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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Nukes are not that useful for stuff other than extremely destructive explosions.

Besides, we have knives. I'm afraid this mindset will soon demand everything to be pre-cut in licensed facilities and make the knives illegal.

This desire for censorship and restrictions is infinitely ridiculous. Instead of addressing the issues of why would someone want to hurt someone or themselves, they try to eliminate the tools.

This is going to fail, maybe people in UK or in the USA might end up not knowing how things work without formal licensing but people in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, China, Vietnam will know.

This attitude can actually lead to the downfall of the western societies. WTF the computer wouldn't tell me how to cook meth? That's something that junkies do and it's not the lack of knowing how to cook it that keeps me from doing it. I'm just curious, not looking to harm myself or anybody but I'm being lectured by a computer.

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You can power spaceships with nukes via the Orion drive. Still the highest known to work thrust/ISP ration we have right now.

You can fantasise about it, sure. Knowing how things work helps with that. Thanks to knowing thins, you can even calculate how it would work, write science fiction about it but if the contemporary mentality was in charge during the nuclear age a category of fiction wouldn't exists or would suck badly.

> Nukes are not that useful for stuff other than extremely destructive explosions.

I would like to mention that in the Fallout series, a game that depicts a different version of history where nuclear power was widely accessible, cars and robots have their own nuclear generators. The reality is that if nuclear power was common, we would not have any problems with energy or a power grid.

Nukes and nuclear energy are different things.

It’s also not a secret how to do these things, they teach it to kids. The complexities come from the engineering the device and that’s actually the secret part.

They aren't that different, all told. There is a reason IEDs are a huge safety concern. I'm failing to see how that wouldn't be worse with nuclear power sources.

Or am I mistaken and you could make it so that IEDs from nuclear energy couldn't be done?

IED's are not that much of safety concern actually. The people who intend to use those are. The risks of IEDs don't modulate by the number of people who know chemistry but by the number of people pissed of or delusional enough to make and use one.

Portugal is not much safer from IEDs than Irak because Portuguese are bad at chemistry and Iraqis are all heisenbergs.

I mean... you aren't wrong, having people willing to use an IED is the dangerous thing. More, they are as dangerous as the supplies that they can get ahold of.

I... don't see how that doesn't put a massive hazard on the availability of nuclear power generators everywhere? We have people willing to make and deploy IEDs today. Why would we not have them if nuclear sources were ubiquitous?

(If the idea is we would have the nuclear plants, but that the ubiquitous electronics would not have their own nuclear sources, I can see that. :) )

I don't see how this is relevant. Knowing how to do something is not the same as doing it.

Personally, I'm not anti-nuclear but I'm also not for proliferation of it simply because I don't trust that there are enough serious people to operate a nuclear plant in every city at the same safety levels we have today. That said, I will never advocate for hiding the knowledge for building those.

I am pro nuclear, but portable nuclear generators would be a whole new can of worms.

IEDs are a huge safety concern in battle zones, this isn't terry gilliam's brazil

as the old analogy goes, how big of a chunk of metal do you need to weld to the rail to kill everyone on the train? which part of that should be more illegal?

gun violence is a culture problem, not a security problem

know your threat model

I am only questioning nuclear generators. Such that comparing them to relatively inert metal welded to a rail seems disingenuous.

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