AP: Iran Converts Uranium Into [Uranium Hexafluoride] Gas

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran has converted a few tons of raw uranium into hexafluoride gas needed for enrichment, a necessary step toward producing nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons, a top nuclear official told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Uranium hexafluoride gas is the material that, in the next stage, is fed into centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Uranium enriched to low level is used to produce nuclear fuel to generate electricity and enriched further can be used to manufacture atomic bomb.

Iran said last month that it has started converting about 40 tons of raw uranium being mined for enrichment. It maintains its intentions are peaceful energy purposes.

"We have converted part of the raw uranium we had and produced a few tons of uranium hexafluoride gas," said Hossein Mousavian, Iran's chief delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency. He would not specify how much. A few tons of raw uranium would be converted into about the same amount of hexafluoride gas.

"We are not in a hurry to do it. The few tons of uranium gas we've produces is an experimental process, not industrial production," Mousavian said.

Mousavian, who also heads the Foreign Policy Committee at Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, said the process was under full IAEA supervision.

"Every stage of the process is under full IAEA supervision. The agency knows of every milligram of uranium converted," he said.

Uranium facts:

U-235 is fissionable. U-238 is not.

Enriched Uranium has a higher-than-natural level of U-235. The more highly enriched the Uranium is, the more U-235 it contains, and the more potentially dangerous it is. Moderately enriched Uranium is generally used for domestic power generation. Highly enriched Uranium is needed for nuclear weapons (and nuclear fuel for subs, carriers, etc.)

Enrichment of uranium is done by diffusion (old technology, still used in the US and France), centrifuge (prototype only in the US), and laser (high tech).

Depleted Uranium (99+% U-238) is about as dangerous as Lead but heavier.

I'm not sure of who the scientist is in the link, but it's a little suspect.

For one, U-238 is not stable. It is a radioactive isotope of uranium that is found naturally and comprises approximately 99.284% of uranium's mass. While U-235 is fissile (at .711% of mass - the remainder is U-234), U-238 is a neutron absorber (which creates Np and then Pu-293) and is fertile. Naturally the resulting PU-239 can be used in a fast reactor - or for constructing a Pu-based weapon.

Secondly, small, high power reactors may be constructed with very high concentrations of U-235, unlike what is suggested in the article - and they're not bombs.

Reactors can be built from natural uranium, low enriched uranium, highly enriched uranium, and other fuels. Canada uses heavy water and natural uranium for their implementation - avoiding the enrichment process but requiring the heavy water "enrichment" process. Most commercial US reactors use low enriched uranium (3-5%). Fast reactors like the French Phenix use plutonium - although almost every standard commercial reactor acquires a good portion of its energy from plutonium fission at the end of its fuel cycle life due to the U-238 + neutron -> Pu-239. With that said, if they go above 10% or so U-235 enrichment, they're heading to uranium bomb material.

We - and/or Israel have time to take the facility out after the election - as long as they don't have the material already enriched. It will be a mess though between the U and if the F is stored in gas form nearby.

Short answer: While the "reactor fuel" explanation seems plausible on the surface, when you dig deeper the only reasonable conclusion is that Iran is producing bomb material. Iran could have a bomb within 9 months, and if the US helps out—as Kerry is actively proposing—then it could be much, much sooner.

Long answer follows for those who are interested:

Whether you're making bombs or electricity, you need enriched uranium—uranium in which the ratio of U²³⁵ to U²³⁸ is higher than the naturally-occurring 0.7%. The question is a) how enriched it needs to be and b) how much you need.

The gas centrifuge enrichment process consists of turning the uranium into gas and running it through a centrifuge. Since U²³⁸ is slightly heavier than U²³⁶, the gas pulled out from the center of the centrifuge will be slightly more enriched than the gas pulled from the rim. The slightly-more-enriched gas is simply fed into a new centrifuge to be enriched even more. To create reactor fuel, you repeat this process several times. To create bomb material, you repeat this process many more times still.

So up to this point, Iran's story holds water: The simple fact that they are enriching uranium doesn't tell us what they're enriching it for. And there's really no way, short of direct inspection of the facility, to determine the degree to which they're enriching it.

That brings us to the second question, that of quanity. The operation of the enrichment process is measured in separative work units (SWUs). Iran's enrichment facility is still under construction, but right now it can produce somewhere around 6,000 SWUs a year. Of course we don't really know, since Iran isn't entirely forthcoming about their capabilities (fancy that), so it might even be more.

Iran claims that the purpose of their enrichment program is to be self-sufficient for Iran's nuclear power industry. However, reactors require a lot of fuel—one reactor load is around 20 tons of fuel. Running Iran's planned reactors for a year would require some 160,000 SWUs of uranium. In other words, Iran's current enrichment facilities would have to run non-stop for 27 years just to power their reactors for one year. At that rate there is no point in even bothering.

By contrast, a bomb only requires about 4,000 SWUs of uranium—it needs one-thousandth the mass of metal a reactor needs, but that metal must be 50 times more enriched than the reactor's. If Iran starts now, which they appear to be doing, they can have a bomb within 9 months. Iran is either producing one nuclear weapon or nine days of reactor fuel—which do you think is more likely?

Now you can see why Kerry thinks the solution to this problem is to give Iran uranium. If we promise to provide Iran with the 160,000 SWUs' worth of uranium their reactors would need, then they would, supposedly, not need any domestic enrichment ability, and so, naturally, they'd simply dismantle their facilities.

Yeah, right.

But wait, it gets worse. It takes 4,000 SWUs to turn unprocessed uranium into enough highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. But most of the real work is involved in enriching the uranium just enough for reactor fuel. If you start with reactor fuel, turn that into UF₆ and then enrich that, you only need 700 SWUs to make a bomb. So if Kerry gets elected and ships a huge quantity of reactor fuel to Iran, Iran will be able to make a bomb just 42 days later. But, since Kerry drove a boat for three months in Vietnam 35 years ago, I guess he must understand this issue better than I do.

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