On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>wrote:
> > > > LFTR reactors would produce U233 – which is very nasty stuff. > Yes but nasty can be your friend. Proliferation is a vastly smaller problem with a LFTR and its U-233 than with a conventional reactor and its Plutonium for a number of reasons: 1) Theoretically you can do it but it's hard to make a bomb with U-233, much harder than with Plutonium. As far as I know a U233 bomb was attempted only twice, in 1955 the USA set off a plutonium-U233 composite bomb, it was expected to produce 33 kilotons but only managed 22; and in 1998 India tried it but it was a complete flop, it produced a miniscule explosion of only 200 tons. 2) In a LFTR U-233 will always be contaminated with U232 which gives off such intense Gamma rays it would screw up the bomb electronics, be easy to detect, and probably killed the terrorist long before he was half finished making it. 3) The U233 is completely burned up inside the reactor where its hard to steal, unlike existing reactors where used fuel rods are shipped to reprocessing plants to extract the Plutonium. In one case the potential bomb making material needs to be shipped across the country, with a LFTR it never leaves the reactor building. 4) A regular reactor produces lots of neutrons but a LFTR makes less of them, so it needs all that U233 to keep the chain reaction going, if you try stealing some the reactor will simply stop operating making the theft obvious. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
