Emperor Misha picks up on the Russian contract to provide Iran with a nuclear power station. Against the idea, not surprisingly, given Iran’s seeming desire to build nuclear bombs. And I think he’s right.
Oddly, I know the organisation in Moscow that is running the project, in the day job I’ve done business with them. This whole thing has been going on for a decade at least. Sorry, I don’t know all the details but here’s a little background.
In order to build a nuclear bomb you need to have one of two things : either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. To make highly enriched uranium you need an enrichment plant, unsurprisingly. These are huge and extraordinarily expensive. And your plant needs to be of a different type, a different level of complexity, than if you want to make uranium to go into a reactor. ( Without boring people silly, reactor grade is 3 – 5 % naughty stuff, bomb grade is 95 % naughty stuff .) This is what all the fuss is over bits and pieces of equipment that have been found in Iran, centrifuges and the like.
Now, if you want to run nuclear power stations, even if you have your own uranium mines, you don’t need to actually go to the expense of building one of these enrichment plants. There are plants in the UK, the US, Canada, France, and yes, Russia, that would be delighted to take your ore, process and enrich it, and send it back to you as nuclear fuel. The kicker is that under the rules of the IAEA ( International Atomic Energy Authority ) you have to send the used fuel rods back to that same plant for reprocessing. This is to stop you from extracting the second bomb material, plutonium.
Plutonium is a man made element, not found in nature. One gets it via chemical extraction from the used fuel rods of a working nuclear reactor. This is much cheaper than the very expensive enrichment process used to make bomb grade uranium, especially as you get all that electricity out of the power plant itself.
So there are two signifiers, two markers if you wish, which help you to decide whether someone wants to get cheap electricity via nuclear power, or they want to build bombs with power supplies as the cover. Assume they are building one or more nuclear plants.
Are they
1) Attempting to build an enrichment plant rather than use the commercial services which come under IAEA control ?
2) Are they attempting to build a reprocessing plant to extract plutonium ?
( Please note that plutonium itself can also be used to run a slightly different design of reactor, so the real question is whether they are doing that and also not building a plutonium using reactor ? )
The original Russian contract included a reprocessing plant. I had thought that this part of the contract had been cancelled under US pressure but am willing to be corrected.
We have seen evidence that Iran is attempting to enrich uranium.
All of this has nothing at all to do with Pakistan and their selling of bomb designs : crude bombs can be built by graduate students if you have the fissile material available. 100 kg of plutonium, black gunpowder and some steel pipe is all you need for a very inefficient dirty bomb.
So, yes, we might conclude that Iran is trying to build a bomb, given that they are known to have tried both of the possible methods of getting fissile material. They’re not just building a power station.
The solution ? Not at all sure there is one if the Mullahs don’t co-operate, outside war. Think about what the proposed solution to N Korean bomb building is. They have a reactor at Yongbong and they have been reprocessing their own fuel. They have also been enriching their own uranium. The deal being offered by Japan/SKorea/ the US is that that reactor will be closed down, and two new reactors built. The fuel for these reactors will come in from outside, and when used up be shipped back out and reprocessed where N Korea cannot get its hands on the plutonium.
A similar solution could be effective in Iran. Russia goes ahead and fires up the plant. But all fuel comes from Russia and is returned there for reprocessing.
If the Mullahs don’t agree to that it is, unfortunately, prima facie evidence that they are trying to build a bomb.
Solution ? Sorry, much too difficult for me.