Posted on 11/14/2005 6:17:53 PM PST by jb6
VIENNA, Austria (AP) - The head of the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency has thrown his support behind a plan calling on Iran to move its uranium enrichment program to Russia, and he may fly to Iran this week to promote the proposal, a European official and diplomats said Sunday. The effort by Mohamed El- Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is intended to persuade the Iranians to accept the plan, despite their initial rejection.
Saturday, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran's nuclear agency, ruled out the compromise proposal, saying uranium must be enriched in Iran.
But the European official and a diplomat close to the agency downplayed Aghazadeh's reaction and said ElBaradei and senior agency officials would present the plan to the Iranians.
The European official said ElBaradei was acting with the approval of the European Union and the United States, which have endorsed the arrangement as a way to reduce the threat that Iran would use enrichment operations to make nuclear arms.
I don't get it. The Ruskies inrich the uranium, where it is sent back to Iran..for insertion in nuclear warheads.
What does this solve? Who cares where the uranium is enriched as long as ends up back in Tehran?
The scheme is based on the fact that power reactor fuel
is low enriched (2-3%) whereas weapons grade fuel is
90+% U235.
Nuclear fuel for light water reactors can not be inserted into warheads to make anything more then a dirty bomb. Enriched Uranium isotopes for nuclear weapons are a tiny fraction of what's in the rods (less then 1%) and very difficult to seperate out from the radioactive junk.
Do you believe Iran is going to scrap its demand to control an "end to end" uranium fuel cycle? And even if they do give it up, are you confident, given their history of deceipt that they would not attempt to make a bomb with spent fuel?
SEE Plutonium from Light Water Reactors as Nuclear Weapon Material Harmon W Hubbard April, 2003
The feasibility of using “reactor grade” plutonium (Pu) for nuclear explosives was established some years ago. The Department of Energy, in 1977, declassified the fact that an underground test had been conducted (in 1962) in which weapon grade Pu had been replaced with reactor grade Pu with successful results. They re-emphasized the test in 1997 for the arms control community1. The subject of illegal construction of nuclear explosives was reviewed by J Carson Mark, late T-Division head at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in a 1990 report.2 The focus of his report was terrorist organizations with access to spent reactor fuel, and he concluded that the difficulties encountered by a terrorist group in using reactor grade Pu for explosive fabrication differ only in degree, but not in kind, from the problems they would find using weapon grade Pu. In this note, however, we are more interested in a “rogue” state with access to Pu from a light water reactor (LWR), and having perhaps more technical expertise, and certainly more resources available, than the putative terrorist group. Our approach is qualitative with quantification of key items necessary for estimates. All of the data and theory used in this note have been in the public domain for many years3.
Never maid those claims, now did I? ;P Iran will continue working on the nukes with Pakistani assistance, just like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Nope, you never did. Just wondered if you were leaning in that direction...
My point is why trust the Russians?
I trust the Russians to do whatever is expedient
for their interests, and for the Iranians to create a
weapon program on the sly. I also take the Israelis
at their word that no way will IRI get N weapons
that work.
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