Iranian Nukes
So, Iran made its big nuclear announcement – they produced their own fuel for their medical isotope reactor. The fuel has to be enriched to 20%, so it was a step forward for them, but the article points out that the reason they had to do it is because when they tried to arrange for the fuel to be produced outside of Iran, the US and France stalled the talks.
Canada is dealing with the loss of their isotope reactor, and the results aren’t pretty. Nuclear medicine has to shut down, so some cancer therapies aren’t available.
This is another example of why Iran has a nuclear fuel enrichment program in the first place – the West has not acted in good faith when they have attempted to purchase fuel from abroad. Iran has uranium, but it must be refined and concentrated to be useful. They don’t have a reliable supplier, so they have to do it themselves.
North Korea has nuclear weapons because the West failed to live up to its side of the bargain struck during the Clinton administration, so the North Koreans reacted.
If the US keeps failing to keep its side of bargains with other countries, it can’t expect that they will make any more deals.
Iran continues to be in full compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
11 comments
Iran’s medical isotope reactor is actually a heavy water reactor built with Pakistani help (there is a large heavy water facility immediately beside it too) so it actually doesn’t need enriched fuel at all to operate as a nuclear reactor, but some of the isotopes they’re aiming for definitely benefit from having 20% enriched fuel spurting more neutrons around.
In other words, if they were making bombs, they wouldn’t want enriched fuel for their medical isotope reactor (since U-238 irradiates to Pu-239, i.e., bomb material, while every bit of U-235 in that fuel is taking the place of U-238 that could be irradiated to bomb material). In short, the very fact that they’re feeding enriched fuel into their heavy water reactor is proof that they aren’t using it to make bombs.
– Badtux the Sciency Penguin
Come on, Badtux, you are trying to bring facts into this, and everyone knows that facts have a liberal bias. 😈
If it is OK to attack nuclear facilities in the Middle East, I guess it would be fine with the US if someone attacked the Israeli reactors. 👿
Having the US complain about Russia and China vetoing action on Syria, after the long history of the US vetoing any action on Israel is the height of hypocrisy.
Even if the Iranians wanted to build a bomb, they are years away from the capability. If they really wanted a bomb, they could probably buy one from North Korea, or Pakistan if things continue to unravel there. The ‘Supreme Leader’ has issued a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons are ‘un-Islamic’, and there is no way around that in Iran. To start, there would have to be another fatwa that lays out the basis of falsifying Khamenei’s reasoning, and that process alone would take years, and can’t start until he dies. It is amazing that most of the people arguing about contraception don’t seem to accept the power of a religious law.
We already know how long it will take *any* nation with 1940’s-level technology to obtain the atom bomb: About five years. 1940-1945, yo. So every time I hear some right-wing chickenhawk whining that Iran is “five years from an atom bomb” I get a chuckle out of it. Sure they are. As is every other nation on the entire friggin’ planet that doesn’t have an atom bomb, for cryin’ out loud. We ain’t talkin’ about something edgy and futuristic, we’re talkin’ about 70 year old technology, sheesh!
Thank you, Bryan and Badtux for making very valid points. I don’t always keep up with what is going on, so it is good to be able to get current.
Yes, Badtux, 70-year-old technology that has been extensively written about in open-source material that anyone is free to read. Of course, the first requirement is a government that is willing to spend the money to do it. North Korea did it, so the cost isn’t as astronomical as it once was, but it is the sort of thing that would get noticed.. It would require the construction of certain facilities, but they would be noticed.
If we can finger individuals for ‘elimination’, how could they hide the construction projects? They can’t, and they know it, so they aren’t building them.
This is the same garbage that we saw about the WMDs in Iraq, and we all know how that ended – badly for US interests.
OWL, people are being herded towards decisions that make no sense. Everything that is claimed to be ‘proof’ turns out to be a fabrication by some group of whackoes. How many times do they get to cry ‘wolf’. before we ignore them forever.
The main reason more nations don’t build atom bombs is because of the repercussions — it turns you into an international pariah — not because they don’t have the ability to do so. South Korea, for example, could have an atom bomb in about 18 months. Yes, they’re that close — they have the heavy water reactors up and going, they have the gear for the plutonium reprocessing plant in mothballs, and so forth — but they don’t do it because it wouldn’t be worth the sh*tstorm that would happen as a result. In fact, that’s the main reason the U.S. still has troops in South Korea.
So only nations that are *already* international pariahs — or aim to be a superpower, or are threatened by a superpower — will do nukes. Which is why our threats on Iran and our attempts to turn them into an international pariah are counterproductive if the goal was to encourage Iran to not build nukes. But of course, that’s not the goal, so … (shrug).
Actually South Korea is closer than that, as they admitted they had been working on weapons, and they ‘destroyed all of the facilities involved’. They could probably test in months if they wanted to, as they certainly have the industrial base to provide all of the parts for a rather sophisticated weapon.
I think North Korea went ahead as a matter of self-protection as much as anything else. Telling the truth about WMDs didn’t help Saddam avoid the attack, so North Korea had no reason to believe they wouldn’t be attacked unless they had nuclear weapons.
Iran is the third member of the totally arbitrary ‘axis of evil’, so they would take threats seriously, which is why they have moved closer to Russia and China.
Likud needs an external threat that is perceived to be credible so it can stay in power, so they keep beating the war drums over Iran. Along the way they have further isolated Israel from the few nations that had been willing to talk.
They only group that benefits from this crap are the oil speculators like Goldman Sachs.
Bryan, the biggest delay in a South Korean bomb program would be refining their native uranium deposits into sufficiently pure U-238 to bombard in their CANDUs into Pu-239 for weapons. They can’t do that with the enriched fuel they get from the Americans for their light water reactors because that fuel is inappropriate for that purpose (the high level of U-235 would result in too many unwanted isotopes of plutonium in the result), and the only time they could do that with the fuel they get from Canada for their CANDU’s is right after they get a shipment of fuel rods for refueling the reactors, i.e., once every 5 years, because otherwise you get too much Pu-240 and other unwanted isotopes in the result (and the Canadians track those rods quite well to make sure they make it into a reactor and are *not* diverted to where they can later be irradiated).
In short, they have the technology to do the complete process, but there’s pieces they’ve never bothered with (for example, the agreement with Canada for the CANDU’s says that Canada will provide the fuel, so they never bothered creating a refining facility to refine their own native deposits) where they’d have to build a lot of infrastructure from scratch. I think 18 months would be a fairly reasonable amount of time for this, given my experience in managing other large-scale manufacturing projects that involved doing things that everybody knows the basic principles but nobody involved has ever done it before.
That said, the treaty South Korea signed restricting their ability to refine, enrich, and reprocess fuel runs out in 2014, so there’s going to be… issues… there with getting fuel for their light water reactors (all of which currently comes from the United States). I suppose they could turn to Russia as a source of enriched fuel until their own enrichment facilities came online, but Russia isn’t exactly known as the most reliable partner you can have. Of course, given how erratic the USA has been lately, unless your name is Israel or Goldman Sachs I don’t know that you could count the USA as being a reliable partner either…
– Badtux the Scientific Penguin
A problem with Russia is qualify control, which isn’t always the best, even on their export products, but the US, as you note is not exactly a reliable partner, even when the people you are dealing with haven’t been swallowed by a multinational. They might try Australia, as they are beginning to get into the business, although most of their stuff goes to China at the moment.
All of which goes to the reason that Iran wants its own fuel cycle, to provide what it needs for itself, and extend the life of its oil fields, its major source of hard currency.
My bad, I assumed they had refineries in place, and I’m certain they have the necessary plans and programming for the computer controlled lathes to put the devices together, They are amazingly simple devices until you try to make small ones.
I’ve seen models of most of the early types at various military museums before the post-9/11 freak-out, and most of the weight was in the shielding, not the devices.
Humans do have an amazing capacity for finding things that will destroy us all.
But back to the original topic, the reason most nations don’t have nuclear weapons is not because they lack the capability to do so, but, rather, because they have no need for nukes and the costs of going nuclear, in terms of international condemnation, ostracization, and sanctions, are higher than anybody sane wants to pay. I mentioned South Korea only as an example of a nation that clearly has the capability but doesn’t have any nukes. If you want to look at the list of nations that have the clear capability to have nuclear weapons within less than two years, just look at the export list for Canada’s CANDU reactors :twisted:.
Which is why it’s crazy that we’re talking about imposing sanctions on Iran *before* they have a nuclear weapon. In that case, what do they have to lose by deciding they *will* build a nuke?!
Exactly, and they do it when US and Israeli intel both say there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran.
The EU is really stupid to go along with this, because they certainly don’t need higher fuel prices as they slip back into recession thanks to austerity. This faith-based governance is a real PITA for people trying to live in the world.