Re: Whoops! The Atlantic Makes Trump Look EPIC In Cover Intended as a Smear

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