From: wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu   
      
   In article ,   
   Christian Weisgerber   wrote:   
   >On 2026-01-21, Ignatios Souvatzis  wrote:   
   >> IIRC, the USA spent some effort to get handling of liquid deuterium   
   >> and tritium right and first built a bomb using that,   
   >   
   >No, no, the search term you are looking for is a "tritium-boosted"   
   >device.   
      
   Tritium is the one nuclear material that the US military has an   
   ongoing supply need for (since the half-life is only twelve years).   
   It's also an industrial gas, used for making self-illuminating exit   
   signs and military compasses among other things.  Scarcely a week goes   
   by when there isn't an "event report" at the Nuclear Regulatory   
   Commission because of a lost exit sign.  But industrial sources can't   
   be used for bombs under the NPT, so the DoE has a contract with the   
   TVA to make it in one of the TVA's power reactors.  When making   
   tritium for bombs, TVA has to use "unobligaged" uranium in the   
   reactors, again because NPT, so this can only happen after a   
   refueling.   
      
   (The AEC made all the plutonium the US military will ever need by the   
   end of the 1960s, which is one of the reasons reprocessing isn't done   
   any more.)   
      
   -GAWollman   
   --   
   Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,   
   wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is   
   Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."   
   my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)