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To: maquiladora

As others have said, heavy water reactors, such as those at the Savannah River Site, (www.srs.gov) run on non-enriched uranium, and they do produce plutonium. The good news, however, is that it takes an enormous facility to separate the plutonium from the other highly radioactive by-products, and such a facility would be difficult to hide.


27 posted on 08/26/2006 8:14:31 AM PDT by Aegedius (Veni, vidi, icked-kay utt-bay.)
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To: Aegedius

All nuclear reactors produce plutonium, light water or heavy water. A significant percentage of the heat from a light water reactor comes from plutonium fission, in fact. The Canadian CANDU heavy water design, however, allows fuel to by cycled through the reactor without shutting it down, so you can pull out the hot fuel before the plutonium is burned up - the Indian nuclear bomb came from a Canadian-supplied reactor as I recall.


39 posted on 08/26/2006 11:37:51 AM PDT by mvpel (Michael Pelletier)
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