Posted by dsalzman 10 hours ago
[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-high-assay-low-enric... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium
It is when your goal is to throw a ton of alpha emitters into the environment for the population to ingest. Do you remember your nuclear cookie thought experiment?
It emits so slowly that the main hazard is heavy metal poisoning, which you'd also get from the depleted uranium that's a waste product from enrichment.
From the numbers I see on https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-u..., if a dirty bomb with 1kg of 100% pure Uranium-235 exploded and evenly deposited a fine dust over a 170 by 170 meter square of typical soil, the total Uranium-235 (and specifically that isotope) of the top meter would only double; the total mass of uranium in that volume would only go up by 0.7%.
The average concentration of natural uranium in soil is about 2 parts per million, which is equivalent to 2 grams of uranium in 1000 kg of soil. This means that the top metre of soil in a typical 10 m ´ 40 m garden contains about 2 kg of uranium (corresponding to about 50,000,000 Bq of activity just from the decay of the uranium isotopes and ignoring the considerable activity associated with the decay of the progeny. Concentrations of uranium in granite range from 2 parts per million to 20 parts per million. Uranium in higher concentrations (50 - 1000 mg per kg of soil) can be found in soil associated with phosphate deposits. In air, uranium exists as dust. Very small, dust-like particles of uranium in the air are deposited onto surface water, plant surfaces, and soil. These particles of uranium eventually end up back in the soil or in the bottom of lakes, rivers, and ponds, where they mix with the natural uranium that is already there. Typical activity concentrations of uranium in air are around 2 µBq per cubic metre. (UNSCEAR 2000).
Or seriously exciting. We might actually get affordable, clean nuclear energy this century.
https://urencousa.com/about/our-history
The parent Urenco company has been operating private uranium enrichment plants in Europe since the 1970s.
We could reach Lex Luther level villainy in no time at all
Plenty of human made websites with terrible graphics. We'd complain, but we wouldn't say the content is worthless because the art looks bad.
Many humans do care if you AI generate your writing, and won't read it if it's blatant. But as you say, the humans are a tiny fraction of total net traffic, who cares.
This severely reduces the "breakout time" the international community relies on to detect and stop nuclear proliferation.
For nations with enrichment capabilities, enrichment is not a major contributor to overall breakout time. Enrichment doesn't take much time, it's building enrichment facilities that takes a while, especially clandestinely.
It is mostly a matter of money and international politics now. It takes a significant amount of money to build and power, and it is hard to hide the scale of building and power usage from international watchdogs. Because nothing consumes tons of energy and doesn't output tons of product to sell except for nuclear material refinement for weapons.
Until datacenters