AviationBanter - View Single Post - Iranian official expects first U.S. military action against Iran within 2 months

**Peter Skelton** · February 1st 07, 09:53 PM posted to rec.aviation.military.naval

On Thu, 1 Feb 2007 21:35 +0000 (GMT Standard Time),
(John Dallman) wrote:

In article .com,
(Airyx) wrote:

Now, anybody who wants to can look into what is required to prepare
uranium for a nuclear power plant, and see that many of the things
that Iran is doing with their uranium (again, fully in the open),
is not necessary unless you are making weapons.

Can you be specific about these activities? You /do/ need to enrich
uranium for a pressurised-water reactor: it won't go critical with
natural uranium.

You can make a reactor that will run on natural uranium with either
high-purity graphite or heavy water as moderators, but they aren't that
good for power generation. All the USA's commercial nuclear power
plants, and most of the rest of the not-ex-Soviet-Union world's ones are
PWRs, because that's easier to build and run and quite effective.

This is why the sharp division between civilian and military nuclear
technology that people try to draw is illusory. To run civilian power
plants in a cost-effective manner you need to make large quantities of
low-enriched uranium. If you can do that, you also have the technology
to make highly enriched uranium.

Since this point is somewhat technical and politically inconvenient,
media reporting on the subject tends to be unreliable.

Ontario Power Generation would be interested in your comments as
they show clearly the impossibility of generating the 45
tera-watt hours they made last year (they own two other stations
but lease them to private companies who sell back the power, not
included in the 45).

They use CANDU technology, a heavy water reactor. Unfortunately a
by-product is plutonium. This has been an embarassment in the
past.

Peter Skelton