Brazil's Nuclear Ambitions

By CKR While international attention focuses on Iran and North Korea as the main nuclear proliferators in the world, ignoring Pakistan’s Nukes ‘R Us franchise, Brazil is building a uranium enrichment plant. The US is also planning to build a uranium enrichment plant. Science magazine had an article on “Brazil’s Nuclear Puzzle” in its 22 October issue, and the New York Times picked it up. The Science article can be found here. I won't link the NYT because their links decay too quickly, it was several days ago, and it didn't say a lot more than did the Science article. Brazil’s plant is expected to be ready to commission later this year (next month? how much is left of this year?). The US’s plant is in planning stages only. The concern expressed in the Science article, by Liz Palmer and Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, is twofold. First, that while Brazil’s plant is stated to be for enrichment of uranium to reactor grade (3.5% U-235), it could also be used to bring the U-235 concentration up to weapons grade (greater than 90%). Second, that Brazil is refusing to allow full inspection of the centrifuges, ostensibly to protect its advanced technology. The article gives a useful fact: About 3000 kg of uranium feed requires ~3500 SWU to make one implosion bomb. The same feed needs more than 2000 SWU to enrich to 3.5%. (Footnote 5) This fact can be derived from the mathematics of separations, found in elementary chemical engineering textbooks. SWU means “separative work unit,” which is hard to explain without those mathematics, and which changes with circumstances. The importance of footnote 5 is that any enrichment plant that can produce reactor-grade uranium can produce weapons-grade uranium. After this perspicacious start, the article then ignores the ability of the IAEA to take minute samples and determine the isotopic makeup of the uranium in them, as it has in Iran. The article presents a hypothetical case of secret hookups to input and output behind the screens around the centrifuges, recognizing that the power input to the plant would be a clue to clandestine enrichment. Presumably the IAEA would be allowed to take samples at various points in and around the plant that could indicate enrichment beyond reactor grade. The NYT article also goes on to speculate on why Brazil would want an enrichment plant, with lots of emphasis on macho considerations. But there are the simply practical: nuclear energy is the only large-scale source of energy that doesn't produce CO2, the primary greenhouse gas from fossil fuel; the supplies of enriched uranium, currently inflated by disposal of Soviet weapons, will become thinner as soon as 2020; and, in an uncertain world, it may be useful to keep options available for nuclear weapons. If an enrichment plant can produce reactor-grade uranium, it can produce weapons-grade uranium. That's inherent in the basics and can't be gotten around. I'll post more about the new US enrichment plant and how all this plays into concerns about the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty later.