Reply #34: :confused: [View All]

Making plutonium for bombs is an old and robust technology. That cat's already out of the bag. When nations like Israel or North Korea start making plutonium, when any nation starts making plutonium in large amounts, it's a sure bet they are making bombs.

Enriched uranium weapons are political circus and always have been. The primary military purpose of uranium enrichment plants is to make fuel for compact nuclear reactors of the sort used in ships and submarines. The civilian purpose is to enrich fuel for light water power plants. But compared to plutonium, uranium enrichment is a very expensive way to make bombs and the infrastructure required to do it is excessively fragile and difficult to secure against military attack.

In the modern real world, as opposed to any Cold War fantasy world, civilian nuclear reactors are very useful for destroying plutonium made for weapons and are being used in this manner today. Turning old bomb cores into fuel for civilian nuclear power plants is most certainly "Atoms for Peace."