Reddit reviews The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor

The reactor designs in use in the US all require enriched Uranium. According to the author of The Curve of Binding Energy, nuclear reactors in the US were intended to produce plutonium for sale to the US Government, with a price around $1,000,000 per KG of plu. When the US stopped buying privately produced plutonium, the bottom fell out of the market for nuclear power plants. This happened at about the same time that the movie China Syndrome came out, and Three Mile Island happened. It is far more convenient to blame treehuggers than cold hard economics.

Last time I looked up the stats, the US military owned about 100 tons of plutonium, about half in nuclear weapons. There were about 1700 tons of privately produced plutonium sitting around in casks scattered around the world.

Thorium as well as CANDU reactor designs would be far more useful as neither of them can produce plutonium. However the thorium designs have never gotten far, and CANDU comes from Canada and doesn't enrich large US corporations, so we'll never promote that either.

Such material can be stolen. Read The Curve of Binding Energy to see just how poorly guarded this stuff was when Philips (the princeton student) designed his bomb.
In that book McPhee describes finding one storage location where he could have cut through a chain link fence a couple of hundred yards from
a couple of sleepy guards, pried open a window with a faulty alarm, and found himself in a room filled with crates of enriched uranium. Shit was crazy.

If you are interested in weird nuclear weapons you should read John McPhee's book The Curve of Binding Energy. He interviews a number of people that worked in the US weapons program. He spends a lot of time talking with Ted Taylor, who built some unique designs for small and large non-fusion weapons.

Absolutely wrong. See http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodore/dp/0374515980

If you have the fissibles, any idiot can build a nuke.

The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor
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