Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Because of Mr. Mayer's expertise in this field, I direct this question to him.

I am in software development, sometimes involving automatic control systems. I designed a safety warning system for the two operating uranium enrichment plants in the USA.

I was very familiar with the safety warning sensors, but really not much else. I had no contact with the enrichment process itself, just with the sensors that looked for leaks, excessive heat, and other malfunctions. I never even saw the sensors that I was monitoring, but relied on a feed from other buildings.

Uranium isotope separation is much easier to do today than it used to be. The old USA plants were based on gasseous diffusion, which is ungainly and costly. Nobody would build such a plant today. Today there are far cheaper methods: centrifugation and laser ionization.

Isotope separation methods

Isotopic separation by laser

And then, let us not forget the bomb based upon Pu239 produced in reactors, which bypasses isotopic separation completely.

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