[Short entry] News "analysis" NY Times style

NY Times staff writers David Sanger and Thom Shanker graced us a couple of days ago with some chicken-little one-liners in Obama’s Nuclear Strategy Intended as a Message.

There are too many speculative gaffs in this article to take it very seriously. They opine: "Mr. Obama’s new strategy makes just about every nonnuclear state immune from any threat of nuclear retaliation by the United States." Unless, of course, the unlikely scenario occurs that a country -- their leadership or population -- does something that the Obama administration doesn't like. Then we'll group them with the "outliers", N. Korea and Iran and then we can continue to threaten them with annihilation.

As far as the stated policy objective of Obama's "new" nuclear doctrine is concerned, even Sanger and Shanker appear to agree with Lindsay and Takeyh writing for Foreign Affairs who have concluded that a nuclear-armed Iran poses little by way of existential threat to the US (though they lament the difficulties in getting Iran to 'go along' with US interests in the region).

Simple errors of logic aside, Sanger and Shanker really hurl into the abyss down toward the bottom of the article:

If a backpack nuclear bomb went off in Times Square or on the Mall in Washington, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy would race to find the nuclear DNA of the weapon — so that the country that was the source of the material could be punished. But the science of “nuclear attribution” is still sketchy. And without certain attribution, it is hard to seriously threaten retaliation.

Hard to believe you can get so much chicken-little thinking into one sentence. Each syllable of this sort of screed should be weighed by the reader. First -- there is no known nuclear device that can fit in a backpack (I think Sanger and Shanker watch too much Lost). "Nuclear attribution" is far from its state-of-the-art development. But calling it "sketchy" is just wrong. Nuclear material is well tracked and the properties of known fissile materials, from all the nuclear nations, are recorded in detail. Attribution is almost certain given the detonation forensics and human intelligence, which is very good on issues related to nuclear material.

The article is essentially fantasy and the Obama nuclear doctrine is the latest in a series of "might equals right" diplomacy.

It's only disappointing if you expected any leadership from Obama.

[Short entry] NYT: Obama Limits When U.S. Would Use Nuclear Arms

Much ado about not so much again, in today's Times. The article roll-out contends that "change," in the form of "limits," is afoot. But in the second paragraph the other shoe drops (usually we have to wait for the last two or three paragraphs in Sanger and/or Baker articles for this denouement). There we find out that "outliers" like Iran and N. Korea -- the only countries who have declared that the best reason they have to seek a nuclear weapons program is because of their fear that the U.S. may attack* -- are excluded from the new "approach."

*Addition: See the report "Situation in the Korean Peninsula -- a North Korean perspective" available via the CSIS website. The first paragraph at the top of the second page of the report:

The DPRK made nuclear weapons and has strengthened its self-defensive war deterrent to maintain the sovereignty and the right to existence of the nation in the face of the increased aggressive threat by the U.S.

Earlier in this article, we find the motivation for using the term "aggressive threat:"

Second, tensions are the result of all kinds of military
exercises and arms reinforcement conducted by the U.S. on the
Korean peninsula. No sooner had the U.S. Administration
taken power than it conducted the unprecedented large-scale
joint military exercises “Key Resolve” and “Foal Eagle” in
and around south Korea in March and thus severely threatened
the security of the DPRK. These were nuclear war exercises
for the preemptive attack on the DPRK entirely in its scale as
well as its contents. This is well known through the fact that a
larger number of U.S. forces than in the past and attackable
military equipment including two aircraft carriers and nuclear
submarines were thrown in the joint military exercises and the
period of exercises was doubled.

Now, these are certainly exaggerated claims, in tenor if not in substance. But the fact remains: the U.S. military presence on the Korean peninsula is taken as a threat. Is it necessary to carry out foreign policy in this manner?

[Short entry] Iran's nuclear weapons program

The shortness of the article in the NYT probably wasn't the reason that there was no discussion of the foregone conclusion on the part of "the respectable" and "the elite" including Elisabeth Bumiller of the NYT, that "still remained the greatest threat to stability in the Middle East and Central Asia." This claim is rarely, if ever, analyzed in the "Papers of Record."

Interestingly enough, if you poll people in the M.E. and Central Asia -- and this has been done extensively -- the greatest perceived threat to stability is the U.S. military, next to Israel and population growth. Of course, for the NYT David Patreus' opinion deserves particular attention.

Related information:
America: the greatest threat to global stability
Muslim Publics Oppose Al Qaeda's Terrorism, But Agree With Its Goal of Driving US Forces Out
Pakistanis see US as greatest threat
Occupation and foreign military intervention 'greatest threat'

[Short entry] Proliferation of nuclear technology

Items of concern in today's NYT's article Taking a Risk With Nuclear Technology other then the obvious risks associated with proliferation of a power source which generates tons of waste, which cannot be disposed of for generations (isolation isn't disposal) include the issue related to "passive controls" that the Westinghouse reactors employ. These are control mechanisms usually associated with individual components of a reactor which respond without intervention from an electronic monitoring system and without intervention from a human operator. The response, obviously, of the component to an system imbalance which could tend to emergency is to reduce the possibility of that emergency. For example, a pressure-relief valve is a type of passive system. It requires no input from external control systems (electronic, human, or otherwise) to work. It simply responds in a threat-reduction manner by "the laws of physics."

There are several dangers associated with this notion. The most pronounced are based on the assumptions humans make in determining the behavior of the passive control. If the component, say the pressure-relief valve is faulty, "the laws of physics" will result in a different behavior of the valve.

Passive controls are also dangerous psychologically and socially because people (nuclear engineers, in particular) have been trained to believe that responses are likely to happen in certain ways. "Margin of error" factors are used to account for this, but these are only statistical measures.

Do you want finite, even if small, probabilities for a meltdown at the local reactor?

Chomsky on Iranian deterrent [weblog Op-Ed entry]

Noam Chomsky spoke at Harvard Memorial Church on March 6. His analysis, largely supported by the public record, is that the constant threat of force by the U.S. is driving the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapons deterrent. Paraphrasing, "They'd be crazy not to."

There is very good historical parallels with North Korea to support Chomsky's analysis. The U.S. "talked tough" on N. Korea and marginalized its leadership, keeping "all options on the table" through the last 60 years of administrations. They offered unilateral talks continually to address the threat the U.S. posed to their sovereignty, all summarily denied. They offered to sign non-proliferation treaties, which the U.S. ignored.

Now they have a burgeoning weapons program.

Contrast the situation with Iraq who had no substantive nuclear weapons program at any point in their history. The U.S. has decimated that country with violence.

What's the lesson?

Yucca Mountain waste repository project closed

In a significant development, which drastically changes the terrain of the renewed nuclear power and waste isolation the Department of Energy has withdrawn its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This effectively ends the project and begs the question: what, where, when, who and most importantly, why now?

Let's remind ourselves of the basics of how we generate electrical power from uranium. The basic principle is that since uranium decays radioactively -- it's "hot" -- the energy given off by the components of the decaying nuclei can be used to heat water into steam. That steam is then used to drive a turbine, which is connected to a electrical generator.

So let's look at the life cycle of a chunk of uranium. In the previous post, February 19, 2010, we discussed how uranium is isolated from dirt and rock in naturally occurring deposits called uraninite or, commonly, pitchblende. After processing the ore to natural uranium, chemical and/or mechanical processing is needed to purify or enrich the material to isolate the desirable component ²³⁵U. (You might recall the role of warehouse-sized fields of centrifuges.) Keep in mind that, when determining the economic feasibility of nuclear power, we need to take into account the cost of all the stages of production, consumption, and isolation of the radioactive material.

Now, once we've isolated the ²³⁵U (read "U-235" or "235-U," either way) to low-enriched (anywhere from 4% to 20%) we can think about putting this "hot," radioactive material into a reactor and use it to make electricity to run our mechanized world. The form in which the enriched uranium goes in to the reactor is as nuclear fuel, often shaped in cylinders (which themselves are comprised of fuel pellets) commonly referred to as rods. The rods are placed into the reactor core, in various configurations depending on the reactor, and water under pressure is circulated throughout the chamber, called the reactor core, which removes the heat of the nuclear reaction. There's no mixing of the nuclear fuel with water.

After a period of time, typically on the order of weeks or months, the nuclear fuel is "spent" in the process of the decay of the ²³⁵ nuclei which comprise the material. (We'll talk about the quantum mechanics of the process of radioactive decay in the next entry. Promise.) Spent nuclear fuel is also known as waste. Waste is an interesting concept that humans have come up with stuff that we've stopped thinking about. But if you stop thinking about this waste, you're going to get into some trouble.

Dealing with the spent nuclear fuel is -- by far -- the most costly part of generating electricity from radioactive materials. You can't throw it away. It must be isolated. This is where the Yucca Mountain waste repository project came into play. The problem is that the spent nuclear fuel is still hot, literally. While the fuel is "spent" as far as the reactor engineer is concerned (because it has become contaminated with the products of the radioactive element and its activity has fallen below design specification) it's ain't so for us. This stuff is nasty. Still radioactive and toxic to boot. And it remains active for a long time.

So the question is what do you do with it so that it's isolated from flora and fauna (include people in this category, why not?) and doesn't do all the bad things that radiation poisoning can do. (Another topic for a future entry!)

There have been a lot of ideas on how to isolate spent nuclear fuel. All of them are ludicrous. Most of them are economically unfeasible. "Send it to 'outer' space."Or 'the moon.' Forget about giving it to NASA. It's too expensive and what if the Challenger had been loaded up with this junk?

The only idea that's considered feasible economically is burial. Stick it into the ground in a deep hole. And hope. I say "considered" feasible because it's not -- really.

The first problem is the cost of building, storing, maintaining, monitoring, and preventing accidental release of the spent material. If anything goes wrong on a large scale -- water contamination, fire, earthquake, etc. -- we're up you-know-where without a you-know-what. You can't easily "handle" this stuff, after all.

Yucca Mountain was selected by Congress[!!], not by scientific process of elimination, but for overtly political considerations. They said "it's dry enough." Turns out it's not. If water gets near this stuff, usually held in metal barrels the show is over.

More later about the details of the actual storage of spent nuclear fuel.

Focus on Iran intensifies

The report released 2010/02/18 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors, Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007), 1803 (2008) and 1835 (2008) in the Islamic Republic of Iran has caused a stir in the media with articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers of record.

The highly anticipated report of the new IAEA director general, Yukiya Amano who took office December 1, 2009 indicates that he'll be taking a hard-line on Iran. This is a strong contrast to the previous IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei the Nobel peace prize winner who presided over the agency for twelve years. ElBaradei was viewed unfavorably by the U.S. government, in general. Amano is viewed in a much more positive light, as the reports today in the NYT, WP, and others indicate.

Enough personnel background -- let's get to the nuclear issues. Incidentally, the purpose of this blog is, generally, to assess claims made in the press and by government and other officials regarding nuclear issues: weapons, energy, waste isolation, etc. And whether these claims are true and of possible concern. We take as tenet the observation that nuclear weapons are, from the perspective of science, a weapon without an application. And the observation that politics, at least in these United States of America, is the expression of aggregated perception -- that is, basically, the opposite of science. (I'll take care to develop these two points as the blog evolves.)

Focusing on the NYT article by D. Sanger and W. Broad, the first point of scientific note is the fact that the IAEA report confirms that the Iranians have enriched "small quantities" of uranium to 20%. Of equal import is the observation by Sanger/Broad that the report "makes no assessment of how close it might be to producing a nuclear weapon."

By way of background, let's tackle the question of "enrichment" first. In summary, enrichment is the process of taking uranium the way it's found in nature and processing it into a more pure form. Uranium is a naturally occurring element, found in rock deposits. The concentration of uranium in the ground is tiny so isolating this element takes a lot of dirt and rock and work. The typical way of mining it is open-pit (devastating the natural environment) and the three countries which are the world's largest producers are Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan. The total world output of uranium is about 100 million pounds per year.

When uranium ore comes out of the ground the uranium is bound up with oxygen (as U₃O₈, "triuranium octoxide" an "oxide of uranium") and is released by chemical leaching. The resulting powder is brown or black (not yellow, usually) -- this is the "yellowcake" of note in the recent story of Joe Wilson's trip to Nigeria at the behest of the Bush Administration.

Uranium oxide still needs to be processed further to yield more pure forms of the metallic element, ²³⁵U the only form which is usable for generating power or making bombs. The reason for this is explained by quantum mechanics and we'll have occasion later to talk about it. The difficulty in isolating or "enriching" the ²³⁵U is the same difficulty we had in getting the yellowcake out of the ore that came out of the ground -- scarcity. When we have the yellowcake, the uranium in this powder comes in two varieties. The variety we want, the ²³⁵U, constitutes only about 1% of the total amount of uranium. And this uranium is bound up in the molecule U₃O₈.

The way that the uranium is purified or enriched is a complicated chemical and mechanical separation process which typically uses a large number of large centrifuges. By 'large number' we mean warehouse-sized areas which cover acres. In other words, enrichment facilities are not easy to hide. We'll discuss the details of enrichment in a later entry. (Promises, promises!)

Enriched uranium is classified according to its purity. There are several classes of grading but, basically, there's "low-enriched" and "highly enriched" grades. Low-enriched is less than 20%, sometimes considerably less. Highly enriched is above 20%.

Weapons need 85% and higher enrichment -- a very pure, metallic form of something that started as being bound up in dirt and rocks. The low-enriched form, typically below 20%, what the Iranians have, is only good for generating power.

Returning to the observations made by Sanger/Broad in their NYT article, we see that it's likely that they correctly assess the amount and purity of the uranium that the Iranians possess since these figures square with several sources -- the IAEA, the CIA, and other western government intelligence estimates.

A little more interesting, perhaps, is their observation that the report doesn't say how far the Iranians are in their weapons development program. The short answer is: "many years" -- at minimum, 5 years. At most, 10. (These figures assume that the Iranians would expend huge amounts of capital developing the large facilities we know they don't now have.) It's interesting that the report "makes no assessment." This is a choice, of course, on the part of Amano's IAEA.

My suspicion is that giving the realistic estimate (more than my 5-10 years) takes the punch out of this report. It suggests that we might anticipate a lack of forthright and honest dealing on the part of the new Director.

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Stay tuned for posts on the intersection of the rational, deterministic physics and technology of the nucleus and the insane, nonsensical and demented world of human politics.