> quite difficult to use the fuel for nefarious purposes (like a dirty bomb). Someone would need to separate the fuel from the shell, not a trivial thing to do. All this to say that it's not super attractive for terrorist types.
Those grains are fine as-they-are for a dirty bomb.
Sure, one of the safest, cleanest dirty bombs you could have the pleasure to meet, but still a dirty bomb.
Maybe not attractive to someone looking to deny territory through contamination, but great for someone looking to incite fear.
I won't speculate on how much fear one can incite. Anything with the word nuclear in it could most lilely be enough to srir up feelings of panic. Hell, D&D was enough at one stage. So you're probably right.
But I will say that if you spread this fuel over a large area with a bomb, it will ve orders of magnitude easoer to clean up, and result in far less long te issues. It wont leach into groundwater. If you swallowed/inhaled it, whilst it wpuldnt be gpod, it wont be absorbed ibto your tissue. Same with lifestock/crops. The cleanup problem goes from almost impossible, to pretty involved.
Again, I'm no expert, so take whatever with a grain of radioactive salt :-)
The grains would also be fine for a terrorist reactor. Setting off an unshielded reactor in a dense city core could cause much exposure to radiation. The miscreants wouldn't even have to guarantee it wouldn't go prompt critical.
A terrorist reactor would be a reactor used for terrorist purposes. Imagine something like the infamous demon core, but set off in a populated area.
Prompt criticality is when a nuclear reactor is critical on prompt neutrons alone. This is to be avoided (in most cases) at all costs, as the doubling time of neutrons becomes very fast, a small fraction of a second. In a normally operating reactor, the core is subcritical on prompt neutrons, but critical on prompt + delayed neutrons. Delayed neutrons are emitted after the beta decay of certain fission products, and this slows the doubling of the neutron population enough that feedback control can keep the reactor's power steady.
Those grains are fine as-they-are for a dirty bomb. Sure, one of the safest, cleanest dirty bombs you could have the pleasure to meet, but still a dirty bomb. Maybe not attractive to someone looking to deny territory through contamination, but great for someone looking to incite fear.