January 26, 2006

Centrifuge "Spin Cycle"

All Europe is abuzz with Iran's recent tock towards the Russian proposal (following a tick against it, an earlier tock, and the original tick; I may have missed a few cycles of incoherence in there).

The Russian proposal, which I was originally somewhat attracted to myself, until I recently read the Guardian report discussed below, is that Iran cease all Uranium enrichment in exchange for being supplied with low-enriched Uranium by Russia. The Russian Uranium would be enriched enough to work in a power plant but not enough to function as a nuclear warhead.

Uranium is enriched in a centrifuge, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Iran admits to a casade of 164 of them at their Natanz pilot enrichment facility, above-ground. Currently, many of them appear not to be working, though "maintenance" (upgrading? building more of them?) continues.

(I had originally written "non-radioactive" above, but a commenter complained that ²³⁸U was, in fact, radioactive... which it is -- but so trivially that for practical, non-technical purposes, one may as well consider it not radioactive.)

Gas centrifuges spin UF6 [Uranium Hexaflouride] gas at high speeds creating a centrifugal force that separates the isotopes by forcing the heavier U-238 further outward in the centrifuge. Gas centrifuges have been used in Europe for about 30 years for enriching uranium.

So a proposal to supply Iran with 3% low-enriched Uranium would apparently solve the problem.

But the accent is on "apparently;" because if a report in the Guardian (and elsewhere) from August, 2005 about thousands of secret centrifuges underground at Natanz is even remotely accurate, it makes a dog's breakfast of the Russian proposal:

Meanwhile, it was claimed today that Iran had secretly manufactured around 4,000 centrifuges capable of weapons grade uranium enrichment - 25 times the quantity it has admitted to the UN.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, an exiled Iranian dissident who in 2002 helped to uncover almost two decades of covert Iranian nuclear activity, said the centrifuges - rotating machines used in separation processes - were ready to be installed at Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz.

Mr Jafarzadeh, who runs Strategic Policy Consulting, a Washington-based thinktank focusing on Iran and Iraq, said the information - which he described as "very recent" - had come from sources within the Tehran regime that had proved to be accurate in the past.

"These 4,000 centrifuge machines have not been declared to the IAEA, and the regime has kept the production of these machines hidden from the inspectors while the negotiations with the EU have been going on over the past 21 months," Mr Jafarzadeh told the Associated Press.

The Wall Street Journal article linked above gives us some numbers:

The two main halls at the Natanz complex are buried beneath the sands of central Iran, and have room for some 50,000 centrifuges -- enough to produce a year's supply of low-enriched fuel for Iran's Bushehr power plant, or high-enriched uranium for 25 to 30 bombs annually. Iran, which has yet to master the intricacies of centrifuge production and large-batch enrichment, is believed to be years away from that.

The WSJ goes on to reassure us a bit that Iran is "years away" from "centrifuge production and large-batch enrichment;" but since they don't give us a source for that, we don't know if it's solid or simply denial.

But clearly, before any proposal like the Russian one is accepted by the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany), who are negotiating with Iran in a (probably futile) last-ditch diplomatic effort to resolve the crisis without resorting to sanctions or military action, we need to get better intelligence on the claim by Jafarzadeh of an army of secret centrifuges.

Since the CIA is too busy on its long-running, critical-priority operation to produce regime-change in the United States, and thus has no time to deal with such side issues as Iranian nuclear yields, perhaps we should ask the Israeli Mossad for help on this "burning" question.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 26, 2006, at the time of 4:54 PM

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