Iran To Continue Talking
Odd that a meeting to take another meeting is considered a success, but in dealing with Iran, you’ve got to take your victories no matter how small. After meeting for 10 hours, the nations (United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Iran) agreed to meet in late May in Baghdad. The crux of the issue is Iran’s stockpile of uranium at a 20% purity, which they say the need for its medical reactor. The US is willing to supply the uranium needed, if Iran stops their uranium-enrichment projects. There are fears that moving from 20% to 90% purity is very easy, but there are also a side that says that Iran’s nuclear threat is not imminent.
Tags: Iran
Enriching uranium from 20% to 90% is alot harder than the process sounds. And I think that 20% enrichment is what a country that has signed the NPT is entitled to.
But the Iranians are currently selling their oil to some of their preferred Asian customers at a discount — that discount via extended credit terms of 180 days. There’s plenty of speculation that this is an indicator of just how effective the current sanctions imposed by the US and the Europeans have been.
@c “Enriching uranium from 20% to 90% is alot harder than the process sounds.”
LOL. I could do it in my basement. There’s more than one way to do it. You know…. Fat Man wasn’t made with centrifuges.
There’s more than one way to do it and the Iranians are pretty clearly in the centrifucation process, which was what I was referring to. Fat Man wasn’t made with centrifuges because they couldn’t get the production they needed. So they made it via gaseous diffusion, thermal liquid diffusion and one other. But I think they tried and set aside centrifuges. The K25 (gaseous diffusion) plant is now gone.
But my point was that the path the Iranians have gone down for production is something of a double-edged sword. They’ve clearly gotten to their NPT limit for enriching uranium and it really isn’t clear that they want to produce a nuclear weapon. But once you’ve mastered the process, it is really hard to stop someone who can enrich to weapons grade from getting their weapon.