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> That's... not the way the burden of proof works here. You don't do non-proliferation analysis by only worrying about it after someone has proliferated. Well, let's put it this way. If you want to create HEU you can either start from natural uranium, which is significantly easier to come by and isn't horribly radioactive. Or then you start from spent fuel, which is under IAEA safeguards (for other reasons), is very radioactive and thus very cumbersome, expensive and slow to deal with. Now which is more likely? Not saying creating HEU from spent fuel is impossible, it's just a stupid way of going about it, and spent fuel already being covered by IAEA safeguards for other reasons so it's probably also going to be easier to detect such a hypothetical clandestine nuclear program. > I think if you want to announce that reactors are useless for building bombs you need to provide a cite. If you read my original response I explicitly mentioned that you need a reactor if you want to create a U233 or Pu based bomb. So I have no idea where you get such a notion from. > Certainly nuclear non-proliferation work by real professionals does include the existence of a domestic nuclear industry. True, but again not a point I have argued against.