Re: Stealing a Nuclear Reactor

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

> Designing and building a reactor is EASY.  You don't
> need to steal one.  It would be much easier to build

In point of fact, I once built a fast-breeder nuclear reactor on a dare.
Needed to raid the Physics department, but I was able to get one built out
of a shoebox, a few sheets of metal foil, carbon paper and a sample of
Pu-238.  (Not -239.  Cornell didn't have access to any weapons-grade
material, but -238 works just as well.  Damn radioactive, too.)

If you're talking about building a nuclear reactor to provide power, yes,
you're right, it's easy.  Doing it /well/ is hard.  Compare a Canadian CANDU
reactor to a Soviet RBMK reactor.  The former has a simple design that still
requires lots of engineering expertise; the RBMK reactor is simple and
requires very little in the way of heavy equipment.

No CANDU reactor has ever had a criticality incident; the negative
coefficient of moderation means incidents are almost, but not quite,
impossible.  Compare this to the world's most famous RBMK reactor,
Chernobyl.

-Nothing- involving high-energy nuclear reactions is `easy' if you possess
the requisite respect for hard radiation and concern for the environment.

> The HARD part is getting the fissile material.

Raw fissile material is easy to come by.  You can buy pitchblende on the
international market, for crying out loud.  *Refining* it into useful
fissile material requires a lot of energy, a lot of engineering expertise,
and a lot of very toxic chemicals.  Uranium hexaflouride just isn't fun
stuff.  Still, it's no more toxic than gold mining.

> not to "constructive" pursuits.  The only benefit of a
> reactor to terrorists is to create more bomb-grade
> material, but most reactors are running the
> non-bomb-grade uranium that cannot be converted.  This

Any nuclear reactor can be converted to a fast-breeder reactor.  Once you
have a fast-breeder, you're halfway to creating any fast-fissile isotope you
want.