Posted on 10/06/2004 1:30:31 AM PDT by Redcloak
Holy shiite, batman!
No, this is not good at all. GWB is probably chomping at the bit to restrain himself until after the election. At which time, he will begin the steps to grind the nuclear ambitions of Iran into broken dreams. Unless Israel acts before then of course.
Imagine the weight GWB carries on his shoulders since 911! The whole world has basically gone to pot since then, or should I say that many of clintoon's failures have showed their face since then.
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.
Uranium hexafluoride is nasty stuff; very corrosive, IIRC. It could easily eat through a pipe and cause a massive explosion.
: )
Ping
An explosion that would be very similar to a low yield tactical nuclear weapon.
If Kerry becomes president, they won't have to bother. He will just give them enriched uranuim.
We would not want pure U235 in a power plant, this would make it too much like a bomb.[from that link]
George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent
The US and the world must act now. Iran will continue moving quickly during the month of November because it feels the US will do nothing during the elections season. I hope it will not be too late for some action to be done against Iran after November...
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.
I look forward to it.
It is U235 that is used in the bomb and slightly enriched for most Pressurized Water Reactors.
Actually, U235 is fissionable but is not considered as a fissile material.
Depleted Uranium (99+% U-238) is about as dangerous as Lead but heavier.
Natural Uranium in approx. 99.3% U238
Long answer follows for those who are interested:
Whether you're making bombs or electricity, you need enriched uraniumuranium 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 fuelone 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 uraniumit 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 fuelwhich 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.
Habe you thought of turning this into an actual editorial or letter to the editor?
No B-52s. B-52 come under a treaty with the Russians. The older models were retired they got sliced up under this treaty.
U 238 + Neutron = U 239
You need to add a Proton to U 238 to make Pu 239 +1. Add an electron too to balance the charge.
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