Hacker News Reader

The obvious thing to consider is throughput and yield/loss. A centrifuge plant can produce kilograms of material and doesn’t fundamentally misplace any material, although it may struggle to extract all the inputs that are the correct isotope. A calutron needs to ionize every single atom, accelerate it to an appropriate energy, deflect it, and decelerate it without losing it. And it needs to deal with inadvertently multiply-charged ions. And if you’re dealing with radioactive source material, you need to deal with the atoms that embed themselves in your apparatus.

At least uranium isn’t actually all that radioactive.

This is a bit uncharitable to the concept of a centrifuge here. The Iranian nuclear program seems to have centrifuges that are a lot smaller and cheaper, and you can certainly build one that meets these needs.

yeah they don't talk about cleaning them either... that's a massive problem in this kind of ion separation techniques, things splatter and stick everywhere.