IAEA Inspectors: Iran not Producing Weapons-grade Uranium
As I mentioned yesterday, Iran is not producing weapon-grade uranium, and could not easily do so without detection. The Hindu, which despite its name is left of center (and which is one of India's finest newspapers) writes:
' Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency have said.
The Austrian Press Agency quoted an IAEA expert as saying that the uranium substances that Iran has produced at its Natanz enrichment facility have been carefully recorded and remote cameras have been installed to supervise part of the stockpile.
“If the Iranians intend to transport these uranium substances to a secret location for further processing, agency’s inspectors will find out,” he said.
The expert added that “so far, Iran has carried out good cooperation with us in relevant verifications”.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has said that Iran has slowed down its uranium enrichment programme.'
US newspapers are complaining that they are losing money and may not survive. After they put all sorts of falsehoods about Iraq on their front pages, it may be that they fatally wounded their credibility with the US public. In any case, the above report does not show up anywhere on the web or in Lexis that I can find, except here in The Hindu, which tells me that someone is not doing their job.
(See also Dr. Jeffrey Lewis.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 2/22/2009 12:03:00 AM
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13 Comments:
Your observation that critical news is often omitted from US newspapaers is something Chomsky has railed about for decades, as did others before him, notably Mark Twain. And as in this case it's systemic, and beyond the failure to do one's job.
The only good thing about the US newspapers is the funnies. I plan to cancel my 50 year subscription to the Chicago Tribune.
If the IAEA wants to have a serious discussion on atomic activity in the ME it should demand Israel free Mordechai Vanunu so he can leave Israel and comes to tell us what he knows about Israel atomic activity.
It is interesting and disturbing that the western press, on the one hand, hypes the Iranian production of low-grade enriched uranium and, on the other, does not mention the Lyor Klein issue (which would surely not sit well with the evangelical christians, who provide the foundation of support in the US for Israel and keep the politicians in line). I've done a quick googling of the latter, so I may be wrong, but no hits come up. I've given up on both the Washington Post and the New York Times for unbiased reporting of the middle east.
The Sunday paper was a ritual of mine for years.
Now, I often still go to the grocery to buy it, but it often sits unopened for a week and then it goes into the recycle.
It's not much good anyway.
As you say, you can't believe most of what they print.
The Financial Times mentioned this in a front page article on Feb 20. Nice scary headline too - "Iran holds enough uranium for bomb".
The headline started to fall apart by the third (short) paragraph.
You are assuming that the US newspapers goal is the truth. I would submit that they probably think their last chance at glory is another war, which helps us understand why keeping negative press about Iran on the front page is good for business, not bad.
Mr Cole, I think you misunderstand what the issue is.
No one has suggested that the Iranians have a bomb's worth of highly-enriched-uranium (or HEU). The problem is that Iran has accumulated a bomb's worth of of 3.5% low-enriched-uranium (or LEU) - 1100 kilograms.
This is a much more dangerous milestone than you suppose.
Enrichment technology DOES NOT WORK LIKE YOU THINK IT DOES. It is a counter-intuitive process.
LEU is EIGHTY FIVE percent of the "separative work units" required to get 90% U235.
It is vastly EASIER to run the centrifuges to upgrade the LEU to HEU than to go from natural uranium to LEU (which they have already done)
The remaining work to go from LEU to HEU may be done extremely rapidly.
Let me give a crude explanation of the counter-intuitive process.
Imagine a bowl with 1,000 ping-pong balls in it.
Green balls represent the unwanted uranium 238 and the red balls represent bomb fuel uranium 235.
993 of the balls are green. 7 of the balls are red. The balls are at “0.7% Red Ball Enrichment.” (like natural uranium)
Now imagine reaching in the bowl and pulling out unwanted green balls. You are doing “separative work”. You will be leaving the red balls in the bowl. (just like the centrifuges)
Remove 800 green balls, a long and tedious job. (like Iran has already done)
Now you have 193 green
balls and 7 red balls.
You are now at “3.5% Red Ball Enrichment” (like the 1100 kilograms of LEU Iran now has)
Last step. This time you only need to remove a mere 192 green balls.
This leaves 7 red balls and 1 green ball or an “88% Red Ball Enrichment.” (or bomb HEU)
Notice that the last step is EASY.
Based on Iran's current centrifuges, they could enrich their bomb's worth of LEU to bomb HEU in ONLY TWO months.
As they build up their cascades of centrifuges, that time lag will soon drop to a few days.
If you re-read the Jeffery Lewis post, you will see that the main point is about the controversy resulting from Iran underestimating the amount of LEU they produced by 209 kilograms.
Actually, Yale Simkin's comment (above) misses the point. In order for Iran to be able re-enrich the low-enriched uranium into highly-enriched uranium, it would have to totally reconfigure the Natanz enrichment facility, involving months of work, all of which would be instantly observable by the 24-hour IAEA monitoring.
To set matters straight, IAEA spokesman Melissa Fleming corrected the record just yesterday:
"The (IAEA) has no reason at all to believe that the estimates of LEU produced in the (Natanz) facility were an intentional error by Iran. They are inherent in the early commissioning phases of such a facility when it is not known in advance how it will perform in practice," said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming...
"No nuclear material could have been removed from the facility without the agency's knowledge since the facility is subject to video surveillance and the nuclear material has been kept under seal."
SOURCE: http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-38148320090222
Anonymous wrote:
"Actually, Yale Simkin's comment (above) misses the point. In order for Iran to be able re-enrich the low-enriched uranium into highly-enriched uranium, it would have to totally reconfigure the Natanz enrichment facility, involving months of work,"
ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE. The centrifuges DO NOT require major modification. No replumbing, no rebuilding, no hardware changes. They would be batch fed and simply require quite minor tuning - just as Iran does on a daily basis bringing on large numbers of new centrifuges everyday.
Bringing the tuned cascades back into equilibrium after the feeding begins would take a matter of hours.
The process would be real quick. To save a few days, the parameters of the tuning would of course have been worked out at a clandestine small cascade (remember that Iran expelled the IAEA inspectors from their centrifuge production plants, and there is no tracking of inventory output nor location.)
Simply saying it would take months is simply an assertion without any technical justification.
As to them being observed by the IAEA, that is true. The scenario is based on a "breakout" - where Iran expels the IAEA, which they have done repeatedly.
Alternatively, it would be done with clandestine cascades using diverted LEU.
My main point was to dispel the oft repeated and totally inaccurate statement by Prof. Cole:
"Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%. It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. Iran is not known even to have that capability, and no it cannot be done in 2 months (try a decade),"
and your equally incorrect:
"it would have to totally reconfigure the Natanz enrichment facility, involving months of work,"
Absolutely right about the credilibity of newspapers. The more we get soft news and the hagiography which facilitated the Iraq War, the financial meltdown, but yet all the Paris Hilton news we can stand, the less credibility the media has in Americans eyes. Pew studies have shown repeatedly that Americans do not want what passes for news these days but yet newspapers, with their eyes on bottom lines, continue to serve us the pap. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as far as I'm concerned, and long live the blogosphere!
Yale, you know perfectly well that even if Iran avoided the need to replumb the centrifuges by resorting to batch feeding, it would be a long and complicated process that would be obviously identifiable by the IAEA monitors.
In fact, legally, Iran is perfectly entitled to make Highly Enriched Uranium if it chose to do so too. However Iran has repeatedly offered to place additional limits on its nuclear program beyond its existing legal obligations that would make it practically impossible to do so (short of giving up enrichment) such as by opening the program to multinational participation. THis is a generous, voluntary act by Iran that is a perfectly reasonable answer to the hysteria about Iran's nuclear "capacity" -- but thus far the US has flatly refused to even acknowledge such solutions and insists that Iran give up enrichment entirely. Obviously, the problem here is not Iran, and there is another agenda intent on demonizing Iran's nuclear program.
Yale, in fact Iran has never "expelled" the IAEA inspectors:
On 10 May 2007, both Iran and the IAEA vehemently denied reports that Iran had blocked IAEA inspectors when they sought access to the Iran's enrichment facility. On 11 March 2007, Reuters quoted International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Marc Vidricaire, "We have not been denied access at any time, including in the past few weeks. Normally we do not comment on such reports but this time we felt we had to clarify the matter...If we had a problem like that we would have to report to the [35-nation IAEA governing] board ... That has not happened because this alleged event did not take place"
The Iranians have occasionally refused to allow inspections in places where they are not obligated to allow inspections anyway, such as at the centrifuge manufacturing sites (which involve no nuclear material, only the construction of the centrifuge themselves, and so fall outside of the authority of the IAEA inspectors)
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