Iran: No deal reached, only framework; Iran can still enrich

Iran is not N. Korea which would truly let all of its people starve. The Iranians have reformers who are interested in changing the country and making it an economic power - that can't happen with sanctions or playing cat-and-mouse nuclear weapon development like the Koreans did.

Ultimately, there is only so much you can do to stop Iran from getting the bomb. But military strikes will only give it more incentive to develop the technology. They can build a bunker so deep that no bomb short of a nuke will be able to get in there. If they are determined, they can do it.

The fact that they are willing to give up all their enriched uranium and make all the concessions they have show they aren't as crazy as N. Korea. And the unfettered access of inspectors is a huge deal.

 

Not sure if serious but the danger with reactors is they are easy to run in a way that produces high amounts of Pu-239. Pu-239 is produced in all nuclear reactors.

 

The reactors they have would be converted. One into a research reactor which would not contain any fissile material. And the other one which is a heavy water reactor would have it's core gutted and destroyed so it could not produce weapons grade radioactive material (i.e. pure plutonium-239).

 

Are you saying as part of this deal they don't get to keep their spent fuel? Their 40MWt reactor can already produce enough for several weapons a year and they are building one almost ten times larger. Any conversion of the reactor could greatly reduce the pu-239 produced but not to zero. More like 20% of what the original design produced. So, enough for several bombs per year of operation.

 

Not being a nuclear physicist I couldn't tell you the nature of the deal and how it prevents Iran from getting weapon's grade plutonium but I can tell you that nuclear scientists have said that this deal would be effective in stopping Iran from getting it.

 

Well then to answer your original question of why reasonable people care about them having 5% enriched U. The problem is with the reactor they can still pump out great amounts of material used in bombs. IF this deal comes with the understanding their reactor will be upgraded in a way that produces far less Pu-239, it will still produce buttloads (kg).

 

http://www.nei.org/Master-Document-...enting-the-Proliferation-of-Nuclear-Materials

LEU can not be used to create nuclear weapons.

 

That isn't what you quoted concludes. It just states that is would reduce the time needed to produce the amount of Pu-239 needed for a weapon. What you quoted says there are two ways to reduce the amount of Pu-239 produced. Reduce energy output to 25% and change from natural uranium to LEU. It doesn't say this prevents the production of Pu-239 like you concluded.

When you keep the same power output, the switch to LEU only reduces Pu-239 reduced to 19% when compared to natural uranium.

You seem to think this eliminates the possibility of a bomb being made? It clearly doesn't.

 

It does, you can not make a bomb from the fuel rods of a reactor using LEU. This is well established in the nuclear industry for the last 50 years.

The reasons are highly technical and beyond my knowledge but for whatever reasons that 1% plutonium that comes out isn't the stuff you can turn into a bomb.

 

So you are (wrongly) thinking if their reactors are converted to LEU they will not produce Pu-239?

 

Oh ok. Well you are wrong about this. It just reduced the amount produced. So does reducing the power output. You should have been clued in when you read "Von Hippel says the fuel swap alone would lengthen the breakout time Iran would need to build a plutonium bomb to more than 1 year."

This is also by converting the 40MWt reactor and then reducing the output to 10MWt. When the darkhovin plant comes online at over 330MWt they can crank way more than one bomb per year.

If you want to read more about converting the smaller 40MWt reactor to LEU read this

http://www.princeton.edu/~rskemp/Kemp-Arak.pdf

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium

No one has ever done it. The plutonium that you get is a mixture of Pu-239 and Pu240. The problem with Pu-240 is that it can it can spontaneously explode so you can't have a too high percentage - it's unstable. You get too much of it from a conventional reactor. That's why convention nuclear reactors aren't considered a threat to be used for building nukes.

 

You are completely confused. Why are you linking a wiki article on reactor grade Pu that states no one uses it for weapons? We are worried about weapons grade Pu in weapons, which is very easy to produce with a nuclear reactor. Just read the previous article you posted (not the wiki article) and my explanation of it. Your have veered off course here big time.

 

I don' think you get it. You need to do some homework and read up on PU-239 vs. Pu-240.

 

Just stop. Just stop embarrassing yourself.

 

Valuable input to discussion. Valuable input. No response to topic?

 

Iran will continue to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon in an underground bunker next to a holy city. That's all you need to know.

 

And they are enriching uranium now. So again, what is the alternative that results in a better endgame?

 

When it reduces the amount dramatically, comes up with inspections, and the world's nuclear proliferation experts - even the skeptics - all think its likely to be very effective, then yes.

Still no alternative solutions suggested, I see.