The toxic chemicals would probably cause contamination affecting local health and the environment immediately around the bombed sites, but have no impact on the country as whole.
“I doubt that the radiation effects would be great,” said Hans Blix, a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who has frequently defended Iran from critics.
The Reuters news agency recently contacted a number of experts asking them about the health impacts of any Israeli or American air raids on Iran’s nuclear sites.
“There could be some chemical hazard [from an attack on Iran’s uranium refining plant outside Esfahan], but I’d think it would be limited to any nearby communities,” said Edwin Ly-man, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
Most experts contacted doubted the US or Israel would target the Bushehr nuclear reactor on Iran’s Persian Gulf coast. Such an attack could release a Fukushima-style radioactive plume that could spread to the entire region—including Israel.
“An attack against Bushehr’s nuclear power plant would probably be a violation of international law,” Blix said. Attacks on operating nuclear power plants are banned.
The United States does not criticize the Bushehr plant. After Iran signed an agreement with Russia several years ago to provide that all spent fuel—which can be used to make bombs—from the plant would be returned to Russia, President George W. Bush publicly endorsed the Bushehr project on four different occasions.
Attacks on Iran’s other nuclear sites—chiefly the Natanz and Fordo enrichment plants and the uranium conversion facility east of Esfahan—might have a localized health and environmental impact on a scale similar to that caused by the 1991 and 2003 bombings of the Iraqi nuclear sites at Tuwaitha and Al Qaim by the United States.
“Uranium is a very heavy metal, chemically and physically,” so it would not be transported far on the wind if Iranian enrichment facilities were attacked, said Malcolm Grimston of Imperial College, London.
“It is about as poisonous as lead…. The issue would be in the immediate area, trying to prevent people from ingesting it for its chemical poisonous properties,” he said.
“It is not like a reactor where you get the volatile fission products—the [radioactive] iodines and caesiums—which can be carried in principle all around the world by wind,” Grimston said.
The bombed Iraqi plants have not become global bywords for disaster, unlike the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion in what is now Ukraine and the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan that suffered a meltdown after an earthquake and tsunami last year.
“The health effects [in Iraq] were very localized,” said Robert Kelley, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and a former director of IAEA inspections in Iraq.
In any attack, Israel or the US would probably also want to destroy the Arak heavy water research reactor. But it is still under construction and does not contain any fissile material.
Others cautioned that while there is no threat to the region, there are certainly worries for residents near the nuclear installations that cannot be ignored.
Paul Sullivan, a professor of economics and adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, warned against double standards in judging risks. “If there were a chance of an attack on such facilities in France, Germany, the US, Japan and the like, there would be constant and very loud cries about the potential environmental and human health impacts,” he said.