—a pronouncement that will raise more than just eyebrows in Washington.
Ghazianfar spoke about uranium mining after meeting Monday with Namibian Mines and EnergyMinisterErkki Nghimtina, who is part of a Namibian delegation currently visiting Tehran.
Ghazianfar spoke about the uranium mines, according to PressTV. The Iranian state news agency said nothing about uranium in reporting on the meeting, a curious omission.
All UN members are barred from selling Iran uranium under a UN Security Council resolution approved in December 2006.
That is binding upon Namibia—as the United States is certain to remind Namibia very soon.
A year and a half ago, the Daily Telegraph of London reported that Iran had signed a secret deal with Zimbabwe to buy uranium ore and pay for it with oil deliveries. Such a barter system would avoid the international banking system. Zimbabwe’s presidential spokesman denied a contract had been signed, but confirmed that a possible uranium deal was under discussion. Since then, that deal appears to have died.
A few months later in August 2010, Iran tacitly admitted that it doesn’t have enough uranium to fuel its planned nuclear power reactors when it announced it was embarking on an eight-year program to explore the country and find sources of uranium ore.
Iran is known to have only two uranium mines, one at Saghand near Yazd in the middle of the country and the other at Gachine near Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf coast. Last December, the Islamic Re- public said it had just started mining uranium ore in Iran for the
first time.
Ali-Akbar Salehi, then head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said, “This means that Iran has become self-sufficient in the entire fuel cycle.”
This might confuse some Iranians who recall that Iran proclaimed complete mastery of the entire nuclear fuel cycle—from mine to fuel pellets—two years ago. Iran has often talked about its mine at Gachine near Bandar Abbas as if it was an operating mine. But it wasn’t operating
until a year ago.
The uranium that Iran has been using until now was imported from South Africa by the Shah in the 1970s. It is suspected that Iran also got some from China in the 1990s, but that has not been confirmed.
The announcement of the mined uranium was presented as a major development technically.
But Western nuclear specialists did not agree.
A 2007 study done by researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the two American nuclear labs, said Iran has too little uranium ore to be able to carry out its announced plans to fuel reactors producing 20,000 megawatts of electricity with total self-sufficiency, that is, without importing anything.
The study’s analysis of Iran’s nuclear resources relies on Iran’s own reporting to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said Iran possesses 1,927 metric tons of identified uranium resources and 14,550 metric tons of assumed but “undiscovered” uranium resources.
Counting both discovered and undiscovered resources, the report says Iran has sufficient uranium to fuel a solitary Bushehr-sized reactor for 75 years, but to fuel its declared goal of 20,000 megawatts of nuclear-generated electricity for a mere 3.75 years.
The Islamic Republic’s justification for its nuclear power program is that its oil and gas are running out and its must have nuclear power so it will not be dependent on energy imports. But Iran has the second largest reserves of natural gas and the fourth largest reserves of oil. Those reserves would fuel electric power plants for centuries, not just three years and nine months.
Salehi did not say how much ore was being dug out of the Gachine mine. He said the second mine near Saghand in Yazd province was being developed and would begin producing ore “in the not too distant future.”
The existence of both mines has been known for many years. The real question is why it has taken so long to get the first ore out of them.
In 2006, Iran said it had discovered uranium deposits at three other sites in the central areas of Khoshumi, Charchuleh and Narigan.
Uranium is a very common mineral, but it mostly exists in such trace amounts that it cannot be mined at reasonable cost. Ore that is mined generally has a concentration of about 0.7 percent uranium. For power plant fuel, the concentration of uranium-235 must be increased to 3.5 percent up to 5 percent through the process of enrichment. For weapons, the concentration should exceed 90 percent.
In 2006, a nuclear physicist from Esfahan said Iran’s two uranium mines contained even less ore than the Americans conceded—only enough to power one 1,000-megawatt reactor (the size of the plant at Bushehr) for just seven years, not the 75 years the Americans spoke of. He posed the question of why Iran was going to the expense of building a nuclear fuel cycle industry.
Ahmad Shirzad, a former Majlis deputy and professor of nuclear physics at Esfahan University, revealed the statistics and asked what officials planned to do after the ore ran out. The question has never been acknowledged, let alone answered.
While the volume of ore in Iran may be sufficient only for seven years of fuel in one reactor, it would provide sufficient explosive power for dozens of nuclear weapons.
