alt Hacker NewsThey talk about that in the article:
>"A centrifuge plant does one thing, costs billions, and takes years to stand up. Our machines cost a few hundred thousand dollars, produce material within months, deploy anywhere, and are able to be reconfigured in a matter of days to separate various isotopes as they are needed," said Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO of Actinide.
Replies
pclmulqdq • today at 1:42 AM
This is a bit uncharitable to the concept of a centrifuge here. The Iranian nuclear program seems to have centrifuges that are a lot smaller and cheaper, and you can certainly build one that meets these needs.
ta988 • yesterday at 9:53 PM
yeah they don't talk about cleaning them either... that's a massive problem in this kind of ion separation techniques, things splatter and stick everywhere.
The obvious thing to consider is throughput and yield/loss. A centrifuge plant can produce kilograms of material and doesn’t fundamentally misplace any material, although it may struggle to extract all the inputs that are the correct isotope. A calutron needs to ionize every single atom, accelerate it to an appropriate energy, deflect it, and decelerate it without losing it. And it needs to deal with inadvertently multiply-charged ions. And if you’re dealing with radioactive source material, you need to deal with the atoms that embed themselves in your apparatus.
At least uranium isn’t actually all that radioactive.