Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran within 2 months

In article om,
(Airyx) wrote:

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.

Oh, absolutely. The only people who use HEU in reactors are navies,
where physically small reactors and infrequent refuellings are very
worthwhile.

IAEA inspectors have been shown enrichment processes that go far
beyond this point.

"That go past this point" or "That /can/ go past this point"? That's the
kind of point that the media can mess up really easily.

Everything I've read has said that they're concentrating on centrifuges.
This is the most practical technology for any kind of uranium enrichment
at present. Now, the enrichment on a single centrifuge stage is tiny,
not remotely enough for reactor usage. You have to run centrifuges in a
long cascade to get any worthwhile enrichment.

So, if you have an industrial-scale centrifuge plant, you can run it in
several parallel cascades to get a large quantity of low-enriched
uranium, suitable for running PWRs, or you can run it in fewer, longer
cascades and get less HEU, suitable for bombs. But it's the same plant,
and the changes needed to reconfigure it are tiny compared to the effort
of building it.

So anyone with a big centrifuge plant can make HEU if they want to. The
biggest centrifuge plant in Europe belongs, not to the UK to France, but
to the Netherlands, who thus have a considerable latent nuclear weapons
capability.

Unfortunately for politics, uranium enrichment via centrifuges isn't
proof of nuclear weapons intent.

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

There is also, sadly, a legitimate civilian use for reprocessing
capability. At the point when reactor fuel is running out of reactivity,
that isn't because most of the U235 in it has been burned up. It's
because the various fission products in the fuel are absorbing
significant numbers of neutrons. If you take the fuel out of the
reactor, and chemically separate the plutonium and uranium from the
other stuff, you end up with uranium that's less enriched than it was,
but is still significantly above natural U235 levels, and is thus
cheaper to enrich back to reactor-grade.

Now, the USA does not do this, having decided decades ago that the
downsides of reprocessing - plutonium, high-level nuclear waste - meant
that the game was not worth the candle. The only large-scale
reprocessing the USA has ever done has been for making military
plutonium, on fuel from reactors designed for making plutonium, rather
than power generation. However, several other states (UK, France, Japan)
do, or have, undertaken large scale-reprocessing or civilian nuclear
fuel, because it's much more economical of limited uranium supplies.

So if a country is wanting to build up a full-scale nuclear fuel cycle
capability, experimenting with small-scale reprocessing to see just how
hard it is - you always learn more from doing it yourself than from
reading about it - is legitimate. The USA's decision that it is not
worth doing is a piece of industrial policy that several other countries
don't agree with. It absolutely isn't a rule in the NPT.

And the idea that Iran wanting civilian nuclear power is obviously and
only a cover, because they have lots of oil, doesn't stand up either.
Yes, they have lots of oil, and it's substantially the only thing they
have. They presumably know approximately how much they have, since they
must surely have surveyed anywhere remotely geologically promising by
now. But when their oil runs out (more accurately, starts getting
economically unattractive to extract) they don't want to return to
poverty. They've ben very poor within recent history, and they don't
want to go back. That's entirely reasonable. There may be more oil to be
discovered elsewhere - but it's elsewhere, and they won't get to benefit
from exporting it.

So they want to create other industries, so they'll have other things to
export. Since they have a somewhat more advanced educational system than
most countries in the region - still, even after years of the Islamic
state (Shias don't have the hostility to all things modern that
extremist Suni so often suffer from) - they're trying to build high
technology stuff. And there seems to be a significant chance that
nuclear technology will make a comeback for electricity power
generation, since fossil fuels have massive advantages for mobile uses,
and less so for fixed plant.

They don't need it for power generation now, so offers of Russian
enrichment and reprocessing aren't very interesting. Besides, would you
trust the Russians to keep up your energy supplies? Europe is learning,
rapidly, that Russia regards turning off the tap as a basic price-
negotiating tactic, about like this ("We think we should end our current
contract and have a new one where you pay twice as much", "We aren't
keen on this idea at all", 'Click').

And yes, the idea that this may also give Iran nuclear weapons is
undoubtedly attractive to them. But it isn't the only plausible reason
for a nuclear programme. If they were being even slightly cunning, they
would genuinely not have a nuclear weapons programme at present, so that
they couldn't be caught doing it. Building up their technology to the
point that, say Japan or Germany were at in the seventies, so that they
could then swiftly execute a weapons programme, would be much smarter.

--
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.