Nuclear Alert: Iran & Israel Playing High-Stakes Poker with Nuclear Power & Nuclear Weapons
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By The Fairewinds Crew
By now, Fairewinds is sure you know that an explosion at an Iranian nuclear enrichment plant has slowed Iran’s progress to enrich uranium. The crisis shows a very blurry line between Civilian Atomic Power and Military Atomic Bombs!
According to the New York Times (NYT):
“Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful and aimed at energy development. But Israel sees it as an existential threat, since Iranian leaders have often called for Israel’s destruction.
…Two officials briefed on the matter told The Times that the blackout was caused by an explosion that targeted the power supply for thousands of underground centrifuges that form the main Iranian enrichment program.”
… American and Israeli officials confirmed separately to The New York Times that Israel had played a role. Israeli news outlets, citing intelligence sources, attributed the attack to the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency…”
Fairewinds followers are asking us two questions:
“Was there a radiation release? and What is going on in Iran?”.
The first question is the easiest. As far as we know, there has been no release of radioactivity. It appears that there was a non-nuclear explosion that cut off the supply of electricity to Iran’s centrifuges that enrich uranium in the process of making either nuclear fuel or atomic bombs. As the NYT states, Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful and aimed at energy development. But Israel sees uranium enrichment as an existential threat, since Iranian leaders have often called for Israel’s demise.
Now to the second question, “What is going on?”, which is harder to answer. In 2015, the U.S. and its allies reached a deal with Iran called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), limiting Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to make atomic weapons. The United States withdrew from this agreement in 2018. As a result of the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA agreement, Iran then felt it was no longer obligated to abide by the JCPOA regulations and slowly began ramping up its enrichment capacity.
In February, Iran announced that it would begin enriching uranium to 20% and CNBC reported:
Iran testing advanced nuclear centrifuge that would allow faster uranium enrichment… Iran’s stockpile of 20% enriched uranium has reached 55 kilograms (121 pounds), moving its nuclear program closer to weapons-grade enrichment levels.
As stated earlier, “Israel sees it as an existential threat, since Iranian leaders have often called for Israel’s destruction.” While not making an official statement, it appears that Israel is responsible for the explosion in Iran. This explosion is part of ongoing religious differences that have roots going back for centuries.
For decades, we are informed there is no correlation between weapons and civilian power. This standoff between Iran and Israel highlights the strong connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, like hand-in-glove.
The borderline between bomb-grade uranium and civilian power-grade uranium is determined by how much the isotope Uranium-235 (U-235) is enriched. Traditionally, if uranium enrichment is above 20%, that is considered the low-end of weapons-grade enrichment, which falls between 20% and 100% enrichment for bombs. Therefore, the higher the percent of enrichment of U-235, the easier it is to manufacture a nuclear bomb.
To be cost-effective, the nuke industry claims its U-235 must be more enriched to prevent atomic power reactors from refueling as often. Currently, uranium fuel used worldwide in operating nuclear power plants is enriched to about 6%. But the nuclear industry’s new designs for proposed Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) will use fuel enriched to about 20%.
Yes, as Fairewinds quoted above, SMRs will use nuclear fuel that is “one step away from weapons-grade uranium” used to make bombs!
At Fairewinds, we have two questions today:
First, what are Iran’s plans for gaining that much enrichment? Iran claims that this centrifuge produced fuel is for peaceful purposes only, then why does the uranium have to be enriched to almost bomb-grade? Is Iran building SMRs?
Where does that place the United States in world politics with its creation of SMRs? The U.S. plans to build tens of thousands of these allegedly new Small Modular Reactors. Moreover, SMRs use HALEU fuel (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium) enriched to almost 20% Uranium-235.
How does this action make the U.S. any different from what Iran is doing when the U.S. SMRs will contain high-test Uranium identical to what is being enriched in Iran?
Is this federal push for this new SMR design some type of ploy to spread atomic bomb-grade fuel all over the world?
The U.S. nuclear power industry is looking at SMRs as its latest cash cow, expecting to sell and build SMRs all over the world! What kind of international threat is this if thousands of proposed SMRs are located all over the U.S. and worldwide?
Previously, Fairewinds has voiced its concern for these Small Modular Reactors as domestic and foreign terrorist targets to spread radioactivity around the country and the world or for terrorists to get their hands on that HALEU fuel to make their bombs. Now we see that these U.S. government-funded and proposed SMRs could also be a target for military organizations in other countries who want to push back against nuclear proliferation that could be used against them.
As a result of the attack on its enrichment facility, Iran has further changed its mind and said it would enrich uranium to 60%. According to the BBC:
Iran will produce 60%-enriched uranium in retaliation for a suspected Israeli attack on a nuclear site, President Hassan Rouhani says, bringing it closer to the purity required for a weapon. … But he reiterated that Iran's nuclear activities were "exclusively peaceful".
France, Germany and the U.K. expressed "grave concern" at the move, saying Iran had "no credible civilian need for enrichment at this level".
Fairewinds is clear that the 20% enriched fuel planned to be used in SMRs is only one easy step away from creating bomb-grade atomic fuel! Now that Iran has informed the world that it intends to enrich its uranium to 60%, scientists worldwide know that there is no peaceful civilian atomic reactor of any kind using U-235 enriched to 60%!
Fairewinds hopes that diplomats will resolve this enrichment conundrum before the military situation escalates further.
