News from Australia of a potential breakthrough in uranium enrichment, has set off an interesting discussion on the merits of nuclear energy over at the Daily Kos. Take a look when you get a chance, as nuclear energy gets more support than you might think.
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics, Australia
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics, Australia
Comments
Cheaper U enrichment makes bombs easier to make. Cheaper heavy water makes CANDU variants cheaper, including variants than can breed U233 from thorium.
I hope this advance is applicable to other isotope separation problems.
If you go to Silex's website, they propose to use it to do isotopic separation for silicon and carbon, for use in semiconductors.
Heavy water behaves differently enough in chemical reactions (the reaction rates are quite different in some cases, apparently) that you don't need the mass-related tricks used for uranium.
As to the proliferation risks, it doesn't appear to be easy technology to master; centrifuges are hard enough, this seems on first glance to be even tougher.
One possibility for weapons development that laser enrichment may offer advanced weapons states, however, is making almost perfectly pure Pu-239. Amongst other things, this would allow the development of a "gun bomb" (like the Hiroshima bomb) made from plutonium, but more importantly to a country like the US would apparently allow them to build physically smaller nuclear weapons (which makes sense; if predetonation isn't a problem your implosion mechanism could probably be a lot smaller and simpler).