Re:Molten Salt Reactors
by acidburnNSA on Friday July 12, 2019 @08:08PM
(#20425644)
In the nuclear industry, U-233 is well known as an excellent weapons material [1]. It's simply a matter of its nuclear properties, which are well known.
"The fast critical mass of U-233 is almost identical to that for Pu-239 and the spontaneous fission rate is much lower, reducing to negligible levels the problem of a spontaneous fission neutron prematurely initiating the chain reaction -- even in a “gun-type” design such as used for the U-235 Hiroshima bomb (see Table 1)."
[1] U-232 and the Proliferation-Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel - http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs09kang.pdf
U-235 is the only naturally occurring fissile isotope of uranium. In raw uranium out of the ground, it makes up about 0.7%, the rest being U-238. U-233 is also fissile, but only really made in thorium breeder reactors.
> ... While it is thus possible to use uranium-233 as the fissile material of a nuclear weapon, speculation[8] aside, there is scant publicly available information on this isotope actually having been weaponized ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material