One potential sticking point of making an agreement with Iran is the disposition of their 60% enriched uranium. One option that I see in media reports is to “destroy” it while it is still in Iran. Without going into the political aspects of the plan, how is this even possible without fission or fusion?
You could mix it back in with the U-238 it was separated from. It’s still there, but you’ve undone the hard work of enriching it.
Mix it? It isn’t in our custody. Do they drop it from the sky and hope it lands on the uranium?
Obviosly any such settlement would be monitored by the
I was interpreting this as being part of “making an agreement with Iran”. I.e., we make a deal with them, one of the terms of which is “you’ll allow in UN weapons inspectors, who will monitor the de-enrichment of your uranium, or do it themselves”.
We would save time and effort and just take it.
That’d work, too. But Iran might be more willing to agree to a deal involving it being deweaponized in situ.
Or just outright buy it and their processing facilities at a profit to Iran. Let them recoup their investment so to say.
Of course that would be fair, a concept that is foreign to this administration. Too much like losing they would say.
If we know where it is? Use nukes or large amounts of conventional explosives to scatter it wide enough that reclaiming it is impractical.
(This is a “could”, not “should” tactic to be clear)
I could totally see the trump administration agreeing to a deal where they allegedly have to totally promised to destroy all their Uranium absolutely pinky swear. But actually they just sort of agree they may water it down a little
Iran wants a civilian energy nuclear program too. (They have a civilian power reactor - when Israel landed something too close to it, they retaliated with a missile close to the Dimona reactor in Israel … a simple message to “back off”). They would see how the nuclear materials are disposed of as a message as to how well they have done in negotiations. As we’ve seen so far, they do not intend to surrender. Handing over the materials would be seen as surrender, and pride might not let them do that.
The USA is not going to be able to simply take the materials. To get at deeply buried materials, they would need to fly in massive amounts of heavy equipment if the entrances are sufficiently damaged. Running an airfield while vulnerable to guerillas and drones would be very risky and cost a lot of lives. Any accidents with the material would be equally horrible. Trucking it across a thousand miles when guerillas could be hiding anywhre would be equally risky.
So the solution is for Iran to agree on something to ensure it does not get further concentrated - isolate and not touch the material, or dilute it for civilian use, but not surrender it. Provide some for of oversight to guarantee compliance. Melting it into dilution with less potent uranium is the obvious solution there, but carries some implicit message of surrender, so they will ask a lot of concessions from the USA to do so without appeaaring to “give in”.
Enriched uramium is chemically identical to unenriched, so melting together is a quick way to ensure it is no longer as threatening. The onlly difference is a 235:238 weight difference, which requires long term differentiation in high-speed centrifuges to enrich it again… slowly. (The estimate is they have about 440kg of 60% enriched, the results of a huge number of centrifuges running since the agreement was cancelled, so 10 years or so. Enrichment is slow. OTOH they only need about 30kg of 80% per bomb from what I recall of Oppenheimer)
Yeah. 60% enrichment is only useful on the way to a weapon. Diluted back to 3% and you have perfectly useful reactor fuel of reasonably significant commercial value.
The separated non-fissile uranium is almost certainly sitting around somewhere. It has its own value and isn’t just a waste product. Even if it wasn’t easily to hand, there is a lot available in the world.
Or they could mine more. They obviously got the original material from somewhere; and I agree, the leftovers must be somewhere, even if in a discard pile.