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

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2026 at 4:34 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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,*
>

Wrong, my proposed method was to replace a control rod in a power reactor
with a loop of U--238 solution and sort out the plutonium as it is formed.
This keeps Pu-239 from picking up another neutron to become 240. That's
probably enough for bad guys to work out the rest, though I go into
considerable detail in "Bad Days/"

Keith

*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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