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There are no proliferation concerns with fusion. You can't make a nuclear bomb with a fusion reactor. They'll be largely free of the nuclear materials and technologies handling and export regulations. Quite a few international deals for fission plants over the years have been scuttled over concerns about misapplication of the reactors or fuel.


Any reaction which emits neutrons is capable of being used to feed breeder-reactor cycles.

Nuclear fusion emits neutrons.

If you can soak up surplus neutrons in uranium 238 you can breed plutonium 239.

By design intent fusion does not intend making fission happen. A side effect of the nuclear physics makes fission products, if you want to.

You can make weapons grade fission materials, with neutrons from a fusion reactor.


You need to start with fissile material to make weapons grade fissile material. If there is no peaceful application for fissile material then a global ban treaty complete with trust-but-verify policies is within the realm of reason.

Regardless of this hypothetical: the fact remains that no part of a fusion reactor increases weapons proliferation risks, unlike a fission reactor. You could plop one down anywhere on the planet and locally source fuel.

If you want a neutron source then you can make one in your basement with a fusor or linear magnetic mirror.


There actually is proliferation concerns, maybe even worse.


In what way? Are you implying e.g. materials science advances will lead to non-nuclear weapons proliferation?


Can you elaborate? Fusion reactors don't produce any fissionable material.


One is not obliged to turn ordinary, mined uranium into weapons-grade stuff, in a neutron-emitting fusion system, but you could if you cared to.

I.e., a nation that had control of such a fusion plant would have little difficulty attaching an enrichment process without interfering with power output.

Fortunately, no economically practical power generation system can be built using hot-neutron fusion, so it is an idle concern, but almost all the money being spent on fusion pursues that impractical goal.


It's an idle concern because fast neutron sources are cheaply available without fusion reactors.


Enrichment takes a lot of neutrons. They need to be slowed down, besides.


You can make a centrifugal magnetic mirror the size of a truck for a few million bucks that will weapons grade as much fissile material as you want. It doesn't take new science or technology to do. If you want to keep weapons grade fissile material out of someone's hands then your best hope is preventing them from having fissile material (or at least controlling every pound of the stuff).


Why is Iran running hundreds of centrifuges if they could cheaply use one of these things to make it into plutonium and separate that out by trivial chemical processes?


¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe because it's the US cold war blueprint and doesn't require any innovation. To be clear: no public program has used magnetic mirrors for enrichment but they are so cheap/small and so hot that they really are a sure thing. Maybe MRI magnets are difficult to source. I feel like the true answer is not rooted in any technical explanation but rather some kind of political explanation.

If I was a warlord trying to make industrial quantities of weapons grade fissile material in 2022 I personally wouldn't go the centrifuge route, but everyone's a critic.


The most intense non-fission, non-fusion neutron source in the world in 2017, Oak Ridge Spallation Neutron Source, produced ~1e10 neutrons / second. If every last neutron emitted could be cooled and made to be absorbed by a ready U-238 nucleus, decaying after a few days to Pu-239, if I figure right we ought to get a microgram in 28 days, or a Kg in 78My. Pu-239's half-life is only 24Ky, decaying to (equally useful) U-235 with half-life a solid 0.7Gy, so only a little bit turns to lead before we finish.

Keeping our copy of the Oak Ridge source operating, and the current world order destabilized, for those 78My seems difficult; and we anyway have made only a Kg. So, this seems like not a practical way to generate a geopolitically effective amount of Pu-239 or U-235.


Magnetic mirrors are fusion devices, but they are pulsed and have conduction losses due to the central electrode. This electrode greatly increases confinement performance but is obviously an impossibility for power generation. Where magnetic mirrors really thrive is in having very hot plasma in relatively small devices [0].

So the idea is not to use magnetic mirrors for power generation, but as a DD-fusion-powered cheap fast neutron source. I have a hunch that radioisotope companies and government organizations are doing this right now.

0. https://vant.kipt.kharkov.ua/ARTICLE/VANT_2012_6/article_201...




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