Apperntly Tehran Builds Fast Uranium Centrifuges

PARIS, Aug. 24 — An Iranian opposition group said here on Thursday that Iran had built at least 15 advanced uranium enrichment machines that could speed production of nuclear fuel and asserted that the country would have hundreds more by next year.

The group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has been correct before. In August 2002, its announcement that Tehran was pursuing a secret uranium enrichment program led in part to the current standoff over the Iranian nuclear development program. But many of the group’s subsequent disclosures have been either less significant or wrong.

Iran faces possible United Nations sanctions if it fails to stop enriching uranium by Aug. 31. Iran says it will use the nuclear fuel to generate power, but the international community fears that the program is designed to provide fuel for nuclear weapons.

The National Council of Resistance is the political wing of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, whose goal is to overthrow the Islamic Republic by force. The National Council said Thursday that Tehran was making advanced centrifuges, known as model P-2, at a secret site run by the “Iran Centrifuge Technology Company.” Iran has already been enriching uranium with slower P-1 centrifuges, made from an older design.

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Of course, the uranium centrifuge issue could be a red herring to distract from noticing the extraction of plutonium from used reactor rods.

North Korea has enough plutonium to build at least 10-12 weapons, even if they go way overboard and/or they're not particularly efficient. They decided to skip the uranium separation and go right for a plutonium weapon.

Plutonium extraction is a dead-simple chemical process. No centrifuges required.

Now, the weapon design is tougher with plutonium, especially if the plutonium is particularly crappy in terms of Pu240 contamination. But it's a lot easier to extract plutonium from rods than it is to separate U235 from raw uranium. So it's sort of a trade-off between the ease of getting the raw material and the difficulty in the weapon design.

What if Iran is spoofing uranium separation whilst off preparing to extract plutonium from Bushehr's rods a year or two after the plant spins up?

[edit on 25-8-2006 by Tom Bedlam]

krax, in the future please add your own thoughts and opinions on a subject when creating a thread. A link and snippet is not enough to start a thread.

ABOUT ATS: General ATS discussion etiquette

In response to the sugestion of writing my own opinion, i think this is oppression, I think Iran should be alowed to have nucular weapons, US and UK have them and really just dont wan them to grow.

1st off who invented the atom bomb and nukes hmmm this ones hard isn't it oh yes the USA and UK so we have supreme right to have them, as for who else should have them we have that right too as we invented it, Russia stole it, China stole it, hmm Gee and Iran wants it.