@@ Jew-S lies about Iran's uranium-enrichment @@
Arash
November 20, 2004
Uranium-Enrichment Myths Busted
Dr. James Gordon Prather
Nuclear weapons physicist
gprather at worldnetdaily.com
To get your support for the application of the Bush Doctrine to Iraq last
year, the neo-crazies claimed to have slam-dunk intelligence that Saddam had
secretly reconstituted his uranium-enrichment program and would, therefore,
soon have nukes to give to terrorists.
But Mohamed ElBaradei - Director General of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) - had told the UN Security Council that "after three months of
intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible
indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."
To get your support for the application of the Bush Doctrine to Iran next
year, the neo-crazies are now claiming to have slam-dunk intelligence that
the mullahs have secretly been enriching uranium for years and, therefore,
will soon have nukes to give to terrorists.
Well, Iran will soon have a uranium-enrichment capability.
But IAEA experts have just spent two years developing a comprehensive
picture of Iran's nuclear and nuclear-related activities, including all
nuclear-related imports. They have found no evidence that Iran has yet
enriched uranium. Much less did they find any evidence that Iran has nukes
or a nuke development program.
Do the neo-crazies and their media sycophants really believe that having a
uranium-enrichment capability is tantamount to having nukes? And if so,
where did they ever get such a crazy idea?
Currently, the world's leader in gas-centrifuge development and the world's
largest single provider of enriched-uranium is the Urenco Group
(http://www.urenco.com), a private-sector consortium with plants in Germany,
the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.
The Urenco Enrichment Company
(http://www.urenco.com/index.php?id=191&pagename=UCL) produces and markets
enriched uranium for use in the manufacture of fuel for nuclear power
plants, while the Enrichment Technology Company develops and deploys gas
centrifuges.
The current generation of Urenco centrifuges
(http://www.urenco.com/index.php?id=170) comprise an ultra-light,
thin-walled tube made from specialty metals and composite materials,
containing a cylindrical rotor - also made from composite materials - which
spins at an incredibly high velocity in a vacuum, on almost frictionless
(magnetic) bearings.
In order to obtain the desired enrichment of the U-235 isotope
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium), it is necessary to connect a large
number of centrifuges together in series and in parallel. This arrangement
of centrifuges is known as a cascade.
Passing through the cascade, U-238 isotopic atoms in the uranium
hexafluoride (UF6) gas (http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uf6/index.cfm)
are progressively removed, resulting in a gradual "enrichment" of the U-235
isotope. http://ie.lbl.gov/fission.html
Uranium ore (An ore grade of 1% U3O8 is equivalent to 0.848% U). Sea water
also contains approximately 3 ppb (part per billion) of uranium.
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radore.html
Nuclear power plant fuel is typically 3 to 5% U-235. Weapons-grade highly
enriched uranium (HEU) is typically 90% U-235 or greater.
http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/ur-enrichment.html
In first-generation centrifuges, the rotors were made of aluminum and the
bearings were not frictionless. Hence they were relatively low-efficiency
machines - incapable of operating at high velocities - which translates into
many more centrifuges being required in the cascade. Thousands of them.
Last year, the Iranians invited ElBaradei to inspect a gas-centrifuge
cascade they were constructing. The facility - once operation begins - will
be subject to an IAEA Safeguards Agreement, which would prohibit the
production of weapons-grade HEU.
According to the IAEA, the Iranian centrifuges appear to be based upon
first-generation Urenco designs.
That figures. A Pakistani metallurgist named A.Q. Khan
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan) stole blueprints for a
first generation centrifuge from Urenco in 1975 and by the late 1980s Khan
was publicly offering uranium-enrichment services - in competition to
Urenco -- using 'indigenously' designed and produced gas-centrifuges.
Now, as best the IAEA can determine, Urenco doesn't have nukes, even though
there are probably lots of scientists and engineers employed by Urenco who
could make a gun-type nuke if you gave them two 75 pound pieces of
weapons-grade HEU to bang together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
Khan probably also had similarly capable scientists and engineers.
But, in 1998, Pakistan tested several nukes, each far more sophisticated
than the gun-type nuke we dropped on Hiroshima. Even more sophisticated than
the implosion-type nuke we dropped on Nagasaki
(http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/design.htm).
Uranium gun-type fission bomb - The atomic bomb dropped on the city of
Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) was code named 'Little Boy' (15 Kilo tons). The
design is relatively simple using a gun type arrangement to explosively
force a sub-critical mass of uranium-235 and three U235 target rings
together at high velocity causing a chain reaction.
Plutonium fission bomb - The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki (August 9,
1945) was code named 'Fat Man' (21 kilo tons) and used plutonium as the
fissionable material. Plutonium is a man-made element that is more efficient
than uranium as a fission source. The design is also more complicated than
the Little Boy atomic device. It relies on a rapid and simultaneous
implosion of a fissionable shell into a critical mass.
You see, the Pakistani nukes were apparently 'boosted' with tritium
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium) - which is the secret of making them
small and light-weight.
So, whether it's Urenco or Pakistan or Iran, having a uranium-enrichment
capability is not tantamount to having nukes. It's certainly not tantamount
to having nukes that are small enough to be delivered by ballistic missiles
(http://www.ricin.com/nuke/bg/bomb.html).
If the Iranians wanted to design and engineer a missile-deliverable nuke,
they'd need the equivalent of Los Alamos National Laboratory
(http://www.lanl.gov) and Sandia National Laboratory
(http://www.sandia.gov).
If the Iranians wanted weapons-grade enriched-uranium for their engineered
design they'd have to get it from A.Q. Khan. Unlike Iran's, Khan's
uranium-enrichment facilities are not subject to the IAEA-NPT regime.
Meanwhile, some media-type ought to visit Urenco and put to rest the
neo-crazy idea that having a uranium-enrichment capability is tantamount to
having nukes.
* Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing
official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal
Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the
Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the
Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for
national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking
member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy
Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a
nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=4016
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/archives.asp?AUTHOR_ID=35