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Iran Opens Its First Nuclear Power Plant
pickens writes "VOA reports that Russian and Iranian engineers have begun loading fuel into Iran's first nuclear power plant located in the southern city of Bushehr amid international fears that Iran will use the facility to make nuclear weapons, a charge both Tehran and the Kremlin vehemently deny. Officials say it will take about two to three months for the plant to start producing electricity once all of the fuel rods have been moved into the reactor. The production capacity of the plant will initially be 500 megawatts, but will eventually increase to 1,000 megawatts. Earlier this year, Washington criticized Russia for going ahead with the planned opening of the plant amid global disagreement and concern over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program. Moscow did, however, back a fourth round of sanctions against Tehran, which called for Iran to stop uranium enrichment."
What has Iran ever done to us
While the plant does use low enrichment uranium, it produces among other things plutonium. And although not a breeder reactor to my knowledge, it still should produce enough plutonium every fuel cycle to make several bombs. Uranium enrichment to produce nuclear weapons is very difficult, plutonium extraction isn't. So all that is left of your argument is the Russian security over the fuel. If we were making this kind of deal with one of our allies would we be preventing them from obtaining nuclear weapons or would we covertly be helping them?
I do find this news worrisome but they still have a ways to go before they actually have nuclear weapons and every step of the way can be thwarted either by covert action or by their own mistakes. Radiated fuel is not fun stuff to play with, and that alone will hopefully be enough of a deterrent.
First, I wish no one had the bomb, and the idea of a squirrelly state like Iran - or God forbid, North Korea - having one is enough to make me lose sleep. That said, under what moral or legal right do we get to say that they can't have one, other than that we don't like them? Is it our official policy that only our allies get nukes, and if so, do Russia and China have the same official policy with non-overlapping sets of allies?
Again, I don't want Iran to have the bomb. I'm just curious about what doctrine or treaty gives us a say in the matter of whether a sovereign country gets to use a technology that we already have.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
While it could theoretically be done, this particular plant is not very useful for making bomb material.
There are also thermodynamic issues that pretty much define a reactor as electric or plutonium producer. To generate Pu you need a high reaction rate which is easiest when the output temp is as low as possible = high coolant flow rate, but to generate electricity you need a high rate AND high output temperature. So a Pu plant wants as cool of a temp as possible (cheaper to maintain) and an electric plant wants as high of a temp as possible.
One design constraint for electric plants is refueling and repair kills your output and ruins profitability. So the fuel rods spend some time in the reactor and cladding corrosion, and corrosion in general, is a big deal. Less surface area equals less corrosion. So electric reactor fuel rods tend to be a bit shorter and squatter to have minimum surface area.
On the other hand Pu plants want the longest skinniest fuel rods they can manufacture because they need to keep the center of the rods below some material temperature limit. And the rods are only going to operate a little while in the reactor before being pulled and having the Pu extracted, so cladding/corrosion issues are kind of glossed over.
Pu plant:
skinny long fuel rods
Freaking giant flow rate coolant pumps
Everything built for low temperature
"What, me worry?" toward cladding corrosion monitoring and the electrical gear in general
Electric plant:
Relatively shorter fatter fuel rods
smaller coolant pumps
everything built for high temperature
Fancy ole cladding corrosion monitoring gear installed and used
Its funny how the journalists think defining a plant as electric or Pu is just talk, but its really a pretty hard core engineering constraint that controls the whole design.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It amazes me how many U.S. citizens are ignorant of the violent, corrupt activities of the U.S. government. The violence is always for the profit of a few.
In the case of the U.S. government overthrowing the democratically elected Premier of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, the CIA was allowed to act in secret: "The CIA, with help from British intelligence, planned, funded and implemented the operation." The purpose was to insure huge profits for British Petroleum (Yes, that BP), and U.S. oil companies.
Quote from the Wikipedia article: "Overnight, the CIA became a central part of the American foreign policy apparatus, and covert action came to be regarded as a cheap and effective way to shape the course of world events"--a coup engineered by the CIA called Operation PBSUCCESS toppling the duly elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, which had nationalised farm land owned by the United Fruit Company, followed the next year."
Military action so that U.S. investors can make more money has ever since been a central policy of the U.S. government. The families and friends of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had oil and weapons investments, so the U.S. military was used to get control of the oil in Iraq. That violence has made U.S. citizens much poorer, through taxes and inflation.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
I personally think that Iran has a disgusting record on human rights, that it really needs to sort out its misogynistic patriarchy, and that the "Iranian Minister of Justice" is an oxymoron. But a state of the US is about to execute a woman with an IQ of 72 for allegedly plotting to kill her husband, and the chance of being executed for various offences in the US is directly linked to socioeconomic status and skin colour. Am I supposed to draw the same conclusions about the US?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The nation that just invaded two of your neighbors is threatening to invade. But don't try to come up with any sneaky way to defend yourself. Just remain calm while the Freedom Police check you for anything they don't approve of.
I know if the Russians and Iran invaded Mexico and Canada, we'd just sit quietly and hope for the best. Right?
I'm reading an interesting book called "Why I Am Not A Muslim" by Ibn Warraq. It's a very heady, lengthy read; it's almost like a series of essays by the same author. (I'm about 2/3 through on this read, and there's already been almost 600 footnotes.)
In his book, he basically detailed a turning point in Muslim culture that was the ramp up to their version of the Enlightenment. The problem is that they decided to go the opposite way and crack down on "dangerous" schools of thought (primarily from Greece, like logic and philosophy) and end up essentially the same several hundred years later.
Now we have the intrinsic problem of a society that is (in many place) at best 50-100 years behind the modern world, but with many modern conveniences and tools at their disposal. The common problem of too many unhappy people (mostly due to lack of things like food, clean water, money, etc. - the usual) along with cheap AK-47s and RPGs does not do a whole lot to help.
Frankly, the best thing we could do in my opinion is push for greater civil rights through economic and diplomatic sanctions. Moreover, we can work to improve the infrastructure in countries that don't like us, but from a third party that is generally regarded as friendly to most of the Muslim world (United Arab Emirates, Turkey, etc.) It would be difficult but the only way there is ever going to be peace in the region is if there is clean water, reliable power and telecommunications, and a stable economy. Until that comes most of the Middle East is going to be stuck in the 1900s.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)