Thorium Reactors and Nuclear Bombs

For the sake of argument I’ll stipulate it’s remotely possible to make a nuke with thorium reactors.

Why does that sound like a hypothetical?

Well let’s start with a comment made by Morio Murase of Thorium Now.

The proliferation concern comes through the idea that you can irradiate thorium to get protactinium-233, extract the protactinium, wait 29 days, and presto, almost-pure U-233. The thing is, one needs to keep Pa-232 out of there because that turns into U-232, whose gamma emissions can really mess with someone making nuclear weapons. So you’d need to build the breeder reactor to deliberately irradiate thorium, and deliberately separate out the protactinium and possibly isotopically separate it if you’re going to make a U-233 bomb. No UN inspector’s going to be fooled by that, and if you’re going to go through all that trouble, you might as well burn both U-233 and U-232 and get some dirt-cheap power out of a proper reactor.

Another thing working against U-233 proliferation is the fact that the only bomb ever to have used it didn’t have the power the US military expected. If you’re going to go through all that trouble to make U-233 for a WMD, you might as well make plutonium instead. And that’s exactly what just about every nation that developed nuke weapons has done.

I conclude that yes, there is a proliferation risk in the thorium fuel cycle, but it is minuscule compared to uranium-238, and more difficult than what anti-nukes seem to believe.

It sounds like a hypothetical because one wonders if it were viable to weaponize, why then are there thorium stockpiles all over the world gathering dust and why thorium itself remains little more than a mining waste byproduct. I mean seriously, if it’s so dangerous it should be valuable and scooped up on that basis alone. Plutonium is absurdly valuable when you get right to it, dangerous and toxic as it is. And depleted uranium despite being nuclear waste also makes great material for bullets. Let that sink in. We found a kind of nuclear waste that’s good to throw at each other and we do it.

That no nation’s weapon scientists, including ours, have found a viable weapon use for thorium such that it literally sits in abandoned piles all over the planet, should make one question the notion of it being dangerous to any realistic degree.

It should be noted the one and only u233 bomb ever tested by the United States was actually just a plutonium bomb with u233 added, and as mentioned above its yield sucked so only India ever bothered with a pure u233 bomb.Which also sucked. Which in turn is probably why the US still has a giant stock pile of pure u233  which they are paying 500 million to destroy instead of it being in bombs.

Think about that for a moment as well. If it were a weapon material could they not sell it to a contractor to be converted into said weapon and bought back or could they not make them into weapons and then sell them to ally states?

So yeah, even if we pretend for a moment that thorium is useful as a weapon. Still the objection is a Nirvana Fallacy.  Because when you get down to it all forms of power are lethal or can be weaponized under the right conditions. Indeed I can’t think of a single technology that couldn’t be used to kill under the right conditions.

Demanding absolute harmlessness is an impossible standard.

Electricity itself is lethal remember.

This line of objection completely ignores the massive positive offset of successful deployment of thorium reactors and incidentally the resultant counter motivation for war.

Any rational appraisal of a security decision has to consider the trade-off.

And one of the many effects of mass thorium reactor development and deployment would be a near total undermining of petroleum wars/tensions.

Thorium/LFTR deployment would undermine any weaponization risk of the technology by the impact of the technology. A competent appraisal must include asking why would a country want to make nuclear bombs if peace is suddenly and vastly more profitable?

Author: Innomen

Writer. Philosopher. Nerd. If you want to know more, contact me. I don't know where it's getting that photo. View all posts by Innomen