[ExI] I hate to say it but, I agree with Trump

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Sun Sep 6 11:34:07 UTC 2026


On Sat, Sep 5, 2026 at 9:08 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

*> why they bother with U-235. There is an easy way to make pure Pu-239
> that I made public 20 years ago.*
>

*If I remember correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong, your method
was similar to a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) that has been
proposed for producing electrical power, except that instead of dissolving
common thorium in a molten salt you proposed dissolving uranium 238. I
think LFTR would be a good way to produce electrical energy, although it
would probably take a few hundred million dollars of research and
development to iron out the bugs, your method might also be good .... If
you wanna make a bomb.*

*I think the principal reason Iran went for uranium instead of plutonium is
because uranium enrichment factories are relatively common, that's because
for civilian nuclear power reactors (except for those that use heavy water
as a coolant) the U-235 fuel needs to be enriched from the naturally
occurring zero 0.7% to 3.5 to 5%. So Iran can claim they're only separating
uranium for peaceful purposes, everybody knows it's a bullshit claim but
for some countries it was useful to pretend that they believed them. *

*The Iranians could have built a heavy water reactor of the type used in
Canada and almost nowhere else, but it would be very hard to hide a large
nuclear reactor; and it would be even harder to hide a chemical plant
capable of separating plutonium.  And plutonium in enrichment factories are
much rarer than uranium enrichment factories and thus would be much more
suspicious, and they are too big and dirty to hide.*

*John K Clark*
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