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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
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There are not international concerns over this plant. It requires uranium enriched by 3% (well below the 90% required for weapons grade material) and is operated by the Russians, who are both providing and disposing of the fuel. There are no proliferation concerns over this.
The concerns are over the other reactor, officially designated for medical research, which requires uranium enriched to 20%, which some see as the first step towards a breeder reactor for providing fuel for nuclear weapons.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm not sure if I should be happy that a more sensible energy source is being used, or if I should give into the fearmongering... so... I'll break out into song!
And Iran...
Iran's so far away.
I plus ran.
They claim they have no gays...
I don't know what to say.
That's 6849 barrels of oil per day they are going to save (the rough amount required to produce 500MW per day). At $74 a barrel that's about half a million dollars per day. Every day. Oil that they can now export to China and Russia that otherwise would have been burned up in domestic consumption. It doesn't take long before a plant like this pays for itself.
But oh, mention Iran and nuclear in the same paragraph and all the paranoid uninformed imperialist types appear, yelling "nuclear weapons!". Despite nuclear energy (or any other form of alternative energy) being an extremely sane choice for an oil exporting nation.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I mean, we could always trust the Russians to work in our best interests. Also, they were never sneaky about anything. Always truthful and honest, them Russians.
And Iran only threatened to wipe The West off the map, starting with Israel, with any means at their disposal. And that they could make a nuclear bomb if they wanted to, because it was a right granted to them from Allah.
Not to mention that they're playing the North Korean game of "let's talk" / "we're not talking to you anymore" / "let's talk" / "we're not talking to you anymore" with the UN. Remember what North Korea has now after a few years of that? Ah, yes, The Bomb.
And all this in the hands of a fanatic regime, intent on spreading Islam through force, feared and hated even by most other Islamic nations, all the while being one of the most horrible human-rights violators of our time.
But there's nothing to fear. They're not after the bomb. They say they are, but there's nothing to worry about. It's just a nuclear power plant.
REMAIN CALM!
"Programming is life, the rest is mere details"
If Israel struck the plant and killed a bunch of Russian engineers, that would be bad. If the strike put a radioactive plum in the air that drifted over part of China or India, that would be worse.
Not to mention the fact that if the Russians really got cheesed off they could just sell Iran warheads.
Any country with enough money and enough time is going to be able to acquire nuclear weapons. We might have to face the fact that there may not always be a military solution.
Canada doesn't have nuclear weapons, they don't feel the need to squander their collective treasure maintaining 12 aircraft carrier groups and they seem to get along just fine. Let some other country pick up some of the tab for being the world's policeman. We need that money here.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I always shake my head and ruefully smile when I see these fear-mongering stories about hyped-up fears of “An Iranian Nuke in our Future!” and similar drivel. The IAEA inspects the program at ever single step of the way and of something is veering off course, everyone in the UN and the US will know. So far that hasn't happened, and my guess is that it won't.
For the record there's no simple, direct way to readily convert fuel-grade uranium into weapons-grade uranium, short of building a breeder reactor, and that's not exactly something you can do in your backyard or garage. Fuel-grade uranium doesn't go into a nuke, and you don't put weapons-grade uranium into your reactor, unless you want a really big “boom”.
As it stands, the only nation in the Mideast that illegally built a nuclear weapons program outside of international purview was Israel, and they got some of the initial materials to do so by smuggling the uranium from a refinement facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the late 1960's (c.f.: The Samson Option by Seymour Hersh). Yet you never hear two peeps about the “destabilizing influence in the Mideast” of that nuclear bandit state in the press, do you?
Also, let's not forget that the entire [crooked] line of thought is brought to you by the same perpetual prevaricators who threw up a lot of hot air about “Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq!” and “Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan!” and then were trying to beat the drums for a war with Syria under the pretense of “Saddam moved all the weapons to Syria (and Iran!)” It's the same old, tired media meme rehashed once again for a petty excuse to get us involved in another war we don't need and can't afford.
For my part, I'd like to see every media editor that purports that very same lie to be strung up, just so the air can be cleared a bit.
"Right now, we're just dealing with karma of past actions by our government.
If we kept our noses out of others business, the World would probably be a much different place and there would be less hatred towards us."
It's sad that so few Americans understand this.
While it could theoretically be done, this particular plant is not very useful for making bomb material.
In order for plutonium produced by reactors to be useful for weapons it needs to be extracted from a reactor fairly shortly after being produced, or otherwise it will be contaminated with heavier plutonium isotopes that generate a lot of heat and neutrons, making the weapon design dramatically more difficult (so difficult in fact that it is probably easier to start all over and make decent material ). For this reason plants used to make bomb material are usually smaller and built to be able to refuel quickly. Attempting to separate the plutonium isotopes after they have been mixed would likely be more difficult than "simply" enriching uranium, so that's not much of a worry either.
It is possible to build large reactors that can function both as power-plants and bomb producers, but this generally requires them to be designed so they can change their fuel bundles while operating ( The UK and former Soviet used to do this ). For a large pressurized water reactor, like this one, it is however not practical since it would require you to shut down and restart it to replace the fuel at frequent intervals, and for such a large reactor doing that takes ages, and it would be obvious to the outside world what is going on ( you don't just hide the fact that a few gigawatt of spill heat suddenly went away ).
Basically of all the types of power producing reactors in widespread use in the world today, a large pressurized water reactor is probably the least suitable for making plutonium. It is theoretically possible, but it is not even a fraction as big a concern as the uranium enrichment facilities Iran is also operating. Those facilities can be used to create highly enriched U-235, which is pretty much the material that is easiest to turn into a nuclear weapon. Using plutonium can have advantages for advanced weapon designs, but it is a lot easier to do with uranium.
you'd be speaking proper English. blimey.
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.
Wrong! Stalin's plan was originally to invade Europe after Hitler destroyed all opposition in Europe. Hitler was the bad guy, Stalin was meant to be the liberator and liberate the whole of Europe - the way Stalin liberated Poland and tried to liberate Finland in 1939. That was the plan. That plan failed because while the Soviets helped train and establish the Wehrmacht in the 30s and actively aided Hitler in the opening stages of WW2, Stalin had no idea that Hitler would turn on him so quickly. The Soviets were massing huge numbers of troops, steel bombers, heavy tanks - the Soviets had the largest number of heavy tanks in 1939 (KW1 and 2) and the largest number of bombers (TB-3). They also had the world's greatest parachute force at about 1 million trained personnel, jumping from towers became a Soviet pastime in the 30s. The SU had virtually no civilian factories, they were preparing for an all out war. The typical view of defensive war seen in Russia was a war fought on the enemy's land - as depicted by Alexander Nevsky. All these were offensive weapons and tactics. When Hitler attacked these forces were incapable of using defensive tactics, they were not even blowing up bridges because Stalin had been building bridges in the 30s to help move his forces forward. Anyhow the Soviet plan was to let the West bleed itself out on Hitler, then the Soviet Union would liberate the European proletariat after the Western European masters and trade unions were gone, and establish a socialist system in every European country. This would have happened after WW2 had it not been for the fact that the USA got in the way and prevented further Soviet imperialism. The SU was more than capable of going West and taking out the French, British and remnant German forces.
Ideally for the US, the US could have let Stalin have all of Europe. The USA would have easily been able to trade with a socialist Europe and profit from it. The Americans instead risked war with the USSR and put their lives on the line for Germany, France, Britain and the rest of Western Europe. In Poland we wished the Americans would fight for us, but it would not be the case, still the American stance and containment allowed us to free ourselves when Gorbachev saw that he could no longer maintain Eastern Europe and would have to recreate the Soviet Economy on its own.
I must also oppose the moral relativism in this thread. The SU treated its own population and the populations of conquered nations very badly.
Tens of millions of civilians died including successful farmers (Kulaks), intelligentsia, ethnic minorities and anyone else who could oppose the Soviet Regime. One need only look at the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 now recognised as an act of genocide (Holodomor), the massacres of POWs in places like Katyn and deliberate withholding of support by the Soviet Union for the Warsaw Uprinsing against the Nazis which lead to 150-200,000 civilian deaths as Nazi reprisals.
If it was containment of Soviet expansion, why the hell did it start right after Mosaddeq nationalized Iranian Oil?
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?
Bullshit. The pact had to do with invasion of Poland in 1939 and mutual "non aggression" and was a ploy by Hitler to keep the Soviet Union away until he was ready to attack. It was signed in 1939 mere weeks before attack on Poland.
Because, you revisionist idiot, the "Socialist" in NSDAP had as much to do with "communist" in the Soviet system as the "People's Republic" in the name had to do with democracy in North Korea or Saddam's Iraq. Stalin and Hitler were both authoritarian ass-hats who hated each other but Hitler was keen on big business, aristocracy and wealth while Stalin was using "communism" as his shtick for power and control. Subsequently the first people persecuted during the rise of Nazis to power in Germany were ... communists and amongst Hitler's most admiring supporters were names such as multi-millionaires like Krupp and Ford (Hitler even passed special laws just for his best super-rich buddies). The last remnants of any kind of "socialism" in the NSDAP were gotten rid of in the "night of the long knives" where the brown-shirt worker "rabble" of the SA was dealt with via bullets to their heads. And that was in 1934.
Speaking of lies, the words "US" are nowhere present in my comment to which you are replying. Projection much?
Yes, particularly the Emperor Hirohito (that well known socialist rabble rouser) and the US "lefties" who dropped some nukes in his backyard and burned a few hundred thousand people alive. Then there were of course those "socialists" who killed 3 million people in Vietnam via copious use of the B52s, napalm and M16s...
In short, you are complete idiot and any discussion with you is not likely to lead anywhere.