News blog

Mo’ centrifuges mo’ problems

In a move that’s grabbed quite a few headlines this morning, the Iranian cabinet has overwhelmingly approved plans to build ten new uranium enrichment plants in undisclosed locations around the country.

The plants would presumably look like the country’s current facility in Natanz, which uses gas centrifuges to separate U-235 from heavier U-238. When enriched to around 5% U-235, uranium makes a great fuel for nuclear reactors. At purities of around 90% it can be used in simple nuclear weapons—the kind that don’t require testing before they’re used.

That last point is what causes trouble. Although Iran says that they want the enrichment plants to fuel a soon-to-be-built generation of power reactors, Western nations fret that what they’re really after is a bomb. There’s some reason for them to question the Islamic Republic’s good intentions: Iran didn’t originally report its Natanz facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), nor did it report a new site near the city of Qom. Ten more such sites will presumably cause many more problems.

The announcement has caused a big fuss, but it’s a little unclear what the directive to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran actually means in terms of Iran’s future capabilities. Iran has taken years to get Natanz up and spinning and few analysts believe it has the capacity to build anything even near ten additional plants.

It’s no coincidence that the plans come just two days after an IAEA resolution that appears to be condemning Iran’s nuclear programme (although I’ll leave it to more tuned-in blogs to analyse what the resolution actually means). The ten-plant plan appears to be yet another symptom of the ever-ratcheting rhetoric between Iran and the West. If it ends, as some observers fear it might, with Iran’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, then we will be headed for another crisis in central Asia.

Comments

Comments are closed.