TechTakes

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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 10 months ago (5 children)

iirc us navy loads their reactors with 93% enriched uranium, the same grade that is used in (american) nukes (and also in couple of very special use cases like oak ridge high flux reactor fuel). can't hand this out just like that. one fuel load is expected to last entire ship lifetime. the less enriched grade you use, the bigger reactor becomes and refueling has to be more frequent

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems [S] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Trump was ready to give some Sam Altman project highly enriched uranium, though I'm not clear on whether that was 20% (already considered a serious proliferation risk) or full bomb-grade 95%.

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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

uranium or plutonium, because i've heard of some plutonium that was slated to be disposed of this way 20 years ago and just sat there unused (not that saltman has facilities or people to do anything with it)

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems [S] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

plutonium, looks like:

US offers nuclear energy companies access to weapons-grade plutonium - Oct 21st https://www.ft.com/content/2fbbc621-405e-4a29-850c-f0079b116216 https://archive.is/Pc949

The Department of Energy on Tuesday published an application that nuclear energy groups can use to seek up to 19 metric tonnes of the government’s weapons-grade plutonium from cold war-era warheads.

...

At least two companies, Oklo, which is backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and France’s Newcleo, are expected to apply to access the government’s plutonium stockpile.

may I just say:

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

However, experts have raised concerns about the commercial use of plutonium and the risk of the material falling into the wrong hands.

NO SHIT

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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 10 months ago

no you can't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium_Management_and_Disposition_Agreement

russians did their part, they basically gave that plutonium to their nuclear engineers for new things development to fuck around with and got a couple of working fast reactors out of that. americans did something that is very mckinsey coded and debated whether to burn it in pwr as mox like the french do or mix it with some magic powder and hide it in mountain which would be basically the same, right, and russians didn't like it because you can reverse that, and it ended up with americans doing nothing, then russians withdrew (and they were right in doing this)

tldr diplomacy by committee

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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 10 months ago

weird that EDF didn't want to buy it, maybe they also have surplus plutonium (reactor grade, so of worse quality)

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[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

The conclusion of the NS Savannah was that it would have been economical after the oil crisis of the 1970s caused a price spike in fuel costs. Ports also need facilities and training to handle nuclear fuel. Once you have that, it's perfectly viable.

Unlike energy generation on land, there isn't a lot of alternatives for decarbonizing marine transport.

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems [S] 3 points 10 months ago

I'm sure there will be no issues setting up nuclear fuel handling at ports worldwide. Well, maybe one or two.