> Thanks for the history corrections and clarifications. Now I'll never forget that Mme. curie isolated polonium (another nearly-useless factoid). History is important but not as important as science. Still you're looking more and more like Frank Drebin: "Nothing to see here, folks, move along!"
Sarcasm noted, but you were mixing up something that wasn't isolated by Curie because it was too hard to do so, with something that was only found in the year she died.
> Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
If you gathered all the nasty decay products from Chernobyl and put them into convenient balls to strap to an explosive for the purpose of messing up someone else's country, you'd immediately have a problem of *the balls would cause the explosives you put them next to, to catch on fire, because of the heat output of their own radioactive decay*. Even in the spread-out form of the real life incident, robots stopped working when they got too close to large concentrations, the radiation fried circuits.
You are scared of something that is not only not plausible, it's something such that if they could do it at a scale big enough to hurt you, they'd have better things to do, e.g. hitting the US warships counter-blockading Hormuz.
> Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc.
Spare you the most important point?
> Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
You say "lots" like it's a point, but it isn't: "lots" is far too vague.
Chernobyl had nearly 3000 times as much uranium in it as a fission bomb, to a different enrichment level, but how much enrichment matters during a criticality incident which transmutes elements into the nasty radioisotopes that you don't want to be around is complicated for fallout calculations. Nobody, including SpaceX, has a missile that is big enough to carry that all in one go.
At the time of the accident in the reactor of the fourth power-generating unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the core contained 1659 fuel assemblies. Each assembly contained 114.7 kg of uranium, and therefore the reactor contained a total of 114.7 x 1659 = 190,287.3 kg of uranium. If the amount of fuel is calculated according to the uranium dioxide, i.e. in the form in which the fuel was loaded into the fuel elements, then its mass in each fuel element was 3.6 kg. A fuel assembly consists of 36 fuel elements, and therefore the reactor contained 3.6 x 36 x 1659 = 215,006.4 kg of uranium dioxide. The investigations performed in the destroyed buildings showed that the nuclear fuel after the accident is found in three main modifications: in the form of uranium dioxide tablets, in the form in which it was loaded into the reactor; in a dispersed form as dust and aerosol; and in a remelted state, in the form of a lavalike fuel-containing mass. This paper discusses the amount of nuclear fuel in the lavalike mass at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
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https://www.osti.gov/biblio/226794In comparison, the one which levelled Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
This scale difference is also (one of the reasons) why even having a nuclear reactor as a "civilian program" is suspect. Makes it relatively easy to hide a weapons program.
Much, much more effective to use the reactor to transmute yourself some plutonium, than a dirty bomb. Apart from anything else, half the plutonium won't vanish in 30 years (caesium-137) / 28.9 years (strontium-90) / 8 days (iodine-131) like the main Chernobyl fallout is doing.