There’s also the SILEX and AVLIS uranium separation processes.
If the Australians could get SILEX to work (a country with less than 24 million people) it would hardly be surprising if someone else managed to do the same with a lot more resources at their disposal.
Those methods are supposed to be more energy efficient and require smaller installations than centrifuges. South Korea and Japan worked on AVLIS at one point.
Centrifuges are extremely efficient compared to gaseous diffusion. SILEX has been the technology of the future since I was in graduate school (1980), and probably always will be. There are actually chemical methods based on oxidation state preference that have emerged, and are likely to supersede all of the brute force methods.
While this is a good article, it has some flaws. There are, for example, 48 heavy water-moderated/cooled power reactors operating in Canada, with a total output of 24 GWe. That’s more than “none.” The biggest gaffe, however, was the implication that an additional cascade was needed to go beyond 20% enrichment. A procedure known simply (and intuitively) as “batch recycling” can be used to go the rest of the way in a matter of days (the 20% LEU is just run through the original cascade again). Iran already has the ability to break out, and not within a year or so. It’s a matter of perhaps a week, at any given moment…if they haven’t done so already.
““batch recycling” can be used to go the rest of the way in a matter of days (the 20% LEU is just run through the original cascade again).”
While the term “batch recycling” is not used, that process is mentioned in the linked article as a possibility.
As for breaking out, I don’t know how long it would take to run the batch to produce weapons grade material, then process the material into a weapons core. Nor how well they could keep it secret using the centrifuges that international regulators know about. But one important point is that the centrifuge collection needed to process diverted material could be much smaller than the set to produce reactor grade material. And having built centrifuges for reactor grade material Iran has expertise in house to build a few more for a “side project”.
CANDU reactors were also successfully exported to other countries namely India.
The best way to ensure they don’t get a weapon would be to control their nuclear fuel supply and recycling process. But I doubt they’ll allow that to happen.
There’s also the SILEX and AVLIS uranium separation processes.
If the Australians could get SILEX to work (a country with less than 24 million people) it would hardly be surprising if someone else managed to do the same with a lot more resources at their disposal.
Those methods are supposed to be more energy efficient and require smaller installations than centrifuges. South Korea and Japan worked on AVLIS at one point.
Centrifuges are extremely efficient compared to gaseous diffusion. SILEX has been the technology of the future since I was in graduate school (1980), and probably always will be. There are actually chemical methods based on oxidation state preference that have emerged, and are likely to supersede all of the brute force methods.
While this is a good article, it has some flaws. There are, for example, 48 heavy water-moderated/cooled power reactors operating in Canada, with a total output of 24 GWe. That’s more than “none.” The biggest gaffe, however, was the implication that an additional cascade was needed to go beyond 20% enrichment. A procedure known simply (and intuitively) as “batch recycling” can be used to go the rest of the way in a matter of days (the 20% LEU is just run through the original cascade again). Iran already has the ability to break out, and not within a year or so. It’s a matter of perhaps a week, at any given moment…if they haven’t done so already.
““batch recycling” can be used to go the rest of the way in a matter of days (the 20% LEU is just run through the original cascade again).”
While the term “batch recycling” is not used, that process is mentioned in the linked article as a possibility.
As for breaking out, I don’t know how long it would take to run the batch to produce weapons grade material, then process the material into a weapons core. Nor how well they could keep it secret using the centrifuges that international regulators know about. But one important point is that the centrifuge collection needed to process diverted material could be much smaller than the set to produce reactor grade material. And having built centrifuges for reactor grade material Iran has expertise in house to build a few more for a “side project”.
CANDU reactors were also successfully exported to other countries namely India.
The best way to ensure they don’t get a weapon would be to control their nuclear fuel supply and recycling process. But I doubt they’ll allow that to happen.