Saddam's Uranium

Last week, the Iraqi government announced that it had sold 550 tons of natural uranium, a stockpile that dated from Saddam Hussein's regime, to a Canadian company.

Does this mean Saddam had WMD after all, as at least a few commentators are now maintaining?

Sigh. Let's go through this one ... more ... time.

These sorts of stories have popped up every now and then over the last few years. Remember the supposed truckloads of WMD that Saddam sent to Syria in the dying days of his regime? Then there was the report that about 300 munitions containing chemical weapons had been found in Iraq since Saddam's fall from power. Turns out that they dated from the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, and had degraded so badly that they were useless.

Nothing has emerged to change the basic conclusion of U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, who led a post-invasion effort to find WMD in Iraq. As Kay famously said, "It turns out that we were all wrong."

No secret weapons caches have emerged. No Iraqi scientists have come forward to speak of advanced weapons programs. None of the trove of regime documents have detailed a WMD effort that posed a near-term threat to the United States and its allies.

So what of the 550 tons of uranium, which was in a raw form known as yellowcake? Well, the first thought that strikes us here at N&S is that if Saddam had all that raw uranium, why would he have been secretly negotiating to buy the exact same thing from Niger, as forged documents purported? One more reason to suspect the Niger caper from the start, something the U.S. government and European intelligence agencies failed to do.

Much more importantly, the 550 tons of uranium ore in question wasn't a secret. It was well-known that Iraq had a stored cache of the stuff at its Tuwaitha nuclear complex. Ever since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the ore had been under the lock and key of the International Atomic Energy Agency. (Ironically, Tuwaitha was looted after the U.S. invasion, when the Bush administration failed to order American armed forces to secure it).

More importantly, uranium yellowcake is about as many steps away from a nuclear weapon as a block of marble is from Michelangelo's statue David.

You need to do a lot of STUFF to yellowcake to turn it into fissile material. Any nuclear scientists reading this are welcome to chime in, but it basically involves refining the ore, turning it into a gas, and then feeding that gas through a series of centrifuges to separate the particular isotope of uranium that you need. Get enough of that, and you have highly-enriched uranium. Then you can build a bomb.

What the Bush administration said before the invasion notwithstanding, Saddam was nowhere close to any of this. We'll explain this all again ... in a few months.

Comments

[Shannon]

I'm no nuclear scientist, but the only way I've even remotely understood uranium enrichment is through this cartoon: http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/graphics/nfc1-3.gif

The cartoon depicts the process of enriching uranium for power production; I wish they'd make one for the weaponization of uranium...

[borisjimski]

That cartoon and your brief description is still only part of if. Raw ore converted to U3O8, then into UF6 (probably via a few intermediate steps; sorry, I don't have my copy of my old inorganic textbook on me), then sent through the centrifuge cascade to enrich and separate out the U235 fissile isotope, then reduce to the metal via a few more steps. And each one of these steps involves a radioactive substance, so there's a lot of shielding and safety precautions that go into it all. This still only gets you to uranium, which is a not terribly efficient fissile material; Pu239 is much better but getting to it involves a lot more, primarily making the isotope from uranium in some chemical form, which involves using a nuclear reactor for several years, then separating out the Pu isotope you want, then chemically converting it into the metal. And you still haven't solved the problem of fuzing the bomb or even designing the bomb into a form where all the high explosives that go to compress the Pu into a dense enough mass to initiate the chain reaction go off within nanoseconds of each other; otherwise you get a fizzle bomb, one where very little energy comes from nuclear reactions.

[Andrew Foland]

You have the basic scheme down right, but the description fails to convey the sheer difficulty of it. From your description, it sounds like it could be done in a lab--maybe by some crazed genius, but still, in some lab.

Enrichment on the scale needed for a weapon just can't be done in a lab. The level of effort required is a state-organized level of efforts and resources--in personnel, machinery, space, and power. As I've been known to say, the hard part of building a weapon is not in knowing how to build it, it's in actually building it.

(And all this rigamorale is exactly why nonproliferation efforts focus on production of fissile materials. That's the hard part. Once the fissile material is produced, weaponization--depending on which material you have--might be relatively simple.)

As an illustration--the Iranian cascades, which have been built over several years, at great Iranian national expense, and even now have not been sufficiently engineered to run at full capacity, would take about three years running flat out with no breakdowns at the current pace (~3000 SWU kg/yr) to produce a single Hiroshima-sized weapon from 550t of yellowcake. (Calculation done using http://www.fas.org/cgi-bin/calculators/sep.pl with 0.711% natural U, 0.6% tail fraction for 60 kg of 90% enriched U.)

550 tons of yellowcake sitting in Tuwaitha today is not significantly more threatening than 550 tons of dirt. Depending on how it is likely stored, it probably has the radiological activity roughly equivalent to a large transoceanic shipment of bananas.

[Nomen Nescio]

Shannon: i'm not a nuclear scientist either, but as far as i've understood it, weaponization can be done in several different ways.

for a uranium bomb, you can run the enrichment further (step 3 in that cartoon), producing less end product and much more U-238 tailings. then instead of making reactor fuel out of the enriched uranium, you make a bomb.

for a plutonium bomb, you make reactor fuel for a reactor usually specially designed to produce lots of Pu quickly. then you have to extract that out of the spent fuel, and instead of reusing it as part of the fuel rod production process, you make bombs out of it.

oh, and mr. Foland has it right; none of this is something that can be done without great effort and expense.

[Xu Yie]

You could, however, very easily make a dirty bomb out of non-weapons grade uranium. Uranium dust dispersed into the atmosphere by conventional explosives could render a large portion of, say, an urban environment uninhabitable for many years and undesirable for longer. Alpha particle emitters like uranium and its daughters significantly increase the risk of cancer when inhaled and/or ingested.

[borisjimski]

For a dirty bomb you only need a radioactive element in whatever chemical form, be it an oxide, the raw ore, or some even merely moderately purified metal that hasn't even been enriched. Osama knew this years ago which is why some of his flight students were out learning crop dusting; just put a solution of it in the tank and spray it over a city. But even there the amount of radioactivity over background wouldn't likely be much since it would be so dispersed. It took a heckuva lot of material to contaminate Chernobyl, an entire melted core dispersed from a point source, and that's more than you can carry in anything smaller than a large military transport plane. Alpha particles are easy to stop with only moderate shielding like a piece of paper; it's the beta and gamma rays that are worse. Foland is right, it takes a huge infrastructure to make enough fissile material fast enough to be able to weaponize it before it naturally decays into a less dangerous isotope; that's one of the advantages the good guys have, the natural radioactive decay of nearly every isotope eventually into a stable isotope of either lead or iron.

[BurningFeet]

All this learned discussion points back to the Decider's famous Africa reference and makes me ask, were the Bushies stupid, or liars, or both?

Think of the record of wreckage this gang of imbeciles is leaving us and tell me it isn't abject stupidity at work. 9/11, Afghanistan, Deficits, Enron, Freddie Mac, gas prices,Iraq, Katrina, Plame, Scooter, U.S. Attorneys.

Stupid since day 1.