Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Europe Takes One Step Closer to Nukes... || Peter Zeihan" video.

AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE - AND YET AGAIN Peter has shown his ignorance in engineering topics. I work in industrial control systems and in 2005-06 I did a water treatment plant at the ERA Ranger Uranium Mine in Australia. As part of that we did an induction course in the nuclear fuel cycle and it covered everything from in the ground to back in the ground. This was at a time when the Americans were kicking up a storm over Iran's nuclear program which they claimed was for domestic power production. When we asked the instructor what was going on he simply asked us to look at what he had just told regarding enrichment and the different grades produced. He had told us regarding gas centrifuges that for fuel grade uranium (3-5% U235) you needed 5,000-10,000; and for military grade fuel (8-19% U235) (like that used in submarines) you needed around 20,000; and for weapons grade (>80%) you needed 40,000 or more AND WE KNEW THE IRANIANS HAD 55,000 YES I KNOW that you can make bombs with less than 80% but they don't work reliably. Go and read about the yields of early A-bombs. When we asked how anyone could know how many gas centrifuges they had he simply said "they bought that many motors to drive them." Gas centrifuges have to spin quite fast and not even the servo motors used in robots go that fast so they use what are called spindle drives. These are the high speed motors commonly found in CNC spindles, hence the name spindle drive. So they are not classified technology but it gets noticed when somebody buys lots of them. The Iranians DO NOT have a CNC machine tool industry so when they bought enough motors and drives to operate 55,000 gas centrifuges everyone across the World's nuclear industry knew EXACTLY what they were doing. It was NOT a civilian power program. ALSO - It is simply not possible for ANYONE to to extend a fuel grade production plant into a weapons grade production plant in a few weeks that sort of thing takes months just to plan let alone execute. NONE of the countries Peter mentioned have WEAPONS GRADE fissile material and NO spent fuel rods are NOT weapons grade unless you are talking about a dirty bomb. There's a major difference between having fissile material and weapons grade fissile material. That's the sort of thing high school kids can understand.
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@johnhughes2124 Or yeah the technology for enrichment is totally understood. All of the countries with nuclear power have the capability of developing nuclear weapons. BUT (and here's the point) EVERYONE and I really do mean everyone in the nuclear industry is going to know exactly what they are doing. There's not that many enrichment plants in the world and most countries get their fuel from other countries with that capability. So if they suddenly start buying the sort of gear needed its going to be noticed just like we knew what the Iranians were doing. Its just not the sort of thing that can be done an nobody notices. That's what we got told back in 2005. Plus the actual world trade in Uranium is incredibly well documented. So everybody knows who's getting what in the way of raw energy. So if a country was to buy X tons of Yellow Cake (Uranium oxide) then we'd all know how much fuel that should produce. Say if a country has 2GW of nuclear power and they bought enough YC to power 3GW then we'd know they are holding extra. The more frightening aspect to this is spent fuel which doesn't have that much fissile material (U235) because that's what got burnt up in the reactor. The problem is what can be done with spent fuel. First its useful if you want to make a dirty bomb which is low tech but would be utterly devastating to a city. That's low tech. The really scary aspect of spent fuel is the "other stuff" in the fuel pellets like Plutonium. That's because plutonium can be used in compression bombs. They sound really simple but compression bombs require ultra-high quality explosive triggers of you don't get even compression and it simply doesn't go off. Trying to develop those triggers would also be very difficult to hide. So the reality is that no matter what anyone tries its going to take a lot longer than Peter thinks and everyone is going to know what you're up to.
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@kozlovskyi Not certain what you mean about choice? Nuclear weapons are not a matter of regulations they are a matter of treaties. Specifically the non-proliferation treaty.
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