Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[belbear42]

Lerner wrote: We’ve discussed this before on the forum (I don’t remember exactly where.) Key point is that with FF, no one needs uranium for anything. Uranium supplies can be tightly controlled, and the fission reactor industry shut down, ending any proliferation of nuclear weapons. In my opinion this should be linked to eliminating nuclear weapons inthe countries that have them, but that’s another matter.

I agree that the fission industry can be shut down if cheap fusion is available, but even in that case a lot of in that case useless uranium will be lingering around (including “depleted” U238). And controlling uranium supplies is tricky business, especially with so much natural uranium deposits available in countries with questionable regimes (that tend to deal with each other, disregarding proliferation laws).
And after all, laws and regulations are there to be broken. The only laws we cannot break are the laws of physics.

I just wanted to know how if FF reactor abuse for plutonium breeding is physically possible for someone really determined to do this, or is the answer something like “okay, MAYBE in a 10000 year run you would have enough plutonium for a bomb”. In that case we may discard this threat as very unlikely.

For the fight against proliferation, it’s useless to ban the current hard-to-get technology for making plutonium, only to replace it with a new easy-to-get tool to achieve the same goal.