Tehran couldn’t make ‘the bomb’ even if it wanted to, Thomas Stauffer

Opinion, June 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info

Tehran couldn’t make ‘the bomb’ even if it wanted to

Thomas Stauffer

The Daily Star, 6/28/03

US President George W. Bush declared recently that he “will not tolerate” a nuclear-armed Iran. However, these are pointless words. There simply exists no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Iran is building a 1,000-Megawatt nuclear power plant in Bushehr with Russian help. The site is common knowledge. It has been under construction for over three decades, since before the founding of the Islamic Republic. Two other nuclear research facilities, now under development, have also come to light: a uranium enrichment plant in the city of Natanz and a deuterium (heavy water) facility in the city of Arak. The only question of consequence is whether these facilities offer a plausible route to the production of plutonium-based nuclear weapons, and the short answer is they do not.
The Bushehr plant is only part of the argument that Iran has embarked on a nuclear weapons program, but it is the part that can readily be analyzed. Accusations of Iranian intentions for the Natanz and Arak facilities, presented as evidence by the Bush administration, remain a patchwork of untestable, murky assertions from dubious sources, including the People’s Mujahideen, which the United States identifies as a terrorist organization.
They assert or infer that there are centrifuges for enriching uranium an alternative to fissile plutonium for bombs or covert facilities for extracting plutonium. Neither of these claims nor Iran’s denials, for that matter are especially credible, since the sources are either unidentified or are the same channels which disseminated the stories about Iraq’s nonconventional weapons or the so-called chemical and biological weapons plant in Khartoum.
The part of the claim that can be tested that the Bushehr reactor is a proliferation threat is demonstrably false. There are several reasons, some technical, some institutional.
The Iranian reactor yields the wrong kind of plutonium for making bombs, and the spent fuel pins in the Iranian reactor would, in any case, be too dangerous to handle for weapons manufacture.
Any attempt to divert fuel from the Iranian plant will be detectable. The Russian partners in the Bushehr project have stipulated that the fuel pins must be returned, as has been their practice worldwide for other export reactors. And just as there are many different kinds of nuclear reactors, there are different forms of plutonium, distinctions which are frequently never made in public discussions of nuclear proliferation.
There are two different kinds of reactors, heavy water or graphite-moderated reactors; and pressurized, or “light water” reactors (PWR’s). The Dimona nuclear power plant in Israel is an example of the former. The Bushehr plant is the latter.
The Israeli plant is ideal for yielding the desirable isotope of plutonium (Pu239) necessary for making bombs. The Iranian plant will produce plutonium, but the wrong kind. It will produce the heavier isotopes, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242 which actually detract from its use in bombs.
Crucial to extracting weapons-grade plutonium is the type of reactor and the mode in which it is operated. The Israeli-type plant can be refueled while “online,” without shutting down. Thus high-grade plutonium can be obtained covertly and continuously. In the Iranian plant, the entire reactor will have to be shut down a step which cannot be concealed in order to permit the extraction of even a single fuel pin. In the Israeli reactor, the fuel is recycled every few weeks, or at most every couple of months. This maximizes the yield of the highest-quality weapons-grade plutonium. In the Iranian-type reactor, the core is exchanged only every 30-40 months the longer the fuel cycle, the better for the production of power.
For the Iranian reactor at Bushehr any effort to divert fuel will be transparent because a shutdown will be immediately noticeable. In the Israeli plant the procedure is clandestine, and only sophisticated surveillance aircraft can detect the production of bomb-grade plutonium. No cases of production of bomb-grade material from fuel from an Iranian-type plant have ever been reported.
Some Bush administration officials claim that Iran’s nuclear energy program is unnecessary given its oil reserves, therefore it must exist for weapons production. Ex-CIA director James Woolsey claimed in an interview on PBS’ Frontline, on Feb. 23: “There is no underlying (reason) for one of the greatest oil producers in the world to need to get into the nuclear (energy) business.”
That reasoning is essentially fallacious nuclear power can make sense in a country with vast amounts of gas, particularly given the unusual circumstances in the Iranian hydrocarbon industry. There are needs for gas in Iran which command much higher priorities than power plants. First, more and more gas is vitally needed for reinjection into existing oil reservoirs (repressurizing). This is indispensable for maintaining oil output levels, as well as for increasing overall, long-term recovery of oil.
Second, gas is needed for growing domestic uses where it can free up oil for more profitable export substitution and new uses such as bus and taxi fleets. Third, gas exports via pipelines to Turkey or in liquefied form to the subcontinent set an attractive minimum value for any available natural gas. Fourth, the economics of gas production in Iran are almost backward, certainly counter-intuitive. Much of Iran’s gas is “rich” it contains valuable by-products (liquid petroleum gas and light condensates).
However, since Iran abides by OPEC production quotas, and since the quotas de facto recognize total output of both crude oil and gas-derived condensates, the rich gas actually displaces crude oil within the quota. That crude oil is cheaper to produce. Hence, the usual by-product credit, familiar elsewhere in the industry, is very much smaller than one might expect.
Overall, as illustrated by more comprehensive financial analysis, it can reasonably be argued that gas in Iran has economic uses which are superior to power generation, despite Iran’s much-touted gas reserves. The economic rationale is therefore plausible the costs of gas versus nuclear power generation are sufficiently close that the choice is a stand-off.
The shah’s original plan, articulated in the 1970s, foresaw a dozen or more nuclear reactors. The scheme then was pure chutzpah. In those years natural gas was a by-product and was being burned off. Today, given the costs versus values of gas, and given the reported bargain price for the Russian reactor, the economics of nuclear power, in an ostensibly gas-rich state such as Iran, are paradoxically plausible.
Even if Iran proves to have ambitions for developing nuclear weapons, any actual production is years, perhaps decades, away. Moreover, Iran has fully acquiesced to the international inspections process. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On June 22, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh reiterated that all of Iran’s nuclear facilities are open for inspections in compliance with treaty guarantees.
Whether Iran has substantive “nuclear” ambitions is not knowable from credible sources. But references to the Bushehr reactor and research facilities as evidence of such ambitions are at best disingenuous and uninformed, if not disinformation.

Thomas Stauffer is a former nuclear engineer, and a specialist in Middle Eastern energy economics. William O. Beeman is director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. They contributed this commentary to The Daily Star

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).