The issue of reactors creating weapons grade materials and the radioactive impact of a plant on the surrounding environment are really 2 totally separate issues. You’re right on both counts, but the way you put them together makes it sound like they’re somehow related.
Also to split some hairs, just because you can’t make a nuke out of radioactive material doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be weaponized, you could make dirty bombs out of pretty much anything radioactive, just conventional explosives to scatter radioactive stuff around making it hard to clean up. Pretty sure that spent fuel of any type would probably make for a great dirty bomb if the wrong people were able to get their hands on it.
If we really want to split some hairs, some waste products don’t even need to be radioactive to be weaponized. Depleted uranium ammunition makes for excellent armor penetrating rounds and comes (primarily) from the enrichment process of uranium for use in reactors.
I thought about mentioning that too, it muddies the waters a bit because it is still technically radioactive and so there are some concerns about health effects from that (although it is not very radioactive, to the point that it can actually actually used as radiation shielding in some applications)
But it kind of goes down a bit of an absurdist rabbit hole from there. Because we humans are really good at weaponizing pretty much literally anything if we put our minds to it. Even if we were able to somehow able to tune our nuclear processes so that at the end all of the fuel and byproducts would be converted into nothing but a pure, clean, non-radioactive mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and traces of other gasses just like our atmosphere, we could then use that in a compressed air cannon or something.
The issue of reactors creating weapons grade materials and the radioactive impact of a plant on the surrounding environment are really 2 totally separate issues. You’re right on both counts, but the way you put them together makes it sound like they’re somehow related.
Also to split some hairs, just because you can’t make a nuke out of radioactive material doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be weaponized, you could make dirty bombs out of pretty much anything radioactive, just conventional explosives to scatter radioactive stuff around making it hard to clean up. Pretty sure that spent fuel of any type would probably make for a great dirty bomb if the wrong people were able to get their hands on it.
If we really want to split some hairs, some waste products don’t even need to be radioactive to be weaponized. Depleted uranium ammunition makes for excellent armor penetrating rounds and comes (primarily) from the enrichment process of uranium for use in reactors.
I thought about mentioning that too, it muddies the waters a bit because it is still technically radioactive and so there are some concerns about health effects from that (although it is not very radioactive, to the point that it can actually actually used as radiation shielding in some applications)
But it kind of goes down a bit of an absurdist rabbit hole from there. Because we humans are really good at weaponizing pretty much literally anything if we put our minds to it. Even if we were able to somehow able to tune our nuclear processes so that at the end all of the fuel and byproducts would be converted into nothing but a pure, clean, non-radioactive mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and traces of other gasses just like our atmosphere, we could then use that in a compressed air cannon or something.