On Feb 1, 3:35 pm, (John Dallman) wrote:
In article .com,

(Airyx) wrote:
Now, anybody who wants to can look into what is required to prepare
uranium for a nuclear power plant, and see that many of the things
that Iran is doing with their uranium (again, fully in the open),
is not necessary unless you are making weapons.

Can you be specific about these activities? You /do/ need to enrich
uranium for a pressurised-water reactor: it won't go critical with
natural uranium.

You can make a reactor that will run on natural uranium with either
high-purity graphite or heavy water as moderators, but they aren't that
good for power generation. All the USA's commercial nuclear power
plants, and most of the rest of the not-ex-Soviet-Union world's ones are
PWRs, because that's easier to build and run and quite effective.

This is why the sharp division between civilian and military nuclear
technology that people try to draw is illusory. To run civilian power
plants in a cost-effective manner you need to make large quantities of
low-enriched uranium. If you can do that, you also have the technology
to make highly enriched uranium.

Since this point is somewhat technical and politically inconvenient,
media reporting on the subject tends to be unreliable.

That's part of the rub, isn't it. Many of the things you need to do
to produce fuel for a nuclear power plant are also things that you
would need to do to create nuclear weapons. There is, however, a
differenciation point in a couple of areas.

It is my understanding that there is a diminishing economic return
once you enrich uranium past a certain point. Anything beyond that is
spending more money on the enrichment process than you can expect to
get in return for power. IAEA inspectors have been shown enrichment
processes that go far beyond this point.

In addition, Iran has been processing plutonium, even though none of
their reactors are designed for plutonium.