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From: Mad Hamish <newsunspammelaws@iinet.unspamme.net.au>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Whoops! The Atlantic Makes Trump Look EPIC In Cover Intended as a Smear
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2024 01:22:31 +1000
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On 21 Sep 2024 14:28:28 -0000, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

>Mad Hamish  <newsunspammelaws@iinet.unspamme.net.au> wrote:
>>Australia has a single 20MW  open pool nuclear reactor which is useful
>>for research and creating medical isotopes
>
>Don't you still have one of the Westinghouse research reactors? 

Not as far as I can find. 
We've had a nuclear reactor since 1957 when High Flux Australian
Reactor (HIFAR) went into operation, then it was replaced with the
open pool australia lightwater reactor (OPAL) in 2007

HIFAR was based on a UK DIDO design

> They
>were reliable and safe and pretty much free from issues of misuse to
>create plutonium.  The US shipped a lot of them around the world....
>even the Congo got one and Australia got a couple.

Not as far as I can tell we didn't, it's possible it's held up in
customs.

>  They are getting
>long in the tooth and political issues are getting a lot of them shut
>down, though.  The one at Georgia Tech got shut down in the mid-nineties,
>and the one in Pittsburgh got shut down at about the same time.
>
>I was told by a Westinghouse engineer that they "were intrinsically
>safe-- so safe even Italians can run them."

Yeah, but they would say that wouldn't they?
>
>>So while it's true that we have a nuclear reactor we don't have
>>anything that would be useful to create nuclear weapons
>
>The problem is that it's hard to purify uranium to make bombs because
>that is a difficult physical process that involves separating out
>isotopes by very small atomic mass differences, while purifying plutonium
>is a comparatively easy chemical process.  So reactions that make 
>plutonium as a byproduct are frowned on by the UN crew, while reactions
>whose decay products are anything other than plutonium are considered okay.
>--scott