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Welp, looks like Türkiye is looking at acquiring Eurofighter Typhoons instead of F-35s. At this rate, Trump's reputational damage—self-inflicted by attacking his allies and cutting Ukraine off at the knees—is going to take down the US military export industry. Nobody wants to build their armed services around weapons bought from a supplier who couid decide to disable them on a whim.
https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody/114168327427858401
@cstross I suspect the UK will be looking hard at the independence of the "independent deterrent", and sourcing Tritium (etc.) from more reliable partners in future.
Not sure what they can do about the naval version of the F-35 though - the new carriers may end up being true "white elephants".
@Cadbury_Moose @cstross Placing the nuclear submarines under the command of the US probably also is no longer an option for the Letters of last resort.
@tessarakt @Cadbury_Moose @cstross Canadian government then -it's possibly where the royal family would be evacuated to anyway? It certainly was the plan in WWII,
@stevel @Cadbury_Moose @cstross According to Wikipedia, government of Australia is allegedly another option.
@tessarakt @Cadbury_Moose @cstross maybe in 1940, Canada was the only realistic evacuation option (KINGEVAC ?) -and the US wasn't considered a threat
@Cadbury_Moose @cstross
Is it so hard to separate tritium out of water-moderated/cooled reactors, or direct neutrons at water?
Handy if someone is producing the commodity though.
Big helicopter carriers?
I think the usual method is bombarding lithium-6, but they apparently have to extract the tritium from water-cooled reactors to keep emissions low when reprocessing spent fuel - it's possibly not economically viable for commercial use. Have a look at the Wikipedia entry...
@Cadbury_Moose @cstross
Spent fuel is in cans.
Neutrons from them will bounce around the water in the cooling pond, and some will stick to a H atom in water, some even to the resulting Deuterium atom.
But I think step one in reprocessing (are we even doing that?) would be to dry the rod.
You'll have a trace of T in the pond, but it decays moderately quickly.
The D2O heavy water might be worth separating out, it is useful.
Lithium splitting rings a bell. (+ rather larger one in Castle Bravo)