January 03-2014
Iran’s nuclear chief insisted Friday that the heavy water reactor being built at Arak couldn’t make plutonium suitable for use in weapons.
But Ali-Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, had a rather circuitous way of addressing that point.
“The Arak research reactor cannot produce plutonium that could be used to make an atomic bomb since the plutonium will remain in the reactor’s core for a year,” Salehi told the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA).
“Plutonium destined to make a weapon cannot stay there for more than three or four weeks or it will contain other elements preventing its use” for military purposes, he said.
But the concern of the Big Six is that the plutonium will not remain there more than three or four weeks, a concern Salehi did not address.
However, he did say, “When International Atomic Energy Agency cameras are installed and constantly monitoring the reactor and inspectors can visit, there will no longer be cause for concern.”
He did not say if Iran was willing to commit to keeping the fuel in the reactor long enough to contaminate it.
He added, “Iran does not have a reprocessing plant,” which is required to prepare plutonium for use in weapons. The Big Six have never asserted that Iran yet has such a reprocessing plant.
Nuclear weapons can either be made from highly enriched uranium or from plutonium. The United States used uranium in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and plutonium in the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
