Regime plans to be first in fusion

Iran Times International July 30, 2010:The Islamic Republic an- nounced last Wednesday that it has set aside $8 million to begin work on a nuclear fusion reactor, an engineering challenge that no country has been able to solve. The United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, Japan and South Korea formed a consortium in 2006 to devote $12.8 billion to build a fusion reactor in southern France. That project is devoting 1,600 times as much capital as Iran to nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion has so far only been mastered to the extent of making an explosion, the hydrogen bomb. It has never been harnessed for power generation. A fusion reactor would produce only low levels of radioactive waste, thus countering one of the key objections to current nuclear fission power reactors. Not surprisingly, there was some suspicion that Iran’s announced program was actually a cover for a plan to develop a hydrogen bomb. Many also asked why Iran would even want to see fusion power developed as success would likely drive down the price of oil. Asghar Sediqzadeh, head of the new fusion research center, was very optimistic that Iran would succeed where every other country has so far failed. He said it would take two years to complete a series of fusion studies, then another decade to design and build a reactor. Ali-Akbar Salehi, the chief of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said 50 Iranian scientists were already at work on nuclear fusion.

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