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From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Whoops! The Atlantic Makes Trump Look EPIC In Cover Intended as a Smear
Date: 21 Sep 2024 14:28:28 -0000
Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000)
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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?  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.  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."

>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
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."