Taiwan may restart nuclear power plant in 2028, minister says

It's not quite that easy to flaunt the NPT. If it were, we'd have 50 nuclear nations by now, if not more. The idea of the NPT is that you are given access to peaceful nuclear technology in exchange for accepting inspections by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). The IAEA inspectors are quite smart, it's not easy to start purifying plutonium out of spent fuel without them noticing. Plutonium is a super-nasty substance to work with, and that's when it's pure. Spent fuel is orders of magnitude nastier, if you plan to do chemical reactions with it. You can't just hide a plutonium purification facility in a janitor's room somewhere. Now getting from zero experience with plutonium to the ability to do a dash for a bomb, that's a huge leap. It is not impossible. In the nuclear proliferation literature there is the concept of "sheltered pursuit". One of the nuclear powers is basically allowing you to disregard the NPT, and pursue nuclear weapons. But guess what? Most nuclear powers are happy to let the nuclear club remain small.

In the particular case of Taiwan, how would sheltered pursuit look like? The US would allow Taiwan to seek nuclear capability. But China would certainly see this as a reason to strike. I think a lot of the world would understand and accept a Chinese preemptive strike if China could show evidence that Taiwan was trying to acquire nukes, and the IAEA concurred.

>The US would allow Taiwan to seek nuclear capability. But China would certainly see this as a reason to strike.

China already sees a reason to strike. Right now, it's about whether Taiwan has a deterrent to them doing so.

>In the nuclear proliferation literature there is the concept of "sheltered pursuit". One of the nuclear powers is basically allowing you to disregard the NPT, and pursue nuclear weapons.

Or you develop everything but the core, some safe design that needs no testing (Trinity worked correctly on the first try, obviously. Something that needs a small core, minimum plut. This can be done in a way (and quickly enough) that you can hope to keep it secret from espionage.

Then you just make sure you have enough spent fuel that when you're ready for that part, you can get 3+ cores' worth in a hurry. Yes, the inspectors will catch on, but not before everything's done. Then you tell the inspectors to fuck off. Crisis averted.

>I think a lot of the world would understand and accept a Chinese preemptive strike if China could show evidence that Taiwan was trying to acquire nukes,

Personally, I think it's a shame that Ukraine didn't trade a couple dozen to Taiwan back in the 90s, in exchange for help rejiggering the electronics on their own nukes. Both nations could have walked away with a couple dozen, and the world would be far more peaceful today.

> Then you just make sure you have enough spent fuel that when you're ready for that part, you can get 3+ cores' worth in a hurry.

Lots of things about nuclear weapons are classified, but we can use some declassified numbers from the Manhattan project. The ratio of uranium fuel to plutonium end result was about 4000 to 1 [1].

  > Approximately 4000 pounds (1814.36 kg) of uranium were needed to produce 1 pound (0.45 kg) of plutonium.

At 6.2 kg per core, 3 cores would require 74 tons of uranium. That's about 50% more than what a plant like the Maanshan nuclear power plant (the one we are talking about here) would burn in one year. Except, or course, that commercial reactors burn uranium to a high degree, so the spent fuel is exactly worthless for weapons purposes. You need to burn the fuel 10 times less to have a chance to extract weapons grade Plutonium. So, that dash for 3 bombs would take 15 years, if by some miracle you could use the reactors 100% of the time only for the purpose of creating spent fuel for the plutonium production. Of course, the problem is that you'd need to buy that fuel from some suppliers, and the suppliers are going to ask questions why you are burning 10 times more fuel then you should (they are most likely legally obligated to report you if they suspect anything non-kosher is going on).

[1]https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/manhattan-project-science-a...