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I agree with the other two comments thus far. I will add that the (U)FSAR and Tech Specs should not be memorized and are fairly boring documents. I recommend giving them an quick look but don't spend much time on them. In eight months when you get your assignments, maybe then you'll find use in diving into specific sections of those documents.

If you're an engineer who will be graduating college, I recommend reading An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems. It helps you develop some guidelines for being a great overall engineer.

> isn't a problem.

I suppose not if you have hundreds of highly trained individuals you can convince to work with strong gamma emitters.

The strong gamma radiation wreaks havoc on the circuitry, chemical explosives, and ordnance components in such a weapon.

Not to mention your weapon is going to shine like a lighthouse to any satellite gamma detector that is looking.

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http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/American_Scientist_Hargraves.pdf


"The uranium-233 produced from thorium-232
is necessarily accompanied by
uranium-232, a proliferation prophylactic.
Uranium-232 has a relatively
short half-life of 73.6 years, burning
itself out by producing decay products
that include strong emitters of high-energy
gamma radiation. The gamma
emissions are easily detectable and
highly destructive to ordnance components,
circuitry and especially personnel.
Uranium-232 is chemically identical
to and essentially inseparable from
uranium-233."


...

"Only a determined, well-funded effort
on the scale of a national program
could overcome the obstacles to illicit
use of uranium-232/233 produced in a
LFTR reactor. Such an effort would certainly
find that it was less problematic
to pursue the enrichment of natural uranium
or the generation of plutonium."

Robert Hargraves has a PhD Physics and teaches energy policy at Dartmouth an Ivy League school, and co-author Ralph Moir (Lawrence Livermore National Lab) a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and author of numerous papers on molten salt reactors.




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"the proportion of U-232 would be about 0.13% for a commercial power reactor. A year after separation, a weapons worker one meter from a sub-critical 5 kg sphere of such U-233 would receive a radiation dose of 43 mSv/hr, compared to 0.003 mSv/hr from plutonium, even less from U-235. Death becomes probable after 72 hours exposure. After ten years this radiation triples.

A resulting weapons would be highly radioactive and therefore dangerous to military workers nearby. The penetrating 2.6 MeV gamma radiation is an easily detected marker revealing the presence of such U-233, possibly even from a satellite.

For personnel safety, any U-233 material operations must be accomplished by remote handling equipment within a radioactively shielded hot cell. This can be designed to make it very hard for any insiders or outsiders to remove material from the hot cell."

Thorium Energy Cheaper Than Coal - Robert Hargraves

https://www.amazon.com/THORIUM-energy-cheaper-than-coal/dp/1478161299


Robert Hargraves has a PhD Physics and teaches energy policy at Dartmouth an Ivy League school, and co-author Ralph Moir (Lawrence Livermore National Lab) a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and author of numerous papers on molten salt reactors.

Have you looked at Atomic Accidents? It tells the history of atomic power in terms of accidents, from one-man mishaps to Fukushima. It's definitely not biased toward "green " attitudes. Also check out documentaries on Youtube about Three Mile Island. That incident offers particularly good insight into public fears and government response.

PM me if you want to go over anything in particular.

Overview:

http://pandoraspromise.com/

Whole Earth Discipline

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Price:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

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Safety:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country

Your opponents will likely have the following arguments against nuclear power: "Three Mile Island! Fukushima Daiichi! Chernobyl!!!!1". Smacking them down will be pretty straightforward:

Three Mile Island:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4#t=5113.5

Chernobyl:

http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

Fukushima Daiichi:

There were zero direct deaths from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown.
The United Nations Science Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation project zero additional cancer deaths over time due to escaped radioactive materials:
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html
Summary available here:
http://www.unscear.org/docs/GAreports/A-68-46_e_V1385727.pdf
Excerpts:

>No radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed to radiation from the accident.
The doses to the general public, both those incurred during the first year and estimated for their lifetimes, are generally low or very low. No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants.

(emphasis mine)

Notably, The Fukushima Daini plant down the coast from Daiichi was hit by the same earthquake+tsunami, and it shut down as designed. You've probably never heard of it though, because it worked just fine. That's the problem with nuclear power. People remember the events that the news freaks out about. The media obviously doesn't talk about the fifty years of power plants quietly humming along providing inexpensive, reliable, safe, emissions-free energy to billions of people.

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Give your audience a sense of the scale of nuclear power's energy density:

https://xkcd.com/1162/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leG8frtW5Wk

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Climate Change:

http://talknuclear.ca/2014/09/nuclear-is-the-no-3-contributor-to-climate-change-mitigation-the-economist/

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If your opponent is a coal or nat gas advocate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4#t=5230

Are you just talking about liquid-fueled fast reactors? The IFR used thermal expansion, and it worked without active control when they tested it against failure scenarios. The reaction just naturally shut down without damage.

Partly they bought themselves time with coolant pump inertia. In the event that somehow the pumps all suddenly jammed, the fuel elements were designed so they'd melt and splatter themselves against the reactor core wall, without doing any more serious damage.

(I'm an amateur but I've read Plentiful Energy, by the lead engineers on the IFR project.)

If you understand everything in this free textbook, you'll be way ahead of most undergrads with a nuclear engineering degree in terms of chain reaction physics. Unfortunately it's hard to get through without some instruction. Also there's a lot more to engineering. Another good introductory book that deals a little more with engineering but is not free is Lamarsh.

Basically, nuclear engineers deal with the nuclear core. They deal with the chain reaction, the heat removal, the fuel performance, the material degradation, and the coupled transient performance. Once the heat is produced, it's up to mechanical, structural, civil, control, reliability, and electrical engineers to turn that heat into usable electricity.