International nuclear watch & discussion -28-Mar-08

Gerard
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New Zealand anti-nuclear politician dies
"The presence of the frigates with a cabinet minister on board attracted considerable international attention, and was part of the international pressure which forced the French nuclear testing programme underground," Clark said.
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China continues nuclear armament buildup
With the above nuclear warhead expansion programs, China will have more nuclear warheads than the United Kingdom and France combined by around 2015, close to the scale of Russia's nuclear warhead stockpile.
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The ayatollah blog has some photos of the Iranian President with carbon fibre centrifuges

Image

Have the Pakis moved on to carbon fibre or are they still using maraging steel?
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Protestors at opening on new Japanese nuclear plant
The plant, in the northern city of Rokkasho, was constructed by Japan Nuclear Fuel and France's nuclear company Areva.
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Ah... the elusive "goal"...
Dan Rather leads Rowan discussion of nuclear politics
"Even if we never get to the goal of completely eliminating nuclear weapons in the world, every step we take makes us safer," Cirincione said
so no disarmament.. but arms control instead... CTBT, FMCT and other rubbish...
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Safe nuclear dump discovered
The new mineral was tested and named at the Kola Science Institute.

The geologist who discovered it, Viktor Yakovenchuk, says it’s capable of absorbing radioactive substances like caesium and rubidium from water-based solutions, and storing them inside.

And radioactive water would be completely safe after coming into contact with Ivanukite.
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Philip
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True?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 08647.html

US and Iran holding 'secret' talks on nuclear programme

Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Monday, 14 April 2008


Iran and the United States have been engaged in secret "back channel" discussions for the past five years on Iran's nuclear programme and the broader relationship between the two sworn enemies, The Independent can reveal.


One of the participants, former senior US diplomat Thomas Pickering, explained that a group of former American diplomats and experts had been meeting with Iranian academics and policy advisers "in a lot of different places, although not in the US or Iran".

"Some of the Iranians were connected to official institutions inside Iran," he said in a telephone interview from Washington. The group was organised by the UN Association of the USA, a pro-UN organisation. Its work was facilitated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a government-funded think-tank chaired by the former chief UN weapons inspector for Iraq, Rolf Ekeus.

While the nuclear issue was "prominent", Mr Pickering said, "we discussed what's going on domestically in both countries and wide-ranging issues" affecting the US-Iran relationship. Although none of the group members was from the US or Iranian governments, he said that "each side kept their officials informed". The Bush administration "did not discourage us," he added.

Mr Pickering declined to go into greater detail for fear of jeopardising future meetings of the group of about a dozen Americans and Iranians, although the number of participants varies. Back- channel talks have often provided crucial impetus in solving the world's most intractable disputes. They usually only become public in case of agreement, as seen with Northern Ireland and the Oslo accords on the Middle East, or failure, as in the case of an Israeli-Syrian informal channel.

The revelation about the existence of an Iran-US back channel coincides with the recent publication by three of its American members, including Mr Pickering, of proposals aimed at overcoming the deadlock between Iran and the West over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. The initiative addresses the crunch issue of Iran's right to enrich uranium on its own soil while providing guarantees that the nuclear fuel will not be diverted for military purposes.

Mr Pickering spoke of a "rather positive" reaction to the plan, which provides for an international consortium to jointly manage and run uranium enrichment on Iranian soil.

However, the Bush administration has not responded, and remains wedded to its current policy of sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to halt uranium enrichment in line with UN demands, while offering the opportunity to enrich uranium outside the country through a Russian consortium. A Foreign Office spokesman said Britain was "aware" of the proposals but did not have an official response. The Iranian government, according to Mr Pickering, has let it be known that "they would not respond unless it was offered officially".

In arms-control circles the plan has gained traction "because he's so respected," said George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to Mr Pickering, who is a former US undersecretary of state. The initiative, co-signed by the UNA-USA president William Luers, a former diplomat, and Jim Walsh, a nuclear expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was first aired at the end of February in The New York Review of Books where it has generated further discussion.

Mr Pickering says that he and his colleagues decided to act now because US policy was "stuck", in the light of Iran's refusal to bow to the UN demand to halt uranium enrichment, despite the imposition of economic sanctions. Prospects for face-to-face US-Iran talks are therefore blocked, he says, arguing that the case is urgent because Iran is continuing to install centrifuges at its main enrichment plant in Natanz.

But other experts point out that with the 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz spinning at only 20 percent of capacity because of technical problems, there is time for the West to play a waiting game.

James Acton, a nuclear specialist at King's College London Department of War Studies, said the challenge would be to prevent Iran obtaining a clandestine route to a nuclear weapon thanks to the technical know-how that would be obtained from foreign partners.

Mr Pickering said: "It can be feasible if governments wish to make it so, technically and financially. But it will take a lot of negotiation."

Some analysts pointed out that a breakthrough was unlikely so long as George Bush was in the White House and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holds the presidency of Iran, where elections are scheduled for next year. "Why would Iran go for it now? They feel like they've won, there are not enough sanctions, and there is no threat of war," said Mr Perkovich.

Calling Iran's bluff?

The Luers-Pickering-Walsh initiative gives Iran the opportunity to prove that its nuclear intentions are peaceful by yielding to the Iranians' key demand for a uranium enrichment programme on Iranian soil. The enrichment activities would take place under the supervision of a jointly managed international consortium. The plan is the most detailed of its kind since 2005. Conditions to be negotiated with Iran would include:

*a UN Security Council resolution authorising the arrangement and specifying that if Iran breaks the agreement, member states would be authorised to take punitive action;

*Iran would be barred from producing highly enriched uranium, which is weapons grade fuel, or reprocessed plutonium, which can be an alternative route to producing a bomb;

*Iran would implement the stringent inspection measures in the Additional Protocol to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty;

*Iran would commit itself to building only "safe" light-water reactors.
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Coral found 50 years after nuclear test in Pacific
Coral is again flourishing in a crater left by the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States, on Bikini Atoll.
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"Cheap Method for Shielding a City from Rocket and Nuclear Warhead Impacts" by Alexander Bolonkin

http://lanl.arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/ ... 1.1694.pdf
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Uranium a sluggish bandwagon
For security reasons, the U.S. position is that no country not already enriching uranium should be allowed to do so. It would require approval of the G-8 group of nations before Canada, and thus Saskatchewan, could become home to a uranium enrichment facility.
G8 approval before Canada can enrich Uranium?
The Candu reactor uses a different fuel produced through a process called conversion. So if a company in Saskatchewan were to build an enrichment facility, it would be producing a product with no Canadian application.
Actually CANDU reactors can burn enriched Uranium
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derkonig
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^
Sour grapes
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Sour grapes
No, this is the start of the US/P-5-initiated "cry for peace and save the global environment for our children's children by taking everyone's nukes (except the P-5 and their friends)" move, in order to shore up the NPT or its successor.
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Arms Control Groups Tell Congress To Reject New Nuclear Warhead
Testifying before the House in 2007, former Senator Sam Nunn noted the strategic error the United States would make by producing new nuclear weapons at a time when other countries are considering developing their own arsenals.
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Deterring the Undeterrable
The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.
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Lobbyist explains switch in nuclear position
It was 1976 when Patrick Moore wrote, "Their construction and proliferation is the most irresponsible, in fact the most criminal, act ever to have taken place on this planet."
The environmental movement has become the "main obstacle to reducing carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel consumption," he said, because it is opposed to all the viable technologies for electricity production, such as hydropower, nuclear energy and wind.

"Too many of these people have accepted certain beliefs." He called them "career environmentalists (who are) never going to change their minds."
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originally posted by sraj in the nukular whine, slander, libel and bitch thread....
U.S. Ends Effort to Ban Sale Of Enrichment Technology
The Bush administration has given up its push for an international ban on sales of uranium-enrichment technology to nonnuclear states, a move that will complicate its nuclear diplomacy toward both Iran and India, and could open the way for a wave of new entrants into the enrichment club.

The concession was made under heavy pressure from Canada, which wants the right to build uranium-enrichment plants to export the lucrative enriched fuel for nuclear-power plants.
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Kings College London has opened their own non-proliferation madrassa... probably envious of the Majlis-e-Monterey..
They are offering, get this, an MA in 'Non-Proliferation & International Security'
link
No MA in Disarmament however... that being heresy for a true ayatollah...
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MoD'S shameful new claim to nuclear test veterans
Ministry of Defence chiefs have told Britain's nuclear veterans they were SAFER watching A-bombs being tested than they were if they had stayed at home
22,000 servicemen were forced to watch the tests...while top brass and scientists were kept a safe distance away
The claim that protective clothing was worn is also debunked by the hundreds of veterans who have told how they were told simply to tuck their trousers into their socks and cover their eyes to protect them from the flash.
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Reactor-Grade and Weapons-Grade Plutonium in Nuclear Explosives

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and the Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Implications of Thermonuclear-Fusion Energy Systems
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0401110
[quote]The nuclear weapons proliferations implications of the siting of ITER in Japan is enhanced by the fact that Japan is already in possession of a large stockpile of separated plutonium. Indeed, large-scale availability of tritium would enable this reactor-grade plutonium to be used in highly efficient and reliable nuclear explosives “boostedâ€
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[quote="Gerard"]Reactor-Grade and Weapons-Grade Plutonium in Nuclear Explosives

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and the Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Implications of Thermonuclear-Fusion Energy Systems
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0401110
[quote]The nuclear weapons proliferations implications of the siting of ITER in Japan is enhanced by the fact that Japan is already in possession of a large stockpile of separated plutonium. Indeed, large-scale availability of tritium would enable this reactor-grade plutonium to be used in highly efficient and reliable nuclear explosives “boostedâ€
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Gerard wrote:Reactor-Grade and Weapons-Grade Plutonium in Nuclear Explosives

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and the Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Implications of Thermonuclear-Fusion Energy Systems
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0401110
That report published Feb 2008 is a treasure trove & the most educative material for lay person who wants to understand Indian NW.

Pls see the diagrams on pg76 to 80. So I see a Photoshop expert at work here?

Drawing lines is so easy, especially if they have to be in plausible tyranny of laws of physics.

An ability to discern an artist from a servant engineer is so hard to find.

Oh BTW, have I seen that drawing on page 80 ? Looks familiar ! :twisted:

See that prolate spheroid fusion stage on Page 79 !! :shock: 8)
I gently desisted from figuring that out and putting em on BR Missile page. So SRDE Yindu bum has a squinted eyes onlee; one spherical (circular) other prolate spheroid (elliptic). What to do, such is goodha rahasya gyaan of brahmaastra.

But who am I to know anything but a lay photoshopping enthusiast away from reality of politics and military.

What a solid Jhaapad to "intelligent breed" at some unmentionable blog for wayward vagrants. :twisted:
Last edited by Arun_S on 21 Apr 2008 01:53, edited 2 times in total.
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