uranium enrichment

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

by Kim Zetter  · 11 Nov 2014  · 492pp  · 153,565 words

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations body charged with monitoring Iran’s nuclear program, first began to notice something unusual happening at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran. Inside the facility’s large centrifuge hall, buried like a bunker more than fifty feet beneath the desert surface

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in Iran, where it had silently slithered its way into critical systems at Natanz, all with a single goal in mind—to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program and prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear bomb. The answer was there at Natanz, but it would be nearly a year before

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been a source of great tension with Israel and the West for a number of years. But even more controversial than the reactor was a uranium enrichment plant in a place called Natanz that had been built to supply the reactor with nuclear fuel. The UN had voted for sanctions against Iran

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be operational in 2005, was entirely peaceful in nature.2 But there had long been rumors of secret nuclear facilities in Iran, including a covert uranium enrichment plant that might be used to create material for nuclear weapons. In 2001, US and foreign government sources had told Hinderstein’s colleagues at ISIS

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only logical conclusion, they reasoned—one that would explain the underground construction and the evidential plans for antiaircraft guns—was that this was the elusive uranium enrichment plant they had been seeking. IT WAS A quiet day in Vienna when news from Jafarzadeh’s press conference filtered back to Olli Heinonen in

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this for a while. Like his counterparts at ISIS, he immediately suspected the Natanz facility wasn’t a fuel-manufacturing plant at all but a uranium enrichment plant. Two years earlier, government sources had told the IAEA that Iran tried to secretly purchase parts from Europe in the 1980s to manufacture centrifuges

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for uranium enrichment.10 Based on this, Heinonen had suspected that Iran had an illicit centrifuge plant hidden somewhere within its borders, but he never knew its location

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build several nuclear power plants over the next twenty years and needed nuclear fuel to operate them. He didn’t say if Natanz was a uranium enrichment plant being built to help produce such fuel, but this appeared to be the implication. The IAEA pressed Iran to open Natanz immediately to its

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at rumors that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weapons of its own, Khomeini decided to revive Iran’s nuclear program. This included developing a uranium enrichment program.22 To launch the program, Iran turned to a Pakistani metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan for help. Khan had been instrumental in helping Pakistan

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. In exchange for $10 million, the Iranians walked away with two large suitcases and two briefcases filled with everything they needed to kick-start a uranium enrichment program—technical designs for making centrifuges, a couple of disassembled centrifuge prototypes, and a drawing for the layout of a small centrifuge plant containing six

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made from maraging steel—a more resilient material than the breakage-prone aluminum rotors in the IR-1. While Iran was busy developing its secret uranium enrichment program, its public nuclear program continued in parallel. In 1995, the country signed an $800 million contract with Russia to resume construction of a reactor

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at Bushehr. The two countries also discussed building a uranium enrichment plant to produce fuel for the reactor, but the Clinton administration intervened and convinced Russia to drop it. So Iran simply built a secret enrichment

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Albright of ISIS says, however, that although US sources gave the IAEA coordinates for sites, they didn’t say that the Natanz site was a uranium enrichment plant. Mohamed ElBaradei, in his book The Age of Deception, acknowledges that in mid-2002 the IAEA received information about the Natanz facility, but doesn

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’t say if the IAEA knew it was a uranium enrichment plant. 13 Iranian officials would later say that the only reason they had concealed their activities at Natanz was because the West had tried to

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of Iran and president of its Atomic Energy Organization. Two weeks earlier, Iranian president Sayyid Mohammad Khatami had finally acknowledged that Iran was building a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, confirming what ISIS and others had suspected all along about the facility. Iran was in fact developing a number of facilities for

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would have violated Iran’s safeguards agreement. But Heinonen wasn’t buying the story. The idea that Iran had spent $300 million to construct a uranium enrichment plant without first testing cascades with actual gas to make sure the enrichment process worked stretched the boundaries of belief. From the pilot plant, the

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its natural state contains less than 1 percent of U-235, the isotope needed for reactors and bombs. Most nuclear reactors need uranium enriched to just 3 to 5 percent. Highly enriched uranium is enriched to 20 percent or more. Although 20 percent enrichment can be used for crude nuclear devices, in addition to

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. Iran hadn’t mentioned the advanced centrifuge in its detailed history, but if it did possess the centrifuges, then it was possible that Iran’s uranium enrichment program was much further along than Heinonen suspected. The IAEA pressed Iran to come clean about whether it was producing P-2 centrifuges, and officials

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: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2010), 192. 8 David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, “The Iranian Gas Centrifuge Uranium Enrichment Plant at Natanz: Drawing from Commercial Satellite Images,” ISIS, March 14, 2003, available at isis-online.org/publications/iran/natanz03_02.html. See also IAEA

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Kala Electric, or Kalaye Electric, that the Iranian opposition group, NCRI, had mentioned in their 2002 press conference as a front company for Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Although the attack struck some of the companies multiple times, not always the same machines were hit each time, suggesting the attackers may have

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target, he called up a client who had extensive knowledge of nuclear plants. The client worked for Enrichment Technology Company, a top European maker of uranium enrichment equipment, formerly known as Urenco—the company whose early generation centrifuge designs Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan had stolen and sold to Iran. If it

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before his friend replied. “I can’t tell you that, Ralph. It’s classified information,” he said. But then he added, “You know, centrifuges for uranium enrichment are not just used by us in Germany and the Netherlands. They’re also used in other countries.” “Yes, I know,” Langner replied. “For example

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’s sixtieth anniversary, he was confronted with a bold request. The Israelis wanted US support and endorsement for an air strike to take out the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. The Israelis had been gunning for an air strike since at least 2003, when IAEA inspectors got their first look at Natanz

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place.15 This innovative new plan, however, called for a digital attack against the centrifuges and computer systems at Natanz to physically sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts. The requirements and restrictions for such an operation were extensive. It had to be a surgical strike capable of homing in on the specific

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it to an untried science experiment.26 But the planners weren’t expecting miracles from the operation. They didn’t expect to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment program altogether, just to set it back and buy some time. And even if the operation were discovered and the Iranians learned that their computers

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Stuxnet, the rest of the world now knew about the mysterious code that had evidently targeted Iran. Yet speculation that it had specifically targeted the uranium enrichment program at Natanz remained just that—speculation. Symantec’s engineers were about to find the proof they needed in the code. But first, they needed

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to the program. He was one of only a few specialists in Iran who had expertise in separating uranium isotopes, a core part of the uranium enrichment process. He was also on the UN Security Council’s sanctions list for his role as a senior scientific adviser to Iran’s Ministry of

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, the 417 attack sequence appeared to simply be turning devices on or off. Albright and his colleagues ran down the list of components in a uranium enrichment plant that might fit this scenario, and the only one that made sense to them was valves. Centrifuges at Natanz each had three valves that

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company had recently found itself in hot water after a shipment of its controllers was seized in Dubai on its way to Iran for the uranium enrichment program. Another shipment of Siemens turbo processors was intercepted in Hamburg by export authorities as it was on its way to Iran. Both of these

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about the code may have been in part an effort to not stir up a discussion about how its controllers got to be at the uranium enrichment plant in the first place. There were Siemens workers who urged the company to take a more active role in examining Stuxnet, but they were

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new code had developed their attack from the same source code and framework that had been used to develop Stuxnet. Stuxnet had sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment program but who knew what this new attack was doing and how many systems it had infected? Bencsáth dashed off an e-mail to Bartos

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retinue accompanying Ahmadinejad on his visit to Natanz was the Iranian defense minister—an odd addition to the party given Iran’s insistence that its uranium enrichment program was peaceful in nature. Iranian technicians had spent all of 2007 installing 3,000 centrifuges in one of the underground halls at Natanz, and

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be installed at a plant that wasn’t even constructed yet. That part is not as outlandish as it seems: Iran had already tested its uranium enrichment process in small cascades of centrifuges at the Kalaye Electric factory sometime around 1999. Furthermore, in 2000 and 2002, the CIA recruited key suppliers in

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illicit nuclear supply network and six months after the IAEA made its first visit to Natanz. The spy agency intercepted a shipment of black-market uranium enrichment components—including 25,000 centrifuge casings as well as pumps, tubes, and other components—headed from Malaysia to a secret enrichment plant in Libya. The

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British Navy had intercepted a secret shipment of 111 boxes of Siemens controllers at a port in Dubai that were apparently bound for Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Siemens had shipped them to a buyer in China, where they were forwarded to Iran through Dubai. The discovery of the shipment caused a

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the numbers at Natanz were dropping, President Obama announced at the UN Security Council Summit on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Disarmament that a new secret uranium enrichment facility had been discovered in Iran. This one was located on a military base, buried more than 150 feet beneath a mountain at Fordow, about

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“serial deception of many years.”19 Iranian officials, however, seemed unperturbed by the revelations about Fordow, asserting defiantly that they planned to build ten more uranium enrichment plants in the coming decades to fuel a fleet of nuclear power plants they also planned to build.20 The enrichment plants would all be

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and Ralph Langner were still deciphering Stuxnet’s payload, the Iranian dissident group that had exposed Natanz claimed it had information about yet another secret uranium enrichment plant being built near Abyek, about 120 kilometers west of Tehran. See David E. Sanger, “Dissidents Claim Iran Is Building a New Enrichment Site,” New

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Stark, “The Birth of a Bomb: A History of Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions,” Der Spiegel, June 17, 2010. 25 Olli J. Heinonen, “Iran Ramping Up Uranium Enrichment,” Power and Policy blog, July 20, 2011, published by the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, July 20, 2011, available at powerandpolicy.com/2011/07

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/20/Iran-ramping-up-uranium-enrichment/#.UtM6Z7SYf8M. 26 “Remarks of President Obama Marking Nowruz,” the White House, March 20, 2010, available at whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-marking

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of ISIS noted in a 2010 report. But if the goal was to destroy a limited number of centrifuges in order to set Iran’s uranium enrichment program back a bit, then “it may have succeeded,” he wrote, “at least for a while.”1 There was no doubt that Iran’s nuclear

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was active in 2009, and found that evidence of the attack’s impact was circumstantial and inconclusive. If Stuxnet did have an effect on the uranium enrichment program, it wore off quickly. “If sabotage did occur, it was short-lived and most likely happened between May and November 2009,” she concluded. “The

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to be further enriched to 19.75 percent, and by the beginning of 2011, Iran had 33 kg of uranium enriched to this level and announced plans to triple this amount. Officials began enriching the uranium to this higher percentage following the destruction of centrifuges by Stuxnet. Iranian officials claimed they needed the higher

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, however it happens.” That same month, a blast occurred at the uranium conversion plant in Esfahan, reportedly damaging a facility where raw materials for the uranium enrichment program were stored.18 Then in August 2012, explosions took out power lines feeding electricity from the city of Qom to the underground enrichment plant

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,” Institute for Science and International Security, October 18, 2011, available at isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/test1. 7 Olli J. Heinonen, “Iran Ramping Up Uranium Enrichment,” Power and Policy blog, July 20, 2011, published by the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, July 20, 2011, available at powerandpolicy.com/2011/07

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/20/Iran-ramping-up-uranium-enrichment/#.UtM6Z7SYf8M. 8 Barzashka, “Are Cyber-Weapons Effective?” 9 David Albright, Jacqueline Shire, and Paul Brannan, “Enriched Uranium Output Steady: Centrifuge Numbers Expected to Increase Dramatically; Arak Reactor Verification Blocked,” Institute for Science and International

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are not just military systems but civilian ones—transportation, communication, and financial networks; food manufacturing and chemical plants; gas pipelines, water, and electric utilities; even uranium enrichment plants.13 “We now live in a world where industrial control systems can be attacked in the event of a crisis,” Stewart Baker, former DHS

Bomb Scare

by Joseph Cirincione  · 24 Dec 2011  · 293pp  · 74,709 words

the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was produced in this way. Both of these processes are forms of uranium enrichment and are still in use today. By far the most common and most economical method of enriching uranium, however, is to use large gas centrifuges. (See the third diagram on the page facing the

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reaction than uranium. The Manhattan Project thus undertook two paths to the bomb, both of which are still the only methods pursued today. Complementing the uranium enrichment plants at Oak Ridge, the Project built a small reactor at the site and used it to produce the first few grams of plutonium in

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information Abdul Qadeer Khan had brought back from his years working in the Netherlands at uranium enrichment facilities operated by the European consortium URENCO (Uranium Enrichment Company). Khan enabled Pakistan to begin production of centrifuges and then of highly enriched uranium. The secret smuggling operations he started to acquire machinery for this effort later formed the

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reactors—and with France to purchase a facility for reprocessing the spent fuel rods from the reactor, separating out the plutonium. Light-water reactors use enriched uranium fuel, which is difficult to manufacture domestically, and allow for easy international monitoring because a shutdown of the reactor core is required for refueling.

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granted to the IAEA helped uncover secret experiments South Korean scientists had conducted in the 1970s and 1980s and as recently as 2000. These involved uranium enrichment tests and the separation of small amounts of plutonium. These may have been unauthorized experiments, as the government claims, or evidence that South Korean

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scientific and engineering challenges. Two major obstacles stand in the way of nuclear weapons development. The more challenging of the two is producing the highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium that gives an atomic bomb its unmatched explosive power. Luckily for champions of nonproliferation, this material can only be produced through

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IAEA and the leading nations of the UN Security Council is retarding Iran’s nuclear efforts today. Iran voluntarily agreed to the suspension of all uranium enrichment-related activities for over two years starting in November 2003, and by mid-2006 had still not built a centrifuge cascade large enough to

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great fanfare in April 2006. Moreover, Iran has run into problems with uranium conversion, a necessary precursor to uranium enrichment. The gas is reportedly contaminated with heavy metals. Until Iran can reliably convert uranium yellowcake into the gaseous uranium hexafluoride that goes into centrifuges, they

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have slowed or stopped nuclear programs. In his detailed study of the Brazilian and Argentine programs, for example, Mitchell Reiss concluded, “Despite heavy investments in uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing capabilities, neither Buenos Aires nor Brasilia ever had the technical wherewithal to produce material for nuclear bombs.”82 Indeed, Argentina never

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any locks intended to prevent unauthorized detonation of the weapon.”9 Nor can terrorist groups build a bomb from scratch. They cannot manufacture the highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium necessary for the bomb’s core. This requires substantial industrial facilities beyond the capabilities of any such group. But they can

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of the existing political and territorial disputes still unresolved. This is not an inevitable outcome, however. Iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium enrichment and plutonium separation) capabilities does not need to end with nuclear dominos falling. The ongoing diplomacy involving Iran, the European Union, the IAEA, and increasingly

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such states use nuclear weapons, the world will not end.”35 For example, if a state like Brazil, which has developed and recently expanded its uranium enrichment capability and which aspires to great power status, sees the acceptance of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India (and perhaps eventually in North Korea and

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the U.S. Department of Energy established the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), an umbrella program to unite ongoing efforts to secure and remove highly enriched uranium from research reactors and other civilian nuclear facilities around the world. Many countries began cooperating in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to interdict illegal trade

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Iranian nuclear facilities has occurred since 2000, including the opening of plants to produce uranium gas, the first successful operation of a centrifuge cascade to enrich uranium, and the construction of a vast facility to house over 50,000 centrifuges. • North Korea also accelerated its program, possibly increasing fivefold its amount

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withdrawal from the NPT, enforcing compliance with strengthened treaties, and radically reforming the nuclear fuel cycle to prevent states from acquiring dual-use technologies for uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing. The threat from existing arsenals would be reduced by shrinking global stockpiles, curtailing research on new nuclear weapons, and taking weapons off

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can prevent this ultimate disaster. A broad expert consensus already exists on the core elements of such a plan: secure all weapon-usable materials (highly enriched uranium and plutonium) against theft or diversion; end the production of these materials; end the use of these materials in civilian research, power reactors, and

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the United States to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium (enough for more than 6,000 nuclear bombs) and a program to convert highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium for sale to an American nuclear energy corporation. This latter program, dubbed “Megatons to Megawatts,” now powers one out of ten lightbulbs in

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origin fissile material and is also working to upgrade security at targeted facilities and support conversion of research test reactors from running on highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium.16 With increased funding and presidential commitment, all these efforts could be accelerated to secure or eliminate the vast majority of nuclear weapons and

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one of the six countries that make the fuel or from the one existing international consortium, the Uranium Enrichment Company (URENCO). China, France, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, and United States are the only countries that currently enrich uranium in significant quantities. Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom together produce fuel in facilities owned jointly

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these proposals seek to end the further production of materials for use in nuclear weapons and stop—at least temporarily—construction of new facilities for enriching uranium or separating plutonium. Some propose that all such enrichment or separation take place only in facilities owned and operated by multinational entities, others seek

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factories, others propose new contractual and commercial means of control. But all recognize that preventing new nations such as Iran or Brazil from entering the uranium enrichment business will require more than a country-specific approach. On February 11, 2004, President Bush said: The world must create a safe, orderly system

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of regional centers.” ElBaradei offered a three part solution: First, it is time to limit the processing of weapon-usable material (separated plutonium and high-enriched uranium) in civilian nuclear programmes, as well as the production of new material through reprocessing and enrichment, by agreeing to restrict these operations exclusively to facilities

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a new global deal. In January 2005, Russian President Vladmir Putin proposed the creation of a global infrastructure “to offer nuclear fuel cycle services, including [uranium] enrichment under the control of the IAEA” to all countries, provided that they observe the nonproliferation regime.25 “Its backbone element will include a network of

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centres providing services in nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment, and they will be controlled by the International Atomic Energy Agency and will operate on the basis of nondiscriminatory access,” Putin said.26 Promising non

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article. They have proposed perhaps the most developed commercial idea, what they call an “Assured Nuclear Fuel Services Initiative”: Countries that do not currently possess uranium enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing facilities would agree not to obtain any such facilities or related technologies and materials for an extended period of time. By the

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encouragement included agreement by senior officials such as Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Cheney that Iran could develop indigenous facilities for enriching uranium and for reprocessing the spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Then-ruler Shah Reza Pahlavi developed plans to build 22 nuclear power reactors with an electrical

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unraveled in 2002. This was partially the result of the disclosure that North Korea had likely cheated on the agreement by secretly importing equipment for uranium enrichment but primarily the result of a decision by U.S. officials to use the cheating as justification for killing a deal they never liked. As

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the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan with Chinese help. With the exposure in late 2002 of Iran’s third major effort, the secret construction of uranium-enrichment facilities at Natanz, Iran was forced to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors access to most facilities and records. The IAEA work has

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for the previously distorted assessments. The report will also allow U.S. policymakers and the American public to engage in realistic debate over Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which without a doubt poses a significant challenge to U.S. interests in the Middle East and elsewhere. A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH Reversing the spread

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reactors.32 In early 2008, Turkey gently dropped the other nuclear shoe, quietly sending feelers to gauge American reaction to its planned construction of a uranium-enrichment center—the same type of operation that the United States opposes in Iran.33 Finally, the Arab League provided an overall umbrella for these initiatives

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products. They should work seriously to create a guaranteed source of fuel for any new reactors, if they proceed, either by the construction of multinational uranium-enrichment facilities in the Middle East (favored by Saudi Arabia), or another area (suggested by Russia) or by the establishment of a “virtual fuel” bank,

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(London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2005). See also David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, “Iran’s Next Steps: Final Tests and the Construction of a Uranium Enrichment Plant,” Institute for Science and International Security Issue Brief, January 12, 2006, available at http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/irancascade.pdf. 82. Mitchell

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Terrorist Attacks,” Associated Press, February 17, 2005. 29. Brazil, Iran, and South Korea have all announced their intentions to enrich their own uranium. In January 2006, Urkaine likewise expressed interest in domestic uranium enrichment. 30. Presidents Bush and Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) in June 2002. Now, for the first time

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Security of Fissile Materials, Radiological Materials, and Related Equipment at Vulnerable Sites Worldwide,” Interim Report, Unclassified Summary, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA, 2005). 15. “Highly Enriched Uranium Transferred to Russia from Czech Republic” U.S. Department of State, September 27 2005. 16. Interim Report, Unclassified Summary, NNSA (2005). 17. The Baker-Cutler

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up a credible and reliable retaliatory nuclear force to deter an enemy state from any preemptive nuclear strike. ELECTROMAGNETIC SEPARATION A technique to enrich uranium involving the movement of uranium ions through a strong magnetic field. The uranium-238 ions move in a slightly different curve from the uranium-235 ions, thus

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Fusion of light elements releases an incredible amount of energy. GAS-CENTRIFUGE PROCESS A method of uranium enrichment in which heavier isotopes are separated from lighter ones through centrifugal force. GASEOUS DIFFUSION A method of uranium enrichment that separates uranium-235 and uranium-238 by taking advantage of their slight differences in mass and

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cycle includes the disposition or recycling of spent nuclear material after its use in a reactor. NUCLEAR FUEL-FABRICATION PLANT A facility where natural or enriched uranium is manufactured into fuel rods that are used in reactors. NUCLEAR REACTOR A facility where fissionable material is used to generate heat through a

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of natural uranium is composed of this isotope. URANIUM HEXAFLUORIDE (UF6) Highly toxic gas that is the intermediate stage between yellowcake and enriched uranium. UF6 is the feedstock for all uranium enrichment processes. URANIUM OXIDE (U3O8) The most common oxide found in natural uranium ore. Uranium oxide is extracted from the crushed ore. Yellowcake

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is about 80 percent uranium oxide. See also yellowcake. WEAPONS-GRADE Fissile material ideal for nuclear weapons. This includes uranium enriched to at least 90 percent uranium-235 and plutonium that is approximately 93 percent plutonium-239. YELLOWCAKE A powdery concentrate of about 80 percent uranium

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Haass, Richard Habiger, Eugene Hahn, Otto hair-trigger alert Hanford reactors heavy water. See also heavywater reactors heavy-water reactors Hersey, John HEU. See highly enriched uranium highly enriched uranium (HEU). See also fuel production Hill, Christopher Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing: bomb design, cultural responses, Franck report on, and Japanese nuclear policy, and Soviet nuclear

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Krepon, Michael Kristol, Irving Kristol, William Kuraishi, Tadao Kurchatov, Igor Landmine Treaty laser enrichment method Lavoy, Peter Lawrence, Ernest Ledeen, Michael LeMay, Curtis LEU (low enriched uranium) Leverett, Flynt Leviathan (Hobbes) Levite, Ariel liberal internationalism Libya: and Bush administration policies, and economic drivers, and national security model, and nuclear black market, nuclear

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Lilienthal, David Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) Little Boy. See also Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing Los Alamos. See Manhattan Project Los Alamos Primer, The (Serber) low enriched uranium (LEU) LTBT (Limited Test Ban Treaty) Lugar, Richard Mack, Andrew Macmillan, Harold Mahmood, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Majeed, Chaudiri Abdul Mandela, Nelson Manhattan Project

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Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission) UN Resolution 1540 uranium: defined, fission overview. See also fuel production uranium-235 uranium-238 Uranium Enrichment Company (URENCO) uranium hexafluoride (UF6) uranium oxide (U3O8) URENCO (Uranium Enrichment Company) U.S. nuclear guarantees: and domestic political model, and economic drivers, and national security model, and nonproliferation regime, and

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

by James Mahaffey  · 15 Feb 2015

-inch gun barrel. The projectile rings, propelled quickly by three bags of burning nitrocellulose, and the smaller cylinder assembled into a larger, complete cylinder of uranium metal, enriched to 86% U-235. The resulting configuration was hypercritical, and it fissioned explosively. To maximize the “shock and awe,” no leaflets were dropped warning

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volume of the stack, the better is the probability of causing an energy-release incident. The worst you can do is to stack bottles of enriched uranium oxide dissolved in water, which is a curious green color, in a rounded mound on the floor. In that configuration the surface area is minimized

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the building move, but not by much, and your car bounces off in the opposite direction with most of its initial speed. It takes more enriched uranium mass in pure metal form to make it go nuclear than in a water solution, but that’s not to say it does not happen

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. Stack up enough enriched uranium metal in a shape that will encourage fission, and you have it melting through the floor. Technically, this type of potential accident builds an impromptu

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bomb, because an entire explosion takes place in about a microsecond, much faster than anyone can lay down blocks. But such a situation of stacking enriched uranium bricks would still be extremely dangerous, as it would make a basic nuclear reactor without bio-shielding and without even rudimentary controls. It runs wild

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water bottles or stacked in bricks, it was as problematic as pure uranium-235 and much more plentiful. At Oak Ridge in 1944, batches of enriched uranium began to accumulate, and a memo arrived at Los Alamos from a plant superintendent, expressing concern about the possible peril of having bottles of uranium

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. Some held 300 gallons, some 600 gallons, and some an eye-opening 3,000 gallons of uranium oxide dissolved in water, in a range of uranium-235 enrichments from raw, natural uranium to nearly critical concentrations. Some were on brick floors, which was fine, but some were on wooden floors. Wood is

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of the chain-reaction concept and then use the resulting nuclear reactor as a neutron source for further experimentation and data collection. Oddly, a separate uranium-enrichment task was spun off for Manfred von Ardenne, a German television pioneer, funded by the German Post Office. Truth be known, Heisenberg was a brilliant

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at Los Alamos were working on the Mk-8, a light-weight bomb similar to the one used on Hiroshima, and two sections of highly enriched uranium, the “target” and the “projectile,” were suspended by poles in a water tank to see how close they had to be in a moderating medium

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spike from a nuclear weapon detonation. All day they had tried different configurations. At the center of the reactor was a hollow sphere of 90% enriched uranium, or 43.0 kilograms of uranium-235 in a 47.7 kilogram ball, 91.5mm in diameter with a 55mm cavity inside. The reflector halves

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nights, it rained on him. 34 K-25, using the gaseous diffusion process, was used to “enrich” uranium for bombs, research reactors, submarines, and power plants for the next 40 years. The other two methods for uranium enrichment, the thermo-columns at site S-50 and the electromagnetic calutrons at site Y-12, were

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, to increase production during the Cold War, and these were copies of the Oak Ridge facilities. However, K-25 did not add to the highly enriched uranium used in the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The diffusion process was slow, and the uranium fed in at the mouth of the process

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6, 1945, the exact critical mass of a uranium-235 bomb core was still unknown, and an experiment using 35.4 kg of 79.2% enriched uranium metal was devised. Blocks of the uranium were built into a pseudosphere surrounded by paraffin. The assembly was placed in a large tank of water

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the 48 states to be borrowed or commandeered. There was one in Canada, NRX.85 Although it was technically forbidden by federal law to ship enriched uranium out of the country, Rickover did it anyway, flattering the Chalk River Laboratory with praise and talking them into allowing him reactor time. He shipped

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would be put to use testing materials and techniques for use in the CANDU commercial power reactors. In 1964 NRU was converted to use highly enriched uranium as the fuel, eliminating the need for regular refueling, and the power was dialed back to 60 megawatts. In 1991 it was modified again to

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dazzling variety. Experimental projects, trying new and previously unheard-of ways to build atomic piles, were underway in Illinois and New Mexico, while plutonium and enriched uranium were being produced by the ton in Washington State and Tennessee. Europe was behind but gathering speed in England, France, and the Soviet Union. In

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privately owned pile. Backing up at Oak Ridge by the hundreds of tons was an inventory of depleted uranium-238, the waste exhaust from the uranium enrichment process. In theory, this useless stuff could be converted to fissile plutonium-239 by fast neutron capture. This was possible in the graphite-moderated converter

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out plutonium-based implosion bombs on an industrial scale, and surplus material was simply unavailable at the time. It was easier to obtain 97-percent enriched uranium-235 for the EBR-I fuel, and it was an adequate substitute for the plutonium.95 At Argonne, the 52 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium

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to superheat the intake air turned out to be too large to fit in the space normally occupied by the fuel burners. The reactor used enriched uranium clad in nickel chromium, with water as the moderator. The airstream was taken from the jet engine tube immediately after the compressor stage at the

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was a steel tank, half an inch thick, 13 feet high and 4 feet in diameter, halfway sunk in the ground. The 28 aluminum-clad enriched-uranium fuel elements were surplus from the big-budget Materials Test Reactor being erected elsewhere on the desert. The total fuel loading was 4.16 kilograms

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modified to extend the operating time between fuelings to five years. The fuel assemblies had been lengthened by a few inches so that more highly enriched uranium could be included. This increased the reactivity of the core considerably, and to bring it down to a controllable level some metallic boron was added

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oxide, with two out of every three atoms in the solid material being oxygen. The uranium content in fuel is usually enriched to 3.5% fissile uranium-235. The rest is uranium-238. After about 4.4% of the uranium-235 has fissioned, the fuel can no longer support the self-sustained chain

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the equipment. There were, however, three criticality accidents in which uranium dissolved in solution managed to find itself in a critical mass and go supercritical. Enriched uranium dissolved in water or an organic solvent will become an active nuclear reactor, increasing in power, if a specific “critical mass” is accumulated. The hydrogen

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many people have died worldwide in criticality accidents involving nuclear fuel. On October 16, 1959, the graveyard shift was working on 34 kilograms of uranium fuel enriched to 91% U-235 in the form of liquid uranyl nitrate diluted with water. The next step of the processing was to extract impurities by

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adding any to the fission process made the reactor subcritical. To work at all, the reactor fuel had to be beefed up with a slight uranium-235 enrichment, coming from the new gaseous diffusion plant at Capenhurst.125 On January 9, 1957, the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, having just presided over

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ordinary water. Although the ultimate purpose of the SRE was to begin development of a civilian thermal breeder, its first fuel loading would be metallic uranium, slightly enriched to make up for the neutron losses in the coolant. As the basic configuration was proven by experiments, thorium-232 breeding material and uranium

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stock to more than pay for the chemical separation and fuel-rod fabrication. The BN-350 started out with an expensive load of 20% enriched uranium with some mixed uranium-plutonium surplus from the Soviet nuclear weapons being demilitarized. By 1999, the now-obsolete fuel-rods would have to be custom-built. 155

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in Rhode Island. On that day in March, the sparkling new United Nuclear Fuels Recovery Plant began operations. Its first contract was to recover highly enriched uranium from manufacturing scraps left on the floor at a government-owned fuel-element factory.173 The plant operated on 8-hour shifts, five days a

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his coveralls. It had been a nerve-racking week at the plant, mainly due to false criticality alarms. When processing nuclear materials, working with highly enriched uranium in aqueous solutions was about as dangerous as it could get, and an accidental criticality was something to be avoided at all costs. Wednesday he

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fitted with four casters at the bottom so it would roll. There was no way that all the bottles in the plant filled with highly enriched uranium solution could go critical as long as they were sitting in safe carts. The bottles were always separated by at least three feet of open

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concentrated, bright yellow solution into polyethylene anti-criticality bottles. Paper labels were attached with rubber bands identifying them as containing a great deal of highly enriched uranium. Five people at any one time ran the entire plant. On the night shift it was three young technicians, Peabody, George Spencer, and Robert Mastriani

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facility, the Fuel Conversion Test Building, was erected to be used for special products. The plant’s license was modified to allow the processing of uranium enriched to up to 20 percent U-235 so that startup fuel for the Jōyō fast breeder reactor could be produced. Jōyō needed fuel enriched to

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18.8 percent U-235. Care was supposedly taken in the building’s design to ensure that no enriched uranium would ever be in a critical-sized or -shaped container, so no criticality alarms were called for in the license. An accidental criticality of any

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it drip through the dissolver. This plan indicated a weak understanding of the factors that lead to criticality. True, 45 liters of 18.8-percent enriched uranium solution is not critical, but only if it is in a geometry that does not encourage criticality, such as the long, thin tank. The 100

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built at the Nuclear Reactor Test Station in Idaho and started up in March 1951. Its fuel was a unique design, made of bomb-grade uranium metal, enriched to 93% U-235. The uranium was mixed with pure aluminum to make an alloy, formed into a long rod, and clad in a

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used in dozens of research reactors all over the world. As these aged reactors are decommissioned, particular care is taken to see that the highly enriched uranium fuel does not fall into the wrong hands. 174 The trichloroethylene (TCE) used in the wash-out step is incorrectly referred to as trichlorethane (chlorothene

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Ridge. It was the answer to all problems that had to be addressed in the light-water-reactor designs, including the availability of uranium and the expense of enriching it, but it was too late. Westinghouse, General Electric, Babcock and Wilcox, Combustion Engineering, and a host of copying manufacturers in Europe had

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14% enriched uranyl sulfate dissolved in water and surrounded by a reflector made of beryllium. The fuel consisted of the world’s entire stock of enriched uranium at the time. The purpose of the reactor was to measure characteristics of uranium fission, but it was also the first reactor using a single

Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service

by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal  · 1 Jan 2010  · 427pp  · 127,496 words

. But it turned out that Hosseinpour worked at an Isfahan secret installation where raw uranium was converted into gas. This gas was then used for uranium enrichment by a series (“cascades”) of centrifuges in Natanz, a faraway, fortified underground installation. In 2006, Hosseinpour was awarded the highest Iranian prize for science and

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for assembling a nuclear bomb. Yet he chose not to make use of plutonium, which is harvested in the classic nuclear reactors, but to utilize enriched uranium. Mined uranium ore contains only 1 percent of uranium-235, which is vital for the production of nuclear weapons, and 99 percent uranium-238, which is

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,000 spins a minute, the lighter uranium-235 separates from the heavier uranium-238. By repeating that process thousands of times, the centrifuges produce an enriched uranium-235. This gas, when converted into solid matter, becomes the substance needed for a nuclear bomb. Khan had stolen the centrifuges’ blueprints from Eurenco, a

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on impact. The goal of the second project, Cleopatra, was to produce two atomic bombs. Joklik suggested an ingenious method for manufacturing the bombs: buying uranium enriched to 20 percent in the United States or in Europe; enriching it up to 90 percent by special centrifuges developed in Germany and Holland by

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the scientists Dr. Wilhelm Groth, Dr. Jacob Kistemaker, and Dr. Gernot Zippe; and building the bomb with the enriched uranium. Joklik flew to the United States and tried to get the enriched uranium there; he also met with several German scientists and invited them to build centrifuges in Egypt. Simultaneously, he purchased some

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reports didn’t get the proper attention. Concerning the Cleopatra Project, the experts said there were almost no chances that Joklik would get 20 percent enriched uranium. Even if he did, Egypt would need at least one hundred of the best centrifuges in order to harvest the necessary uranium for assembling one

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the Iranian nuclear project was close to completion and sources in the International Atomic Energy Agency even declared that Iran has produced 109 kilograms of enriched uranium, enough to assemble four atomic bombs. If Israel decided to deal a major blow to the Iranian project by launching an all-out attack against

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means necessary—military or other. The American services claimed that this would be the moment when the enrichment of uranium by Iran reached 80 percent, a crucial stage in the development of their nuclear capability. Uranium enriched to that level could be very quickly upgraded to 97 percent, the degree needed for the assembly

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install three thousand new centrifuges, far faster and more sophisticated than the equipment now in service. In that facility the Iranians could feed the centrifuges uranium enriched up to 3.5 percent and keep enriching it till it was ready for use. Israel was convinced that this doomsday cave, like many other

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Its Falling Nuclear Program?” Yossi Melman, Haaretz, September 16, 2007 (H) “Israel Made the U.S. Understand,” Yossi Melman, Haaretz, April 27, 2008 (H) “Report: Enriched Uranium in the Nuclear Site that Israel Bombed,” Yossi Melman, Haaretz, November 11, 2008 (H) “Report: Israel Had a Mole in the Syrian Reactor,” YNET, October

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

by Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk  · 29 Apr 2013

: Department of Energy DU: depleted uranium EPA: Environmental Protection Agency GE: General Electric HEU: highly enriched uranium IAEA: International Atomic Energy Agency IBM: International Business Machines ISN: Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies IT: Information Technology LEU: low-enriched uranium MAD: mutually assured destruction MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology NAM: Non-Aligned Movement NATO: North Atlantic

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system. Planning doesn’t go much beyond that. If things work for twenty-five years, that’s a success. The Tehran Research Reactor requires highly enriched uranium fuel to operate; the same is true for MIT’s reactor. The Department of Energy has told MIT it must convert to low-enriched fuel

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fuel that is less than 20 percent 235U is classified as LEU or “non-weapon-useable low-enriched uranium.” Fuel that is greater than 20 percent 235U is classified as HEU or high-enriched uranium—“usually weapon-grade uranium (WgU) containing 90 percent or more 235U.” Frank von Hippel, “A Comprehensive Approach to Elimination of

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Highly-Enriched-Uranium from All Nuclear-Reactor Fuel Cycles,” Science & Global Security 12 (November 2004): 138, doi:10.1080/08929880490518045

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. Iran’s right to enrich fuel remains central to current tensions: “Iran claims it needs the higher enriched uranium to produce fuel for the Tehran reactor that makes medical radioisotopes needed for cancer patients.” Ali Akbar Dareini, “Iran Claims Two Steps to Nuclear Self

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spoke there have been some investigations of the impact of US weaponry in the attack on Fallujah. One technical study found unusually high levels of enriched uranium, presumably from DU, along with other dangerous substances.36 Another study, reported by Patrick Cockburn in the London Independent and in the International Journal of

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sanctions; it’s the United States that’s isolated. The nonaligned countries—118 countries, most of the world—have always supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium, still do. Turkey recently constructed a pipeline to Iran, so has Pakistan. Turkey’s trade with Iran has been going way up, they’re planning

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

by Serhii Plokhy  · 1 Mar 2018  · 465pp  · 140,800 words

catastrophic fallout was the escape of less than 5 percent of the reactor’s nuclear fuel. Originally it had contained more than 250 pounds of enriched uranium—enough to pollute and devastate most of Europe. And if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion

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VVERs. And they were not only more powerful but also cheaper to build and operate. Whereas VVER reactors required enriched uranium, RBMK reactors were designed to run on almost natural uranium-238, with an enrichment level of a mere 2 to 3 percent of uranium-235. Last but not least, the RBMK reactors could

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(MWt), more than two-thirds of the projected capacity and a dangerously unstable condition in all RBMK reactors. One of the fuel channels burst, releasing enriched uranium into the core of the reactor, and it took operators close to thirty minutes to figure out that something was wrong and shut down the

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, ADE-4. Like the Chernobyl reactor, the one at Tomsk-7 used a graphite moderator to slow down the neutrons that bombarded the nuclei of enriched uranium. Borets worked at the Chernobyl plant for more than ten years before taking a job with a contractor responsible for launching reactors. Reactor shutdowns were

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reactor had 1,661 fuel rods or pressure channels, each approximately 3.5 meters long, filled with pellets of 2 to 3 percent enriched uranium-235 and natural uranium-238. There were 211 movable control rods made of boron carbide that absorbed neutrons, and which could therefore slow down the fission reaction if

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nuclear warheads, Russia would continue to provide fuel for Ukraine’s nuclear plants, including the one in Chernobyl, all of which ran on Russian-produced enriched uranium. The Chernobyl plant received considerable attention in the Washington negotiations of November 1994 between Kuchma and Clinton. “President Clinton drew attention to the significant resource

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin  · 14 Oct 2004  · 1,509pp  · 416,377 words

producing 18 to 50 kilograms of plutonium a year or enough for two to five Nagasaki-sized bombs; (4) a factory to produce enriched uranium (North Korea mined natural uranium); (5) a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant with high chimneys and meter-thick walls to keep radioactivity from escaping, almost completed and expected to

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. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and other officials visiting Pyongyang surprised their hosts with evidence that North Korea was continuing nuclear weapons development using uranium enrichment, a different and separate process from the plutonium process the country had frozen earlier. The delegation returned to Washington to report that its counterparts had

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offered to re-freeze its plutonium-based program (evidently realizing its admission had been a tactical error, it now denied it had acknowledged having a uranium enrichment program) while negotiating with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia to see what sort of deal it could get. What it wanted

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one in which K worked. Under its paranoid regime, virtually everything of military significance is manufactured underground, whether it’s buttons for soldiers’ uniforms or enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. A South Korean intelligence source estimates that North Korea has several hundred large underground factories and more than 10,000 smaller facilities

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety

by Eric Schlosser  · 16 Sep 2013  · 956pp  · 267,746 words

it may have to be ‘written off’ permanently.” The AEC debated whether to remove plutonium from the Genie’s core and use highly enriched uranium instead. In one respect, uranium-235 seemed to be safer. It has a half-life of about seven hundred million years—but emits radiation at a much lower

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bits, and most of the uranium from their secondaries had been recovered. But a crucial piece of one bomb was still missing, most likely the enriched uranium spark plug necessary for a thermonuclear blast. It was never found—and the search later inspired erroneous claims that an entire hydrogen bomb had been

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plane. The prospect of having to render safe a W-53 warhead didn’t make Arnold nervous. The core of the W-53 contained highly enriched uranium, not plutonium, largely eliminating the inhalation hazard and the risk of radioactive contamination. He’d visited Titan II launch complexes, practiced on dummy versions of

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

information to Tony Blair in a private conversation: even the IAEA, the international authority on nuclear inspections, was absolutely convinced that Iraq did not possess enriched uranium. Blair cut him short: ‘But Ruud, we’re not talking here about sincerity, or about the correctness of facts. This is about a political decision

The Future of Fusion Energy

by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball  · 18 Dec 2018  · 404pp  · 107,356 words

fusion reactors to generate fissile material for nuclear weapons. By replacing conventional nuclear fission power plants with fusion, the world can eliminate the need for enriched uranium and plutonium, making nuclear bombs much more difficult to produce. •Fusion has been underfunded for decades. The current funding for fusion is peanuts. In 2016

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’t support a chain reaction). For this reason, we have to manually remove U-238 in a process known as enrichment. For weapons, we must enrich the uranium a lot, typically to be more than 85% U-235 (remember that we start at 0.7% U-235). As we will see, this

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difficult to obtain. Uranium-235 is common in nature, but only appears distributed amongst a much larger amount of uranium-238. To make natural uranium usable, we must enrich it to artificially increase the fraction of uranium-235. Plutonium-239 and uranium-233, on the other hand, don’t exist in nature

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, enrichment and breeding, carry their own set of challenges that we will explore in the next two sections. 10.2.1Uranium enrichment How do we enrich uranium to increase the fraction of U-235? Since U-235 and U-238 are isotopes, they are chemically indistinguishable, so separating them using their chemical

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must be repeated thousands of times to achieve a substantial degree of enrichment. Still, arduous as it is, this was the predominant method employed for enriching the uranium used in the Manhattan Project. Figure 10.7:The process used to convert raw uranium ore into a material suitable for enrichment. Currently, the

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overwhelming majority of the world’s uranium is enriched using gas centrifuges. A centrifuge is a large, sealed cylinder that rotates about its center at a high rate.17 When hex is injected in

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with gaseous diffusion, this process must be repeated many times to significantly increase the concentration of U-235. Figure 10.8:A centrifuge used for uranium enrichment. When the hex is inserted into the spinning chamber, the heavier gas molecules (i.e. those that contain a U-238 atom) preferentially move to

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actual nuclear weapon is the gun-type bomb (shown in Figure 10.9). It consists of a “bullet” and a “target,” both made of highly-enriched uranium. A chemical explosion is used to drive the bullet into the target. Once combined, they exceed the critical mass and explode due to energy released

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nuclear weapon, it would likely be of this design because of its simplicity and ease of manufacture. In a gun-type nuclear weapon, obtaining highly enriched uranium is the critical step.21 A second design is the implosion bomb. This setup is far more complex and expensive than the gun-type, but

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, 1945. The distances labeling the circles in the bottom image are in feet. Because natural uranium is not fissile, a typical power plant does use enriched uranium fuel, but it only needs to be 3–5% U-235 (see Figure 10.12). It can make do with this low level of enrichment

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centrifuges than fueling a fission power plant, even though it needs higher enrichment. This is because a bomb requires as little as 10 kilograms of enriched uranium, while operating a power plant for a year requires over 10,000 kilograms. Another proliferation concern is posed by spent fuel, the high-level nuclear

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is important for nuclear security to monitor existing power plants and keep careful track of spent fuel. Figure 10.14:The composition of the low enrichment uranium fuel before (left) and after (right) it is put into a fission reactor. 10.4Breeder Reactors Standard fission reactors consume more fissile material than they

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fairly scarce, governments did substantial research into power plants that could produce fissile material on the fly. As more uranium reserves were discovered (and as uranium enrichment became increasingly affordable), interest in breeders declined. A breeder reactor works by being fed fertile material, which is anything that can be transmuted into a

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is largely weapons-ready. If someone were to steal it, they could use a chemical technique called PUREX to separate out the plutonium and/or enriched uranium needed to make a bomb. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), fuel for breeders would take roughly 1–3 weeks to be incorporated

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or bad, just different. The abundance of plutonium would make it easier for countries with weapons ambitions to build advanced bombs, but the reduction in enriched uranium would make it harder for nuclear terrorists to build low-tech gun-type weapons. But before we get ahead of ourselves, what is the proliferation

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world without nuclear weapons. In a world with nuclear weapons, why would bomb-makers bother with a fusion power plant? Countries will still have dedicated uranium enrichment and plutonium production facilities and there will still be fissile material to steal. 10.7The Nuclear Energy Transition After fusion power plants become available, it

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kilograms, while for plutonium-239 and uranium-233 it is 8 kilograms. In contrast, the fuels for conventional reactors have much larger SQ values: low enrichment uranium is 75 kilograms and thorium is 20,000 kilograms. 29By volume, this isn’t actually too much. For example, the spent fuel from 60 years

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, 197 turbulent transport, 126 U U.S.S. Beale see Cuban Missile Crisis, 305 units of energy and power, 18 units of nuclear energy, 69 uranium, 90 enrichment of U-238, 315 fission reaction, 312 uranium deposits, 25 uranium-235, 23 uranium-238, 24 US Energy Research and Development Administration, 360 US

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