Iran's path to nuclear weapons

by Joseph Sternberg

Have you ever noticed whenever there is a news story based on information from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (AIAE) or some other Intelligence source that reports Iranian progress towards developing nuclear weapons,  the article is invariably ended with a sentence stating that Iran authorities deny that Iran is developing nuclear weapons? Evidently journalistic ethics gives high priority to giving space to authorities who have a dubious record on this subject.

The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, has repeatedly asserted that the Iranian nation has never sought and will never seek nuclear weapons. He has been Supreme Leader since 1989 and was President from 1981 to 1989, so he should be well informed on what Iran is doing. In 2007 the US published a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that reported that Iran had stopped work on the design of a nuclear warhead. As we have just learned recently, the Intelligence was based on intercepted communications of scientists who were working on the warhead design and were complaining about the decision of the Iranian authorities to put the work on hold. You can't stop doing something that you were never doing. No matter how many times Ayatollah Khamenie says that Iran has never and would never seek to develop nuclear weapons, he is lying.

So why would the Iranians put the nuclear warhead work on hold in 2003, according to the NIE?  By 2002, the Iranians had decided that they must go underground with nuclear facilities  to improve their survivability.There were bad people out there who might decide to bomb them. Building facilities underground for the enrichment of uranium requires large areas that can accommodate thousands of centrifuges and so is an expensive and time-consuming task. There is not much point in having constructed a warhead if you don't have the weapons-grade uranium to put in it.

There was another reason to put the warhead work on hold, besides the fact that it would not be needed for some time. If the work on the warhead was discovered, the Ayatollah Khamenei's campaign to persuade doubters of the peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program would collapse, and the countries that were dragging their feet on tough sanctions would have little excuse to do so.

The Iranians are working hard on uranium enrichment. The identity of two underground enrichment sites was disclosed by dissidents, Natanz in 2002 and Fordow in 2007. Thousands of centrifuges are installed at these sites. Once the sites were disclosed, they were subject to inspection by the UN IAEA. The fission isotope in uranium is U-235, which is only 0.72% of natural uranium. Enrichment to 3-5% of U-235 is necessary to fuel standard nuclear power plants. However, Iran's first nuclear power plant at Bushehr has been fueled by the Russians. Iran has a Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) that runs on fuel enriched to about 20% of U-235. In 1993, Argentina provided 255 pounds of fuel elements sufficient for multiple refuelings of the reactor. Iran has been negotiating with various counties for a resupply of fuel for this reactor, which doesn't run continuously. Finally, uranium enriched to over 80 % U-235  is needed for a nuclear weapon. Such enriched uranium has no peaceful purpose.

So what is the enriched inventory reported by the IAEA in Feb. 2012? Between its two known enrichment sites, Iran now has a supply of a supply of 220 pounds of enriched uranium containing 19.75% of U-235. A modern uranium implosion-type nuclear weapon design would require about 33 pounds of uranium enriched to 80-90 %. The step from 20% enrichment to 90 % enrichment is a relatively small one and doesn't require  thousands of centrifuges.The 220 pounds of 20% enriched uranium contains 44 pounds of U-235, more than enough for a nuclear bomb when it is further enriched.  Based on present estimates of the rate at which Iran is enriching uranium at the known facilities, a year's production of 20% enriched uranium would be enough for one or two bombs.

It is clear that Iran is not satisfied with the rate of enrichment obtained with its IR-1 centrifuges.  It has informed the IAEA that it is working on more than four different advanced centrifuge designs. Further, prior to 2009, Iran had publicly announced that it intended to build ten new uranium enrichment facilities, but they didn't say where or when.So Iran may have more enriched uranium than known to the IAEA.

What about the suspended nuclear warhead work? Clearly if this work was resumed, it would be done in underground facilities and Iran would make every effort to keep it secret. The size of such a facility would be much smaller than the facilities required for uranium enrichment and so, presumably, easier to conceal. In 2010 the IAEA informed Iran that they had extensive information about undisclosed activities relevant to critical nuclear weapon design issues being carried out by Iranian military organizations. Iran has refused to discuss these issues and has maintained that the allegations are baseless, and that the information referred to by the IAEA is based on forgeries. It has also refused access to Parchin, a key explosives development military facility.

In congressional testimony this year, the US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated his view that Iran has not yet decided to make a nuclear weapon but is only keeping themselves in the position to do so. He did not claim to have any specific information to support his view of the intentions of the Iranian leadership. Perhaps a more accurate statement would have been that there is no evidence (none was cited) that Iran ever gave up its goal of developing nuclear weapons but that the threat of severe sanctions and or military attack provide a strong incentive to keep crucial nuclear warhead work secret. The size of an underground facility needed for warhead development is much smaller than what is needed for uranium enrichment and so is easier to hide. A key problem for Intelligence is to uncover any relevant secret underground facilities.

I am reminded of a story told to me by an old French friend. A Frenchman became concerned that his wife might be seeing another man, so he hired an investigator to follow his wife. A few days later, the investigator reported the bad news. His wife had met a man at a particular hotel and they had entered the hotel and rented a room. The husband demanded to know more. The investigator said he had been able to find out the number of the hotel room and quickly went there. The door had a large keyhole, and he was able to see what was going on in the interior. The two occupants had started to remove their clothes. "And what happened then?" cried the husband. "I don't know," said the investigator, "the light in the room was turned off." "Oh," sighed the husband. "The Incertitude."
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Dr. Sternberg served as Scientific Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe 1971-1974. He is a retired professor of physics, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA

The Green Energy Illusion

by Joseph Sternberg

President Barack Obama repeatedly touts "green energy" as the way of the future. Billions are being spent to subsidize wind and solar power to replace the use of fossil fuels (and, by the way, enrich Al Gore). Obama repeatedly asserts that this is the way to solve the carbon dioxide problem caused by using fossil fuels and that we are moving in the right direction by subsidizing green energy. He implies that if all the countries did the same the level of CO2 in the atmosphere could be stabilized at an acceptable level.

This claim is false. How do we know that it is false? The reports of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which is part of the Department of Energy, provide the answer. The EIA  was set up years ago to  provide independent data and analyses for all forms of energy and associated emissions, not only in the US but also in the world. They are the administration experts, have access to all of the administration's programs, and the information they develop is publicly available on the web. Of course, it has to be recognized that "forecasting is difficult, particularly about the future." But the forecasts of CO2 emissions by the EIA have to be substantially more reliable than forecasts about green energy provided by proponents of wind and solar power. The EIA forecasts are provided out to the year 2035.

Before looking at the EIA reports, three points need emphasis. The world's production of energy is increasing. As a consequence, the rate of worldwide emissions is increasing. The priority for both China and India, with 2.4 billions of the world's population, is economic development which means increasing power generation resulting in increased emissions. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, took a delegation to China in an attempt to persuade them to sign on to the Cap and Trade program that the Democrats were pushing. The Cap and Trade program would be expected to decrease energy production, not increase it. The Chinese told her to get lost. Any approach to controlling emissions has to be an approach that can be embraced by China and India or it will fail.

The second point is that it is not sufficient to be just "moving in the right direction" as Obama is wont to say.  This statement is irrelevant because it ignores the magnitude of reductions that must be achieved,  and by when, in order to stabilize the level of atmospheric CO2. The  level keeps increasing despite the fact that CO2 is continually being absorbed by the ocean which, in fact, eventually will absorb most of it. However, the  absorption is a slow process taking hundreds of years. So before being absorbed in the ocean, the CO2 piles up in the atmosphere. All of this is not scientifically controversial.

Numerous studies have been conducted to determine how much decrease in emissions is required to stabilize the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Such estimates are not precise, but they are not scientifically controversial. What do they say?  The studies show that if the increase in emissions could be stopped by about 2035 and the level of emissions then decreased close to half by the end of the century, the atmospheric level of CO2 could be stabilized at 550 parts per million (ppm) by the next century. This is the goal set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and would be double the atmospheric level of CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age.

The third point is that green energy is being pursued by many countries, including China and India, but green energy has inherent limitations. For example, consider the first proposed US offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound. Because the wind doesn't choose to blow all the time, a representative wind farm will only produce about 30% of its rated capacity as compared with 90% of rated capacity currently being achieved by our nuclear plants. A wind farm delivering the same energy as a representative nuclear plant would cover an area of about 150 square miles. Wind energy requires a lot of area. As technology improves, green energy can be expected to have a place in future energy production.  But what is the basis for asserting that green energy is ready to replace the use of fossil fuels?  As we will see from the EIA data, there isn't any.

The largest contributor to emissions in the US is from the generation of electricity. Transportation is the second largest contributor. Nuclear reactors account for about 20% of electricity generation. The remainder of power plants use fossil fuels about equally divided between coal and natural gas. Renewables  include biomass, hydropower, geothermal, wind, and solar. All together renewables provided about 10% of electricity generation in the US,  about 2/3 of which has been provided by hydropower.  The total of solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, and wind provided about 4% of electricity generation. The use of renewables is forecast by the EIA to increase between 2011 and 2035. But the bottom line is that US emissions are forecast  to increase, not decrease, by perhaps 5%, between 2011 and 2035. The forecast increase in wind and solar power is not going to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation to any significant extent in the US.

What about China?  China is energetically pursuing the expansion of solar and wind farm development. They also are pursuing an ambitious program of nuclear power, and plan to have 60 nuclear plants in operation by 2020. Despite all that, the EIA forecasts that emissions from China are expected to increase substantially between 2011 and 2035. At present emissions from China exceed those from the US. It is clear based on the estimates from the EIA that green energy in not going to stop the rise in emissions from China. Worldwide, estimates indicate a 35% increase in emissions.

Obama's green energy program is an illusion. The result is to spend billions wastefully instead of spending the money accelerating the development of technologies that could also be employed by both the developed and the developing nations to reduce atmospheric emissions.

It is important to recognize some of the scientific uncertainties about the effect of increasing atmospheric CO2. The  IPCC concedes a possible variation of more than a factor of two in what the temperature rise might be due to increasing atmospheric CO2.  This is due to scientific uncertainty about how the atmosphere works. Scientists are working on the problems, but there is little prospect that the uncertainty will be reduced anytime soon. Second, if you assume a particular global temperature increase, there is considerable controversy and uncertainty about what the climatic consequences would be, including a rise in the sea level. Computer models are used to make the predictions, but the computer models are unproven. The global climate is very complex. So you are in something of a quandary about global warming. The paleoclimatology data from a hundred of million years ago indicates that a several-fold increase in atmospheric CO2 goes along with a large increase in global temperature, even including the disappearance of the earth's ice caps. But the levels of atmospheric CO2 now being considered are smaller than the historical levels and so are not much help in reducing the uncertainty.

Second, global warming is not the only concern. The surface ocean is being acidified. This is chemistry and is not controversial. What is uncertain is the consequence for the world's food supply.The Interacademy Panel on international issues representing a global network of science academies has issued a statement (2009) on ocean acidification. According to their statement, the rapid increase of acidity of the world's oceans has "-- potentially profound consequences for marine plants and animals especially those that require calcium carbonate to grow and survive and other species that rely on these for food. Marine food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production--". Not much about this appears in the press, which focuses on global warming.

The difficulty here is that if it is discovered that the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 are causing effects on the high side of the predictions, no one knows what to do about it then. As one might say, it would be too late.

The belief that green energy will provide a replacement for the use of fossil energy is an illusion. The billions that are being spent in subsidizing green power should instead be used to  accelerate the development of technologies for carbon capture from fossil fuel plants. Where feasible, the substitution of natural gas for coal would help since for the same energy generated, natural gas emits half as much CO2 as coal. Coal is extensively used in China. Nuclear power can make a significant contribution. Limiting atmospheric CO2 must be accomplished in the face of a worldwide growth in energy production. China and India will not give up economic development.
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Joseph Sternberg
Retired Professor of Physics
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA