Re: Lack of Uranium?
Making plutonium in a power reactor is a non issue. It's multiple isotopes and virtually impossible to separate from used rods
The bigger problem is that ALL solid fuelled reactors can have depleted uranium rods stuck in them briefly to produce weapons-grade plutonium. These aren't "power" rods but the solid fuel design facilitates doing it
This underscores that the critcal part of the weapons proliferation cycle isn't "uranium" or "enriched uranium" but DEPLETED uranium
Making a uranium bomb is essentially uneconomic (the materials costs is about $40-100 billion per unit. It's cheaper to buy your enemy).
You need depleted uranium because a nuclear weapon actually needs very low radioactivity components, or it is likely to go off prematurely and natural uranium produces too much Pu239
Ditto trying to make bombs out of thorium -> U233. It makes u232 as part of the process - in sufficient quantitiy to be deadly to handle (gamma emission) and be an excellent fizzle maker(*). Attempting to separate U232/U233 wiould require a centrifuge farm 100 times larger than a natural uranium one AND it would need heavy lead shielding to protect the operators - all a bit noticeable really
(*) Teapot Dome is about the most sucessful one ever and it produced half the yield expected from what you'd see if the U233 had been replaced with U238 or tungsten
China's working on breeders - thermal breeders using thorium. Once working, Proliferation problem == solved and anyone continuing to enrich uranium is essentially exposed as doing so primarily for weaponsmaking purposes
(not to mention it also nobbles the US petrodollar hegemony. They're playing a long game)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
