Iran claims “entire nuclear cycle”
A quick follow-up on the news that came out of Iran earlier this week, where National Nuclear Day was celebrated with the pronouncement of President Mahmoud Amadinejad that his country had completed the nuclear fuel cycle. An AP article about a speech Amadinejad gave today on his nation’s nuclear achievements does a fairly decent job of explaining how easy it would be for Iran to rapidly develop nuclear weapons without tipping its hand.
Iran now controls the entire cycle for producing nuclear fuel with the opening of a new facility to produce uranium fuel pellets, the Iranian president said Saturday….
Production of nuclear fuel pellets is the final step in the long, complicated chain of nuclear fuel cycle. The U.S. and its allies have expressed concern over Iran’s developing nuclear program for fear it masks a nuclear weapons program—a charge Iran denies.
Heavy-water reactors use a different process than light-water ones, but have their own nuclear proliferation concerns. The West fears Iran could eventually reprocess spent fuel from the heavy-water reactor to produce plutonium for a warhead.
“Today, with the grace of God, Iran is a country controlling the entire nuclear fuel cycle,” Ahmadinejad said on state television.
Ahmadinejad has announced several times in the past that Iran has the knowledge necessary to produce its own fuel, but with the opening of the new facility, the Islamic republic says it now has the capability on a industrial scale.
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Highly-enriched uranium, however, can also produce a nuclear bomb, something that has the West very concerned. Iran maintains its program is strictly to make energy.
Iran is putting the finishing touches on a nuclear power plant with Russian help in Bushehr, in southern Iran, but the uranium fuel to power it is imported. Tehran also plans to build a 360-megawatt light-water nuclear power plant in Darkhovin, in the southwestern Khuzestan province, which it will power with its own fuel.
…Iran has its own uranium mines and is already extracting uranium ore from the Gachin uranium mine in southern Iran where a mill turns it into uranium ore concentrate, known as yellowcake.
The yellowcake is then taken to the uranium conversion facility outside Isfahan, central Iran, where it is finally processed into UF-6, or uranium gas, the feedstock for uranium enrichment. The gas is then taken to uranium enrichment plant near Natanz, another town in central Iran, where it is enriched.
The enriched uranium is finally taken back to Isfahan where it will be turned into fuel pellets used by the reactors to produce electricity.
Iran (and many other Arab nations) will join with Russia (Psalm 83:4-5) to launch an attempted nuclear attack against Israel (Joel 2:3) & probably the United States (Jeremiah 50:9, Revelation 18:10), but Israel shall be spared thanks to a counter-attack (Joel 2:20).
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