The December 2015 issue of Physics Today (page 26) contains an Issues and Events story on the Iran nuclear agreement, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In that piece, David Kramer describes inspection technologies that experts claim will make the JCPOA “sound.” Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz is quoted as saying, “The JCPOA is based on hard science and unprecedented verification in order to assure the international community that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon and that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful.”
The latter part of Moniz’s statement ignores the fact that an Iranian uranium enrichment program makes no economic sense. The world has excess enrichment capacity to support its nuclear power plants. It is a buyer’s market, with multiple suppliers—for example, Russia, France, the US, and private companies such as UK-based Urenco Ltd.
Nations that do not have enrichment capability for weapons programs buy their power-reactor fuel on the international market. The argument that Iranian enrichment capability would be needed to ensure the fuel supply for power reactors is weak. The pressurized water reactor (PWR) that Iran has is partially refueled on approximately an 18-month schedule. PWR fuel is not costly, relative to the capital investment in the reactor itself. As Iran’s many highly educated nuclear engineers understand, the country can ensure continuous operation for many years by purchasing and taking delivery of multiple fuel loadings.
As for assurances in the JCPOA that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon, the country is allowed to operate 5000 of its older centrifuges (the remaining 14 000 are laid up, not destroyed). Iran can produce reactor-grade uranium enriched to 3.67% 235U and maintain an inventory of 300 kg. Using some of the centrifuges to further enrich the fuel to weapons-grade 90% 235U would support fabrication of several Hiroshima-yield bombs in a few years. That would be cheating, of course, though how difficult such activity would be to detect is uncertain.
Kramer writes that “as with all the IAEA’s [International Atomic Energy Agency’s] agreements with individual member states, the details of the agency’s safeguards provisions for Iran are confidential.” Most of what we have learned to date about the Iranian enrichment program has come from defectors, not the IAEA. In any case, Iran is allowed to develop advanced centrifuges and, 10 years from now, deploy them, enabling such bombs to then be produced quickly, within a year.
The JCPOA has been widely claimed to be the best agreement that can be achieved, with no alternative save war. That assertion ignores the historic effectiveness of strict application of economic, technical, military, and cultural sanctions. They helped drive South Africa’s governing party in 1994 to finally end almost five decades of apartheid. Clearly, signing that agreement was a much more difficult decision for South Africa than Iran would face in giving up an uneconomic uranium enrichment program.
