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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> The reactor itself, the nuclear core, is not a complicated mechanical contraption. The core has no moving parts or complex mechanisms. It's just an arrangement of special materials, that permits nuclear reactions to occur. There are moving parts to transfer the heat and control the reactions, but it's basically a pile of bricks.

I could say roughly the same thing about a smartphone.

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Yes, but a smartphone has billions of microswitches and articulated features. The smallest feature of a fission core is about the same size as a smartphone. The level of sophistication of the tooling needed is miles apart. If we were to start from scratch we could make a fission core long before we could make a smartphone.

And we did, half a century earlier!

However, the smartphone is evolutionary not revolutionary.

Not to pile on but there have been natural reactors in nature, but zero natural smartphones

> pile

I see what you did there

I mean our brains are basically meatsack computers.

Nuclear reactors are definitely simpler. The simplest reactor is just a pure enough and large enough blob of a fissile material. A Turing machine is more complex.

Arguably, the complexity of getting the blob of fissile material should count as complexity. I'd argue that the simplest reactor therefore is the kind you can make with natural material, so a beryllium, heavy water, or graphite moderated natural uranium reactor like CP-1. Even then there was much complexity in getting pure enough graphite.

The article even mentions there were naturally occurring nuclear reactors on earth a while ago.

So it's possible to for a blob of fissile material to just form naturally.

Well, that was 2 billion years ago. Since U-235 has a shorter half-life than U-238, the natural uranium enrichment was far higher back then. And indeed that was a water-moderated reactor. [1]

Some people have postulated that the moon itself was formed in a nuclear fission excursion [2], and/or that there is or was a nuclear reactor in the center of Earth [3]. These are both not commonly believed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

[2] https://phys.org/news/2010-01-moon-nuclear-explosion.html

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.5934

The Chicago pile was demonstrated in 1942. Transistors weren't even invented yet.

You are incredibly off on complexity

Not sure how any this description could apply to even the simplest microprocessor-containing device. Seems like fabs are sufficiently advanced tech so as to be indistinguishable from magic ... so much so that we forget how amazingly, absurdly, not-simple they are?

Yep you definitely need Unix Theory to build and run a nuclear reactor. I'm saying you're right!

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