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The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee warned that the risk of a nuclear conflict is greater than for a long time.
ICAN describes itself as a coalition of grassroots non-government groups in more than 100 nations. It began in Australia and was officially launched in Vienna in 2007.
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Nobel peace prize 2017: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons wins award
2017 Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
International Campaign To Abolish Nuclear Weapons Wins 2017 Nobel Peace Prize
Given the current tensions due to North Korea, this prize seems somehow apt. What do you think?
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Anti-Nuclear Campaign ICAN Wins 2017 Nobel Peace Prize
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Aiwendil on Saturday October 07 2017, @05:30PM
You can, the device that destroyed hiroshima was a uranium bomb, which means that its fissile material was "simply" uranium enriched to above 90% (ie. No reactor needed)
Also - nothing (other than ecomics and treaties) prevents you from creating Pu-239 (or U-233) with accelerators.
The gun-type design (hiroshima) is simple enough that they didn't have to test it first, but that design does not work* with plutonium.
(* = ok, it does work if you get pure enough Pu-239, but it is easier to figure out implosion designs (nagasaki))
This is why we try to keep track of enrichment plants (monitoring uranium enrichment) and power output of reactors (monitoring purity of Pu, since U238 needs to be in the reactor for at most a few weeks to not get too much Pu-241 (which creates a significant risk of pre-detonation/fizzle)).
The easiest/cheapest way to get rid of Pu-239 is to use it as reactor fuel, Pu-238 is to sell it to NASA (RTGs), and without reactors you'd have to get all medical and industrial isotopes from accelerators (and still get lots of waste). "Spent fuel" contains lots of useful fuel still (fast reactors can extract many times as much energy from it, and for that matter CANDU reactors (canada's and india's nain reactor type) can use spent fuel from most light water reactors after only a brief cooldown and repackaging).
Also should be pointed out that production reactors (ie - reactors to create isotopes) are a lot more similar to research reactors than to light water power reactors (out of the power reactors only magnox, rbmk, agcr and candu are suitable to run for plutonium production - and only the magnox has been used for that (by uk and n.korea) despite the fact that they all (has) been running in nuclear weapons states (rbmk in russia, agcr in uk, and candu in india, china and pakistan but all of those used other reactor types instead (either purpose built or research reactors))