Uranium Enrichment - How Widespread?
This is also in the comments section from my last post, but I thought I'd highlight it here as well.
"...The issue is allowing Iran to enrich uranium. Enrichment can't be said to undermine the NPT because the NPT explicitly allows for the right to enrichment for peaceful purposes. There are many other NPT signatories who enrich uranium without building nuclear weapons. So the crucial question is why it's so important to prevent Iran from exercising its legal right to enrich uranium. I would like more discussion about that."
You shall have it. I will note for now that the number of countries who actually enrich uranium is considerably less than "many" - it's a dozen.
It's worth noting that 5 of those countries are nuclear-weapons states under the NPT and two others are India and Pakistan. So the number of non-nuclear weapons-states belonging to the NPT who enrich uranium is still fairly small.
But that could certainly change. I don't know if the demand for nuclear power will increase, but it is certainly reasonable for the non-proliferation regime/arms control community to plan for it.
Paul,
You may want to read outside of the HEU-centric literature. I suggest http://www.uxc.com/. It is a start.
January 26, 2006 9:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just found this on a Web site: The Brazilians refused access to the Resende enrichment plant to the IAEA claiming the need to protect intellectual property in 2004. Six months later they agreed to allow the IAEA limited access.
Time to bomb Brazil, right? They're obviously hiding their nuclear intentions. Yet we don't hear word one from ElBaradei about this. Meanwhile, Iran, in the same position, is threatened with imminent military action. Why? Well, Brazil isn't threatening Israel, apparently...yet. If it joins Chavez in some way, however, look for the drums to beat in the US in a second.
ElBaradei has been pressing for the nuclear fuel cycle to be regulated by modifying the NPT to allow enrichment only by multinational agreements rather than individual states. This is certainly interesting, but begs the question whether any sovereign state will allow its energy requirements to be regulared by outside parties.
When the United States agrees to this, it might be a fruitful approach.
Dream on. The US has dumped more international agreements about nuclear weapons than even Israel.. If this country sees the need to make even more and easily usable nuclear weapons specifically for use against non-nuclear states without their own capacity for delivering nuclear weapons, what chance does the world have to rein in proliferation?
And ElBaradei is doing no service to the cause of non-proliferation by ignoring Israel's weapons while demanding what is CURRENTLY a legal right by Iran to enrich be halted.
It's hypocrisy, Period.
January 26, 2006 9:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't understand...the 12 countries I mentioned do not all produce HEU.
January 26, 2006 9:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't really understand this either. I'm only coming at this as a physicist, but part of my understanding is that it takes a lot more engineering to get Highly Enriched Uranium than merely Somewhat Enriched Uranium (the complicated cascade of gas centrifuges for UF4 if I'm not behind the times). That's part of why the inspection process is effective. You can hide plain old uranium, even after it's been enriched, but it's hard to hide the engineering program that's needed to do it. One of the premises of NPT is that the science behind nuclear weapons pretty much can't be hidden. It's the engineering that's presently hard.
January 26, 2006 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly how many international agreements has Israel "dumped"?
January 26, 2006 11:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Remember that South Africa either discovered or developed an entirely different method of separation. I know that in the open, non-classified memoirs published in the 1940s Manhatten Project scientists described at least two other separation methods that were not pursued. So it would be a mistake to think that centerfuge techniques are the only one out there.
sPh
January 26, 2006 11:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. El Baradei has no power to demand anything of Israel, since Israel isn't a party to the NPT. Iran could put itself in the same position as Israel simply by withdrawing from the NPT, something it has threatened to do if it is reported to the UN Security Council.
January 26, 2006 2:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of these methods is a calutron, essentially a small-scale cyclotron. It's called a calutron after Cal U.
January 26, 2006 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Iran actually pursued laser enrichment for a while. And Iraq took a total shotgun approach, which included calutrons.
January 26, 2006 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink