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Comment by throwaway69123 | Hacker News Reader

“The enriched uranium fuel they use must be kept secure. “ really lacking context on this sentence, enriched nuclear waste is stored because of non proliferation treaties not because of limitations of the science or technology

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Non-proliferation and more importantly nefarious use.

Like dirty bombs, that anyone can make easily, who can make a ordinary bomb.

Enriched uranium would not make a particularly impressive dirty bomb. Spent nuclear fuel, or some specific very radioactive isotopes, maybe.

Even more sinister would be to just hide radioactive material some place. No bomb, no one knows whats wrong because no one casually sweeps a geiger counter, and this probably would probably irradiate people nearby for years before its found.

Yeah, but the point of terror is to make terror, that people are afraid. Not to actually damage much. A dirty bomb would be a perfect terror weapon as people are afraid of radiation and mostly would not trust government when they declare it is safe.

The US actually does have a radiation detector network that covers most major cities. If you have enough radioactive material to pose a threat to people's health from brief exposure over a non-trivial area, it would be detected. You'd probably also wind up on a lot of intelligence agencies' radars trying to acquire that much radioactive material and the equipment for handling it.

How many smoke detectors would you have to stockpile before getting a knock on your door?

Dirty bombs are an overblown threat, compared to a regular bomb parked near a stadium security line or what you can make with off the shelf chemicals.

The fallout from a dirty bomb would be relatively easily cleaned up with showers and a few hoses on streets and buildings. The people close to the blast would also inhale some radioactive dust which will be a much bigger problem, but most of them will probably just die because of the conventional explosion itself. The radioactive dust is definitely far less problematic than shrapnel from a fragmentation bomb.

Overall dirty bombs are really not a problem bigger than any other kind of bomb.

In addition to proliferation and other tasks: do not turn into radioactive meteor upon reentry breakup.

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