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Comment by helmsb | Hacker News Reader

I once heard that stealing nuclear material from a reactor design like this was akin to stealing a lit bar-b-bq grill by hand. Not impossible but not very easy or practical.

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If you mean it would be a suicide mission, those happen with some regularity.

Except that you need to survive in order to successfully steal the fuel. And you won't survive. QED

Not necessarily if you're part of a team.

That is dark.

It is, and it's standard practice. Suicide bombers are almost always part of a team that provides them with instructions and know-how, sometimes equipment and money, and first and foremost with a goal to die for. Also, lots of these attacks are part of a greater political scheme, and I would assume pretty much all attackers are aware of that. If your sacrifice means your side gets access to actual freaking atomic bombs, I mean, I could see that be pretty enticing.

And if not there's always the option to make people do lethal things against their will. People have been sent to their deaths by the millions over the course of history, that's totally doable.

IMO, dotting the landscape with such reactors is just asking for some state or other to take them and use them to leapfrog a lot of the effort required to build nuclear bombs.

Sure, but maybe your dirt poor family will get a million dollars and/or rich country passports.

Or less if you don't have long to live anyway.

Those are "carrot" versions. There are also "stick" ones.

You do realize the lengths states like Iran are going to enrich enough Uranium for a few simple bombs? If this works as a shortcut, it doesn't have to be easy or practical. And besides, it might be a lot easier if you don't care whether the people cracking the thing open will survive the ordeal, or whether radioactivity gets released to the environment.

More important is that you have to do it before a response can be deployed.

If you treat these things like nuclear weapons they won't be very useful. Securing those bombs is enormously costly. You can't do the same for thousands or more of such reactors deployed for decades, all over the world, under civilian control.

Given that even the US Military doesn't have infinite resources, how can you guarantee there will be a fast response, or any response at all, or even that anyone will notice 20 years after deployment if someone with the resources of a nation state tries to get at that Pu? There might be wars where that reactor is deployed, there might be natural disasters, people might switch to 100% renewables and lose interest in the reactor, ...

>> You can't do the same for thousands or more of such reactors deployed for decades, all over the world, under civilian control.

So what? Put them under military control, then.

Hooraa!

NWO, there you go!

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