Comment by giardini
20 hours ago
So theoretically, Russia could begin converting their nuclear warheads to heat-generation units that could be used for all sorts of purposes. What kind of safeguards would be required?
The Russkies have lots of nukes but no cash. They're apparently as money-illiterate as I am, which is pretty awful. But if converting warheads to "heaters" (for everything from heating to power generation) would be worth a fortune, then it might be enough to rebuild Russia's economy.
Furthermore, it might be a way to save OpenAI by creating cheaper power supplies for AI datacenters [just kidding about this last one - always like to get the AIers excited, see if their stocks rise!].
> So theoretically, Russia could begin converting their nuclear warheads to heat-generation units that could be used for all sorts of purposes.
They already did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
A little too well, in fact, undercutting other suppliers; to quote from the page:
> What kind of safeguards would be required?
Mostly the classified security measures kind of safeguard: Make sure nobody can come in and steal the hard-to-make enriched weapons grade stuff before it gets blended down.
For material handling, everything I've heard about uranium as a metal is fairly mundane. Just:
• don't ingest it, lick it, or sniff it, it's an alpha emitter and a heavy metal
• don't grind it while you work on it, not only do you not want to breathe in a dusty alpha emitter, the dust is pyrophoric, i.e. catches fire in air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophoricity#Pyrophoric_mater...
• and make sure the weapons-grade chunks are not ever under any circumstances near each other while working on them, for which the main big surprise is "do not work them into cylinders, because cylinders can roll towards each other and end up touching".