This all makes sense. But also, I strongly suspect that sabotaging the nuclear power industry this way was a deliberate choice, driven by nuclear weapon proliferation concerns. The experience curve for nuclear power has a lot of overlapping pieces with the experience curve for nuclear weapons; if the US went all-nuclear for its electricity, then other countries would follow, and it’d be a lot harder to stop a country from acquiring nuclear weapons when they already have nuclear power. Similarly, nuclear reactors are a vital piece of US naval power, and commoditized nuclear power generation would undermine that.
I don’t think these concerns were worth sacrificing nuclear power, given how much of a problem CO2 emissions turned out to be. But it does mean that the right strategy for fixing things might be subtler than it looks, and involve finding a department hidden away somewhere and convincing them that there are new reactor designs with less proliferation risk.
And so, it came as a surprise to me to learn recently that such an alternative has been available to us since World War II, but not pursued because it lacked weapons applications.
It feels perverse, to me, that thorium has been an available option since WW2, and was ignored because it was NOT good for making weapons; and now it is cited that embracing thorium increases the risk of nuclear proliferation.
I like to point people to the DHS on dirty bombs, because you know the DHS is not in the business of downplaying national security risks.
It is very difficult to design an RDD that would deliver radiation doses high enough to cause immediate health effects or fatalities in a large number of people. Therefore, experts generally agree that an RDD would most likely be used to:
Contaminate facilities or places where people live and work, disrupting lives and livelihoods.
Cause anxiety in those who think they are being, or have been, exposed
That last point is obviously correct: people still act terrified of radiation and “exposure”. This year I got a solid dose of ~20 mSv for a single medical test. The way a lot of people talk about radiation, that’s a huge exposure. But if it’s administered by a doctor instead of a hypothetical dirty bomb, I expect people don’t worry too much about it.
But let’s look at the terrorists we know about. How many terrorist groups do you know of that are less interested in killing people and more interested in causing anxiety and inconvenience?
I mean, I guess if someone disrupts the power grid by blowing up some transformers, or puts a carcinogenic substance in our drinking water (hot dogs? kidding), we might call them terrorists, but that’s not a normal terrorist M.O., right?
But also, if the “terrorist”’s goal is to just disrupt and not kill, there must be easier ways to do that than to steal used nuclear fuel. Used fuel is protected by security guards, containment buildings and containment casks, right? I’m not an expert on this, but couldn’t somebody just buy various carcinogens from a Home Depot and spray them into a reservoir?
Any reactor does that though, and it doesn’t even have to be a power reactor; hardly a meaninful differentiator.
Dirty bombs just require any reasonably short halflife radioactives (~tens to hundereds of year halflife ideally) that can spread the dust over an area. In some sense the fear is really overblown; they’re only effective in the sense that any first world country will predictably overreact to even trace, harmless, radioactive contamination and spend billions on cleanup and have a massive panic. Thus making it an effective terror weapon even if it was so impotent as to cause no actual harm from radiation.
Maybe inconsistent actions by different government agencies as a result of poor communication? Where nuclear weapons are concerned, poor communication is to be expected.
This all makes sense. But also, I strongly suspect that sabotaging the nuclear power industry this way was a deliberate choice, driven by nuclear weapon proliferation concerns. The experience curve for nuclear power has a lot of overlapping pieces with the experience curve for nuclear weapons; if the US went all-nuclear for its electricity, then other countries would follow, and it’d be a lot harder to stop a country from acquiring nuclear weapons when they already have nuclear power. Similarly, nuclear reactors are a vital piece of US naval power, and commoditized nuclear power generation would undermine that.
I don’t think these concerns were worth sacrificing nuclear power, given how much of a problem CO2 emissions turned out to be. But it does mean that the right strategy for fixing things might be subtler than it looks, and involve finding a department hidden away somewhere and convincing them that there are new reactor designs with less proliferation risk.
It feels perverse, to me, that thorium has been an available option since WW2, and was ignored because it was NOT good for making weapons; and now it is cited that embracing thorium increases the risk of nuclear proliferation.
AFAIK, no one knows how to make a thorium reactor that doesn’t create dirty bomb risk even though their enrichment risk can be made low.
I like to point people to the DHS on dirty bombs, because you know the DHS is not in the business of downplaying national security risks.
That last point is obviously correct: people still act terrified of radiation and “exposure”. This year I got a solid dose of ~20 mSv for a single medical test. The way a lot of people talk about radiation, that’s a huge exposure. But if it’s administered by a doctor instead of a hypothetical dirty bomb, I expect people don’t worry too much about it.
But let’s look at the terrorists we know about. How many terrorist groups do you know of that are less interested in killing people and more interested in causing anxiety and inconvenience?
I mean, I guess if someone disrupts the power grid by blowing up some transformers, or puts a carcinogenic substance in our drinking water (hot dogs? kidding), we might call them terrorists, but that’s not a normal terrorist M.O., right?
But also, if the “terrorist”’s goal is to just disrupt and not kill, there must be easier ways to do that than to steal used nuclear fuel. Used fuel is protected by security guards, containment buildings and containment casks, right? I’m not an expert on this, but couldn’t somebody just buy various carcinogens from a Home Depot and spray them into a reservoir?
Any reactor does that though, and it doesn’t even have to be a power reactor; hardly a meaninful differentiator.
Dirty bombs just require any reasonably short halflife radioactives (~tens to hundereds of year halflife ideally) that can spread the dust over an area. In some sense the fear is really overblown; they’re only effective in the sense that any first world country will predictably overreact to even trace, harmless, radioactive contamination and spend billions on cleanup and have a massive panic. Thus making it an effective terror weapon even if it was so impotent as to cause no actual harm from radiation.
Maybe inconsistent actions by different government agencies as a result of poor communication? Where nuclear weapons are concerned, poor communication is to be expected.