To its credit, the American government has made significant progress in recent years in helping secure some of the material in Russia, although hundreds of tons of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium in the former Soviet Union still lack up-to-date safeguards against theft.
Reprocessed waste yields usable uranium fuel, along with "an alchemist's dream" of other elements useful in industry and medicine, says Sherrell Greene, who retired in late 2011 as head of nuclear technology at the United States Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and now works as a consultant.
And what are the chances now of curbing the regime's presumed nuclear ambitions?The next diplomatic set-piece will be at the IAEA, whose inspectors will report formally on September 3rd about just what Iran is up to at Isfahan, where yellowcake (uranium ore) is converted into a gas that can later be spun in centrifuge machines to make usable uranium.
It would also cut the total number of Iran's centrifuges – which are used to enrich key isotopes of weapons-usable uranium — by two-thirds and require that Iran export or transform such uranium into fuel.
One site that will miss its deadline by years is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which holds a large stock of weapons-usable uranium.
Re "Uranium Reactors on Campus Raise Security Concerns" (news article, Aug. 15): There is no public mention of any effort by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to immediately upgrade security at university research reactors to the level needed to prevent thefts of bomb-usable uranium fuel by well-armed and -trained terrorists.
One of the few figures available, on a database compiled by researchers at Stanford University in the US, revealed that about 40kg of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium were stolen from poorly protected nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union between 1991 and 2002.
The discovery of a plant for making potentially weapons-usable uranium, dug secretly into a mountain on a military compound near the city of Qom, means that the test of their sincerity is Iran.The talks between Iran and six countries America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China that got under way this week in Geneva define a tipping-point.
Its centrifuge machines could produce enough bomb-usable uranium for about a weapon a year.
It was confronted with American evidence that it had been amassing the equipment and technology to produce bomb-usable uranium.
