Good old Eisenhower and Atoms for Peace, 1953.
This was more what I was trying to motion toward — if you sell a power reactor to the private market, aren't you basically guaranteeing that "locations of security hardening features" and so forth will be able to be scrutinized at leisure by foreign state actors who can then use that information to attack other power infrastructure made to the same template?
secrecy is a sliding scale, and delaying and thinning out access to this information makes it "more secure" but surely some cleaning person will tell their buddies over a pint.
https://www.nei.org/resources/fact-sheets/nuclear-plant-secu...
I worked on automated conversion of a large collection of documents for nuclear power stations some years back, and there was a lot of bureaucracy around who could access the documents, and how. I wasn’t supposed to take any files home, for example, which meant I couldn’t copy them onto a laptop. Management claimed that this was due to federal laws, but I didn’t ever investigate the legal basis.
A nuclear reactor uses fuel juuuust barely above critical mass so the reaction is slow. It's a very different thing. Producing the fuel is just basic centrifuge isotope separation, which has many non-fission applications.
Interesting. Everyone says that nuclear reactors are safe and material can't be used to build bomb, how are we ensuring that were always only tiny bit above CM... And this bit doesn't grow unexpectedly.
As laic, i see many failure modes, starting with simple accidents in handling of rods or bad storage
You need sufficient fissile material to provide the increased neutron flow generating heat which you can use to power generators, but you have to then extract that heat efficiently to prevent your nuclear core from literally melting.