I’m starting this article not because of the title subject but what I consider alarming statements made by folks in the US about how the tech used here could be used for clandestine enrichment.
Best cast it’s an attempt to dissuade other countries from adopting the CANDU reactor, or keep Canada buying enriched uranium from the states, and worse case it’s further pretence for annexation.
“The only thing that inhibits Canada is the will to do it, the political decision to do it,” said nuclear weapons expert Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, who served as head of national security and international affairs in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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“All uranium-fuelled reactors produce plutonium. The issue with the CANDU is that it has online refuelling,” explained Ed Lyman, director of nuclear safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. “You’re refuelling continuously, which makes it harder for the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].”
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“Of the countries that have made nuclear weapons with plutonium, many of them have used a heavy water reactor,” he said.
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Canada is also branching out into a new kind of technology that will require enriched uranium: the small modular reactor (SMR). Some of the proposed SMRs would use uranium enriched to a level as high as 20 per cent, known as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
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“And so I worry about this push for advanced reactors, SMRs that use HALEU up near 20 per cent, like the ARC 100 in Canada, that the material itself is in the dangerous band. And if Canada were to pursue a whole fleet of SMRs using HALEU, and especially if they were to build their own enrichment plants to support that, that might give them a threshold capability for bombs, even if they never make highly enriched [over 20 per cent] uranium.”
God the comments are depressing. “The only way to protect from the bad guys with nukes is to give the good guys nukes!”
Right, because the same logic worked with guns in the US. Mel Hurtig is rolling in his grave rn.
Name the number of countries the USA has threatened that have nukes.
Literally North Korea, but way to ignore the point.
All it takes is one maniac or rogue government to come into power and the world is over if they decide to do the unthinkable. We came close to the end of the world because of literal malfunctioning equipment before.
Nobody should have these weapons, the people who saw first hand what they did to the Japanese know that, and despite how often the narrative is that it was a necessary evil to end WWII, their very existence should constitute a war crime seeing that they are indiscriminate in who they kill, to which innocent civilians will be guaranteed to always die seeing that these weapons have only gotten more powerful since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I can’t even trust governments not to drone strike innocent families in the Middle East, why the fuck should I trust them with weapons that can kill millions?
USA has never threatened military action on North Korea since they acquired nukes. You proved my point.
We can hold hands and pretend we can all get along, but countries with nukes don’t get fucked around by the USA. This was heavily discussed by scientists at Los alamos. The reason to use the bombs in Japan was not to end the war in the pacific, it was to scare the world into not trying to start another world war.
If we abolished nukes completely, we would return to invasions with conventional weapons, which also have megatons of destructive force, because we let countries buy them from anyone.
Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton bomb. USA dropped 88 kilotons on Iraq.
Are we forgetting the North Korea crisis?
“Trump warns N Korea that US military is ‘locked and loaded’”
“Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S.”
“Trump discussed using a nuclear weapon on North Korea in 2017 and blaming it on someone else, book says”
Putting aside the fact that the war in Iraq should have never happened to begin with, even when you have soldiers deliberately gunning down civilians like they did in Haditha, and bombs hitting civilians, that’s spread out over a larger area that is overall more deliberate in targetting military targets. Conventional warfare for all it’s flaws, is more humane than say, nuking a city of a million people and calling it a day. One of the reasons landmines are considered a war crime is because they’re indiscriminate. Nukes should be classified the exact same way.