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NRC Accused of Ignoring Proliferation Risks With SILEX Enrichment
Harperdog writes "Scott Kemp has a disturbing look at SILEX, a new technology that 'happens to be well suited for making nuclear weapons.' There are many disturbing aspects the this article, not least that the NRC, which is required to consider the critical question of proliferation, has so far punted when it comes to examining that question. 'The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has refused to consider the proliferation risk in its decision to issue a license for the first commercial SILEX facility, despite a statutory obligation to do so. Only a few weeks remain for Congress to intervene.'"
Not everyone agrees that SILEX poses a real proliferation threat. Kind of a shame that its environmental benefits (lower power consumption and a smaller waste stream than existing processes) are what increase the proliferation risk.
So what are they supposed to do, make a law against using this technology? Yeah, that will work --NOT!
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
You mean a plant here here in the USA? You realize that we already HAVE nuclear weapons, yes? Enough to destroy the entire world a couple times over. How much more proliferationey does it need to be in order to concern you?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The alternative is to not build a SILEX plant in the US.
And what will the results be? Will no one else build them? If the technical hurdle, as the article claims, is the laser system, and if they are getting easier to produce, then it seems unlikely that no one else will produce a SILEX plant.
Therefore, the danger does not stem from the US building a SILEX plant. It stems from laser research. So why doesn't the article insist we stop researching lasers?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It will probably become easier to enrich uranium for anyone who has the resources to do it, whether or not this Silex technology is made commercial scale. It's not like the basics of the technology are a secret.
Does the USA realize that all this "we're running the world" stuff just makes foreign extremists angry? Even more determined to have it?
Imagine it was the other way around with some other country telling the USA what to do...
No sig today...
The development of this technology for commercial power generation uses must not be stopped, rather if it has benefits, encouraged. Just becasue there are issues that it can be used to make a bomb, should not stop countries such as the US developing it for its nuclear power plants. I would agree that the facilities to process it should be licenced and monitored and we should keep it out of the hands of rogue states such as Iran.
Even if their power grid hadn't collapsed they're having trouble meeting demand because of the weak monsoon lowering reservoirs. Fission power should last a several hundred years.
You're unusually on topic today. Really!
Thank you for being a friend
As GWB said, if your not with us, you're against us, axis of evil and all that stuff. Since they're already doing laser enrichment I don't think us doing it is going to have much effect on them...
Traveled down the road and back again
Obviously a reference to laser enrichment requiring fewer stages to reach the same enrichment
Your heart is true you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
Some of the research was sent to .ru by "fellow travelers". BTW I think its confidant, but cosmonaut sounds cooler so we'll stick with that.
And if you threw a party
Aka an enrichment plant
Invited everyone you ever knew
Aka a really Fing big enrichment plant, after all nothing ever goes wrong when you put all your eggs in one optimized basket. Stuxnet? Whats that?
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
20KT in a standard shipping container, no problemo. Only need 1 way shipping on this one, obviously. Um, try not to drop it enroute, ok?
And the card attached would say thank you for being a friend.
The usual "obvious" sarcasm where if we didn't expend amazing resources fighting the world, we wouldn't need to fight the world. But that would reduce wartime profits so thats never gonna happen. If only there were a way to make "wartime profits" in peacetime. I don't think facebook IPOs are going to do it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If the technology has been proven I think it will get out there eventually regardless of whether it's deployed commercially in the west or not. Even if it's through a fresh development effort which would not have been undertaken had the technology not been previously proven. It seems to me that the best chance we have at detecting any future clandestine SILEX lab would be to use the technology now under a well established regulatory system and gain experience which may be valuable in detecting labs in the future. Do we really want to let someone else be first to build these things?
...in case you were wondering. An energy-efficient means of enriching uranium, worrisome because it would be harder to detect its use than older methods.
Just another U.S. government agency ignoring the law. Nothing to see here folks ... move along.
History shows again and again how Nature points out the folly of Man!
Whats a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor? 35x less waste with mostly useful byproducts for medical and space industry? WHATEV, THIS MDMA IS GREAT!!! SKRILLEX SUCKS!!!!
Hey it went up...I wonder what happens now...
China has nukes, and officially so. They are "allowed" to according to the NPT.
Iran signed the NPT. Since 2006 it's a bit iffy, but so far they managed to play along.
NKor, sorry, but I can't take that tinpot dictator serious. He has nukes? Bloody unlikely. But even if, short of hurling them around by hand I fail to see a distribution system.
Pakistan (and India, while we're at it) could be much more of an issue.
But what about Israel, while we're listing potential nuke owners? I mean, they never even signed the NPT...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Don't worry about North Korea. Once the US women's soccer team beats them in the Olympics today, Kim Jong Numero Uno will just collapse and North Korea will automatically become a capitalist's playground! /i kid /not about us beating North Korea /let's go USA women's soccer /hope solo is really hot
If Iran got their hands on this technology, it'd be a lot more fun to make it run incorrectly than some dumb centrifuge. We could blow a hole right through their building with the laser lol.
What are they going to do, pass a law making it illegal to ignore a statutory requirement?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...in case you were wondering. An energy-efficient means of enriching uranium, worrisome because it would be harder to detect its use than older methods.
Too bad they can't do it with Erotic EXcitation... then we could power the world with internet porn.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What I never got was all those outcries along the lines of "We're not the worlds police" .. yet you have things like this happening more and more
English
Foreign extremists will be angry. About something. Always. This is all they do.
People who bomb civilians by surprise, in their homelands mostly BTW, are not people you ever consider having a valid agenda you can somehow appease by changing your own behavior.
Because it's not about your behavior. It is about their behavior, and their agenda, which would violently exist no matter what you said or did.
At some point you have to realize you have to oppose people on the basis of their lame agenda and their lame tactics as a simple matter of principle. THEIR agenda. Which would exist no matter how peaceful or not the West is or ever was. And in opposing them, you do not piss them off. Because they are already pissed off and interested in bombing anyone who opposes them already. Come to them with flowers, or come to them with a drone, they are already engaged in the business of murder according to their own teachings and desires, completely independent of anything in the West's agenda. It is the height of arrogance to assume you are the source of their menace. The source of their menace is their own ideology, created completely on their own, completely having nothing to do with the West. You would know this, if you saw the obvious truth that the greatest victim of these a**holes are their own people, in their own homelands.
This whole premise of appeasing radical hotheads is a complete nonstarter. You don't appease them. You oppose them. They are already committed to violence according to their own self-realized agenda. Their agenda has nothing to do with, and will never have anything to do with, anything the West ever did or is doing.
You oppose them on principle, and you oppose them in the name of helping the moderates in their homelands retain control of their homelands. You don't try to appease them. Because you can't ever appease them. You have to understand what kind of a**holes you are really dealing with here. Currently, you do not. You believe this arrogant lie that these monsters are created by the West, somehow, by magic, even as these monsters cite their own ideological beliefs in their inspiration, and even as they have an agenda which has nothing to do with the West, and has to do with transforming their own societies into medieval hellholes.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if you look up "nuclear" in any good encyclopedia, you'll see a photos straight up satans a$$.
NKor, sorry, but I can't take that tinpot dictator serious. He has nukes? Bloody unlikely. But even if, short of hurling them around by hand I fail to see a distribution system.
Now that Tin Pot is married, he will need them, just to be sure.
Given that Nukes are the only peacekeeping weapons the world has ever known I fail to see how proliferation is a serious problem. A nuclear armed global society is a poilte global society.
Liquid salt reactors weren't built because they can't be used to enrich Uranium. We know how to build them. Why aren't we building them.
Imagine you are the government of Iran. Putting religious and cultural issues aside for a moment, you have seen two of your neighbors occupied by a superpower - and in the case of Iraq, done on the backs of blatant lies that nearly everyone now acknowledges.
Wouldn't *you* want the ultimate defensive weapon (nukes) to keep the crazy Westerners from invading, ala North Korea? Put in that light, the choice appears rather rational.
NKor, sorry, but I can't take that tinpot dictator serious. He has nukes? Bloody unlikely. But even if, short of hurling them around by hand I fail to see a distribution system.
Thought they had a possible successful Nuclear test back in 2009. It was a small underground test.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Its not big surprise that the US has kept reactor technology that is half to two thirds crappy for producing electricity, but has the benefits of making really stuff that makes really big holes in the ground. Molten salt reactors were suggested as being much cheaper to build, much safer, and wildly more efficient in 1974, but the US government killed it, threatening to end the careers of the scientists who proposed it. The big problem for them was that you can't make stuff that blows up with the new technology. We've had 38 years of nuclear technology that is highly dangerous, highly radioactive, extremely expensive to: build, maintain, decommission because of this. Yet we still have them. Marvin the Martian wasn't the only one: "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering Kaboom!?!?"
Ca 1969-70, Exxon developed laser isotope separation enough to claim over 90% reduction of separation energy expenditure on easily commercializable processes and began preparation for construction of commercial facilities. After the developers made statements about ease, like even in a garage, Exxon was slapped with a weapons proliferation impact statement, a shocking response then. We didn't hear too much about laser isotope separation after that.
Really, there are ways to live life without nukes. They're not perfect, either, but I'm less worried about a solar bomb, and the only wind bombs around here come out of the dogs.
In ancient times, Silex was a brand of vacuum coffee maker, a glass contraption that my parents used.
Pakistan and India never signed it, either. But it's possible that the presence of nuclear weapons kept the last flare-up from getting out of control.
Israel has never admitted to having weapons but has never denied it, either. They do this specifically to keep the world guessing as part of its deterrence strategy. Had it not been for Mordechai Vanunu, the world might still be guessing about it instead of being almost completely certain. There is a small segment that thinks that Vanunu is actually either an agent or a dupe of Mossad and that his revelations were meant to cover up a lack of nuclear weapons. Building and maintaining them is, after all, hideously expensive. For example, sanctions aside, Iran would be in much better economic shape if it got its enriched uranium from those who have already sunk the start-up costs. But maintaining a significant home-grown defense capability--including nuclear weapons--provides a powerful capability that few nations have. Iran has learned this lesson, though not to the same capability as Israel.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I was around Princeton in the late 1980s when this idea of using lasers to modify the rates of chemical reactions was being talked about. In general, I've been thinking about this nuclear proliferation issue for a long time (not just for that reason, a professor I had there, Frank von Hippel, who worked on non-proliferation issues, was upset/concerned when I raised the issue in a paper for his seminar that people would soon be able to make weapons at home or in small communities as technology proliferated, like we see now with 3D printed gun parts). Some possible answers I've come to are in my sig and on my site.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Last I heard was that there was a huge detonation but the accompanying radiation that should have been there was not detected, so it is quite possible that he just pulled a huge publicity stunt by blowing up a few tons of TNT.
Even if he had "da bomb", lacking a sensible way to get it anywhere means that at best he could blow up himself, and, frankly, I'm not so sure if NKor would look worse after that...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, considering how they're wedged between two invaded countries right now, you can't really blame Iran for wanting an "invasion deterrent"...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If they want it, they should go down the path that North Korea did and drop off the NPT. That will, of course, practically guarantee military action, but it's an option and the only legal one at that. I'm in the minority that thinks they want it and are building things up to just shy of actual construction, skirting legalities of construction (but probably breaking the treaty's openness provisions).
Iran wields a great deal of influence in Iraq right now and had a dream of basically running the Middle East. It had the run of Syria through al-Assad, mostly ran Lebanon via Hezbollah's majority in government, and a major proxy in Hamas. Its plans for expansion seem to be coming to a halt, though. It had hoped to garner influence in Egypt through the Muslim Brotherhood, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Hamas and Hezbollah, unwilling to be seen as supporting the oppressive al-Assad government, have been reluctant at best to obey Iran's demands to provide men and resources, focusing instead on their local needs (and possibly suffering financially for it). Iran's dreams of controlling the Middle East (and maybe laying the ground for a caliphate upon the return of the 13th Imam), a decent possibility only three years ago, are now growing quite distant. Iv they stuck to more normal means of dealing with other countries, they wouldn't be in their current poor state.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.