Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

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inally, who cares about reprocessing fuel? At this time naturally abundant U235 prices are so low and projected to continue to be low for this century that all this effort to recycle fuel and burn longer seems completely unwarranted on market principles, despite how cool and hip it sounds to "close the fuel cycle" or produce "100 times" less waste. Last I checked, fuel and disposal was a tiny fraction of the real costs of nuclear electricity, and certainly far smaller of an engineering problem than the public likes to believe.

I wasn't aware that anyone had solved the problem of spent fuel. last I knew there were thousands of tons of the stuff sitting around in swimming pools next to reactors all over the country/world. I don't recall the status of the project to bury the stuff under mountain in Nevada either, but I don't think that plan is approved.

WTF is wrong with breeder reactors that consume the otherwise spent fuel? Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to contain then why all the waste sitting around?

  Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to
  contain then why all the waste sitting around?

I think the concern about breeder reactors isn't so much the proliferation risk of the fuel and waste itself, but that a commercial market in breeder reactor technology will proliferate the knowledge and equipment necessary such that state actors will find it easier to build breeder reactors quickly and secretly.

But maybe that's just a misperception on my part.

Before Beowulf clusters, building supercomputers required tremendous expertise. The U.S. thought it could keep China from building supercomputers by controlling the export of supercomputers and supercomputing-enabling technology. But once supercomputing moved to clusters of commodity hardware, most of those export controls became useless almost overnight. China didn't spontaneously develop an expertise in chip design and fabrication; rather, because of the technological shift in the West, supercomputing know-how and equipment simply became impossible to contain.

The idea state actors could building anything quickly and secretly is a misconception.

Depends on the complexity and on our intelligence assets.

Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done spectacularly well. Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge. There's probably all manner of less complex projects underway that U.S. intelligence is oblivious to.

Like China and North Korea, Iran is something of an outlier. Israel has long had strong intelligence assets in Iran, and in addition to benefiting from those, the U.S. seems to have been able to beef up SIGINT fairly quickly with arguably better than usually results.

It's highly dependent on the technology and the country in question. Sure, at the end of the day it's impossible to keep the genie in the bottle. But the goal is never forever. A country's strategic interests always have an implicit time component. If you can suppress tech long enough for a "rogue" state to become a respectable player in the international system, then you've won. Long enough might be only a few years.

Conversely, if you can develop tech faster than the U.S. can learn about _and_ act upon it, you've won. North Korea won that race, and might have been able to win it even without China protecting it. And how did North Korea win that race? Largely with exogenous skill, importing Soviet talent after the fall of the USSR.

Also, need I remind anyone the intelligence disaster that was both 9/11 and the Iraq War? It's not so much that the intelligence community was wrong, but that there's rarely any certainty in their assessments. If you don't know for certain that something is true, how do you justify your policy decisions? It gets muddy very quickly.

> Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done spectacularly well.

I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who live and work in those countries.

> Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge.

How do you know that?

  I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have
  done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who
  live and work in those countries.

No doubt that's true. There are many capable scientists in those countries. However, in the case of North Korea for example, from all available publicly known information North Korea had been trying to build both ballistic missiles and a nuclear program since the 1960s. But there appears to have been few significant advancements until the fall of the USSR and the immigration of some well-known Soviet scientists, after which their programs made significant advances over suspiciously short periods of time.

  How do you know that?

I don't know, just like I don't know that Obama isn't a secret Muslim, that Trump isn't a Manchurian Candidate, or that you're not an extraterrestrial alien.

However, for whatever reason the Illuminati saw fit to disclose that Pakistan sold nuclear secrets to North Korea; which apparently went on for over decade before the initial disclosure; that many high-level U.S. officials (politicians, appointees, and civil servants alike) went [apparently] apoplectic upon disclosure; and that the fall-out seemed to be widespread and persistent.

We also "know" that South Africa had the bomb and Israel has the bomb. And despite official denials it seems clear that Israel, minimally, had the tacit approval of the U.S. if not outright assistance, and that South Africa's program was also under surveillance at the time. In other words, once details of these programs became publicly known it also became publicly known shortly afterward the extent to which the U.S. knew about those developments. In the case of the Pakistan sale of nuclear secrets, and in multiple situations wrt North Korea and China, by all public accounts the U.S. was and still is often readily taken by surprise. There are plenty other historical examples (including recent examples) of the U.S. being taken by surprise, although obviously not all were so strategically consequential.

There is no need for the scare-quotes around "know" - President de Klerk gave a speech in which he admitted that South Africa had built and subsequently dismantled a nuclear weapons program. There are public IAEA reports on the verification process following SA's accession to the NPT.

(An interesting insight into late cold-war politics is that it was the Soviet Union that tipped off the United States that South Africa was preparing to test a weapon).

Well, it's all over AQ Khan's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan

What's not known is how much he was engaging in nuclear proliferation with the permission of the government, or which parts of the government were helping him. Pakistan's warring security agencies make the current US dispute between the CIA and FBI over Trump and the Russians look like amateurs.

Geo-strategic irony: Because everyone has a secret nuke lying around, nobody engages in conflicts any more- thus the usual social tension valve beeing unused, leading to civil wars instead of the conventional wars.

TL,DR; Iran vs SaudiArabia turns with nukes into, Iran <-> Iran and SaudiArabia vs SaudiArabia.

Short term gain is long term pain.

Not sure about that - there are at least two Iran vs. Saudi proxy wars being fought in Yemen and Syria.

All out WW1 Mass Murdering with drafted civilians like the iran-iraq war?

You're assuming the CIA actually believed there were WMDs in Iraq..

Now did the CIA believe that Sadam would have re-built them the first chance he got? Very probably.

(and ok i guess technically they could still be buried out in the desert somewhere, has this been ruled out?)

As far we know CIA analysts absolutely DID NOT believe that Iraq had a nuclear program or significant chemical weapons program. Rather, what the CIA institutionally believed was that it lacked any strong evidence to make an assertion one way or another.

The case for the Iraq War was made on the back of a single informant, an informant that most Western intelligence agencies (including Israel) believed not particularly credible. The CIA also, initially, didn't believe that informant very credible. However, Cheney & Co went hunting for evidence, dredged it up, packaged it, and sold it as a "slam dunk" to the previously incredulous Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet. It's only by dint of Tenet being Director can we say that the CIA believed the justification behind the Iraq War.

If anyone is looking for more information, the informant referred to here is an Iraqi-German known as Curveball.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

Rare, but it does happen.

Like the Manhattan Project?

It's a good point. If the best example is something that occurred ~70 years ago it's hard to know whether that means secrecy is working, or not.

WTF is wrong with breeder reactors that consume the otherwise spent fuel?

They turned out to be uneconomic, is all. Perhaps that will change at some point.

> Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to contain then why all the waste sitting around?

It's harder to contain than to process from waste.

You need advanced expensive tech to turn the waste into weapons-grade material. If we don't create it, the nasty material doesn't exist and has lower security risk.

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