Hunting for Iran's secret nuclear plant near Qum on Google Earth

Ogle Earth ^

[maquiladora]

Iran's nuclear program is again making the news cycles after the country admitted this week that it has built a second nuclear fuel processing plant, to complement the one at Natanz.

According to the New York Times, the admission by Iran came after it learned that western intelligence agencies knew of its existence, and indeed the US, UK and French leaders were just now on TV to accuse Iran of having concealed the plant from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for all the years it was under construction.

The New York Times has US government sources situating the new plant "inside a mountain near the ancient city of Qum," and that alas is the most detail we can glean right now from public news sources.

Might it be enough to find this new plant in Google Earth, however? Not with certainty, but one place in particular looks like a very strong candidate. I'll explain how I found it, you decide how likely it is to be the right place.

First, I turned on successive years of the "Digital Globe Coverage" layer in the "More" directory in the "Layers" sidebar of Google Earth, and went exploring around Qum (aka Qom).

The working assumption is that any satellite image tile taken all by itself as a "special request", instead of as part of a long strip, tends to be taken at the behest of an organization that has good cause to investigate that region for something it might not have direct access to. This need not be an intelligence agency, it could also be an NGO, for example one that is interested in proliferation issues like ISIS.

With this search criteria in mind, two areas around Qum are found to be consistently the beneficiaries of such special requests. One of them is an Iranian missile test site some 40km ESE of Qum, and it is not near a mountain. The other one?

Well, it's a mountain 35km NNW of Qum. And it has two big parallel roads driving straight into it.

Considering that one-ended tunnels are rare finds, and after a look around Qum to see if there might be other overlooked sites, this candidate site sure looks promising.

(One weird additional piece of information: The imagery all the way around the mountain is dated August 21, 2005, but the area immediately around the entrance of the tunnel comes with no date attached in Google Earth. Imagery metadata in Google Earth is almost never that granular. The imagery of the tunnels could be newer, as 2005 would be a long way back to be building this plant (though not the tunnel for the plant), but there is no clear seam of a more recent image being overlaid on a base image. So my guess is that the imagery of the tunnel is from 2005 or later.)

[maquiladora]

Ping. Looks like a likely candidate to me.

[SonOfDarkSkies]

The heck with Google Earth...I want to download “Ogle Earth”!;-)

[FreedomProtector]

lol....we are all satellite spies now....

[NaughtiusMaximus]

Wow! Amazing work!

[jhpigott]

good homework

[MCCC]

Perhaps Obama gave the Iranians this site.

http://i825.photobucket.com/albums/zz175/castlebravo007/Undergroundsite.jpg?t=1253892794

[GauchoUSA]

Nah, they’ll never find anything in there. Intelligence was wrong about Iraq’a WMD they are sure to be wrong about this site (sarc...)

[Scythian]

Look what I found on Google earth, this is not a fake ...

[IYAS9YAS]

What are the coordinates?

[Scythian]

What are the coordinates?

See this, the image is pretty well known actually ... Indian Head

[Windflier]

Look what I found on Google earth, this is not a fake ...

IIRC, that's a pic from one of our Mars observers, not Google Earth.

[Windflier]

Hmmm.... looks like I confused that pic with another one that was taken of the Martian surface. There are several human-looking geological features on that planet.

[Gator113]

Good.

Now, does anybody happen to have a couple of Nukes laying around? I’d like to borrow them, because we can be darn sure that Obama’s traitorous leadership will never eliminate this threat.

After all, Obama is still running a campaign in hopes of hanging onto his whack-job followers ........ while he wars against America.

[GauchoUSA]

There are several places like that which are just amazing. I know of some more in the NW of the United States near the Canada border.

[Bender2]

I know I've had a little drinkie or two... but I believe the Indian Head is in Canada just over the border from Montana, not Iran. Zoom out from the image at http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=50%C2%B0+0%2738.20%22N+110%C2%B0+6%2748.32%22W&ie=UTF8&z=17&ll=50.010538,-110.113585&spn=0.004895,0.009978&t=h&om=1 and it will show the location.

[G8 Diplomat]

They've got one at Qom now too?

Supposedly they have a "secret" one at Al-Zarqan as well:

[G8 Diplomat]

Speaking of Al-Zarqan, I came across this letter hosted and translated by MEMRI about the reactor there. Al-Zarqan is in the Khuzestan province where the Arab minority lives. The Arabs in Iran hate the regime (simply because it is Shi'a) and are probably nervous about it going nuclear. The reactor is in the middle of a highly-populated area so the Iranian government can use civilian shields as a grievance if the reactor is bombed.

Here is the translation:

From the IRGC Commander in the city of Al-Ahwaz to the director in charge at the Mehab Qudus company for Construction and Supervision Mr. Mohammed Kayafir

Re: The nuclear reactor at Al-Zarqan

Greetings,

I thank you for the good services of the Mehab Qudus company, and at the same time I must remind you of the following items:

1. All construction materials must be transported from the warehouses to the construction site in top secrecy.

2. As part of the doctrine of caution, we reiterate yet again that during the transport of all required materials, you must ensure that this [transport] does not arouse the suspicions of any citizen in the region through which you are moving.

3. In general, it is absolutely forbidden to hire any Arabic speakers or any citizen from Khuzestan in the framework of the 'Al-Zarqan Nuclear Reactor' construction project. You must ensure that all manpower, including the driver, the accountant, the warehouse manager, the laborer, the technician, or the guard, comes from the northern provinces.

In conclusion, we say yet again that all the construction work in this project must be carried out under absolute secrecy.

From the aide to IRGC commander in the city of Al-Ahwaz, Hassan Jalaliyan.

[IYAS9YAS]

Thanks, both, for the links. That is really cool.