From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Sep 29 2002 - 08:00:01 MDT
In an attempt to track down what the source of the uranium
might be, I ran across the "WISE Uranium Project":
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/index.html
An interesting set of resource maps (that only seems to
work in Internet Explorer) can be found here:
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/umaps.html
Also of interest is the National Nuclear Data Center:
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/
And for the ultimate nuclear geeks, you can get "Nuclear Wallet Cards":
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/wallet/
Interestingly enough, in the discussion of the U.S. plants
involved in Uranium Enrichment and Fuel Fabrication there isn't
any mention of a very large facility just outside Amarillo Texas.
This page discusses the Iraqi nuclear bomb efforts and indicates
that their bomb design requires 15-18 kg of HEU:
http://www.iraqwatch.org/wmd/nuclear.html
This page says they would require 18.5 kg:
http://www.nci.org/i/ib113095.htm
This page says that for Pakistan to produce its Chinese derived
design with a 15 kg core of weapons grade uranium about 20 kg
would be required before machining.
http://www.isis-online.org/publications/southasia/ta-pak060198.html
It is estimated that Pakistan had enough WGU for ~30 weapons in
1998 with an annual production capacity of ~5 weapons per year.
Here is a detailed discussion of the difficulties of manufacturing
nuclear bombs (esp. from the perspective of a terrorist):
http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/News/TerroristBombs.html
According to this:
http://www.fas.org/ssp/docs/020500-heu/intro.pdf
HEU is likely to be the fuel terrorists would choose because it
is less radioactive and hazardous than plutonium and can be
used in weapons with simpler designs. It does however take 3 times
as much HEU as plutonium to make a weapon. In 1994 Russia had
over 825 tons of highly enriched uranium outside of weapons
with more probably becoming available since then as weapons are
dismantled. See:
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/BCSIA/Library.nsf/pubs/mmup4
The U.S. is slowly in the process of purchasing a significant
fraction of this material. See:
http://www.fas.org/ssp/docs/020500-heu/intro.pdf
How fast this material is being removed from Russia isn't clear.
The document says it may not be completely converted into nuclear
fuel until 2013. Even then there will still be a significant amount
of HEU left in Russia.
Robert
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