Comment Most unusual part of the story - weapons grade? (Score 1) 169
I don't know much about nuclear engineering, or the subject as a whole, so maybe somebody can jump in here and clarify.
My understanding is that "weapons grade" only refers to a degree of purity, and not to actual intent... but I still have to wonder why they chose to have a "weapons grade" reactor to begin with. What benefits are there to having this as opposed to say standard Uranium reactors?
The University of Maryland (where I graduated) has a research reactor that became higher in profile after the 9/11 attacks. Around 2005 or so ABC ran a story about it, but it was never a big secret that UMD had one. I believe MIT and other technical schools also have such reactors. In general I think they run on just regular uranium instead of the highly enriched "weapons grade".
It's kind of crazy to think that we've got Iran spending so much of their state resources trying to manufacture enriched uranium meanwhile we've got Kodak sitting on 3.5lbs of the stuff in a basement in NY doing rando-tests with it.