[mrDmrTmrJ]

We control nuclear proliferation by making enriched uranium (U235) very, very hard to acquire.

While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.

[thephyber]

Why did you interpret your parent as is they were serious about putting nuclear power in every device?

It was extremely clear to me that it was a comment to show the stupidity of the admin insisting that energy density was the right/only heuristic for evaluating which fuel sources to use/support.

[jijijijij]

Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium. Stuff that’s producing enough thermal energy through natural decay, rather than criticality in a reactor. You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.

[dragonwriter]

>Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium.

The rover ones use Pu-238.

> You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.

The Curiosity and Perserverance rovers each have one MMRTG (multimission radiothermal generator), and I've never seen a picture of the rover where it is censored, and its actually explicitly called out and shown and drawn attention to in lots of NASA publicity stuff.

https://share.google/cqF7eqAJtLH52ALtN

https://mars.nasa.gov/internal_resources/788/

[jijijijij]

Looks like I misremembered or confused the censoring stuff. Thanks for the correction.

[DoctorOetker]

Why would those nuclear "batteries" be censored from Mars rover imagery? To prevent bad actors from acquiring the stuff for a dirty B?

[jijijijij]

Yeah, the Mars Liberation Front may use it to attack City 1!

It‘s the battery tech, which is classified military stuff. I presume it’s a thing you put in submarine detectors deep in the ocean, or compact spy satellites.

But indeed, it’s the type of radioisotope that’s dangerous to just be around, where minuscule amounts could fuck up the whole village. But terrorists would probably rather get their hands on emitters from the medical field than fly to mars.

[mrbluecoat]

Non-weapon fissile material Thorium is an option.

[MertsA]

Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. All thorium reactors work by breeding that thorium into uranium.

[AnthonyMouse]

Commercial reactor fuel isn't weapons-grade to begin with.

[XorNot]

This cannot be stressed enough: commercial reactor fuel is 5% enriched. Bomb material is 90+% enriched.