US Built a Secret Replica of Iran's Nuclear Facilities

[Daneshmand]

The US built a secret replica of Iran's nuclear facilities to help gain an edge in nuclear talks - Business Insider

The US built a secret replica of Iran's nuclear facilities deep in Tennessee's forest to help gain an edge in negotiations

The East Tennessee Technology Park, a site within the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is seen in an undated handout photo from the US Department of Energy

• The US government built "a secret replica of Iran’s nuclear facilities" deep in the forests of Tennesseeto gain an edge in its negotiations with Iran, reports The New York Times.
  
  This "Manhattan Project in reverse" is situated on the grounds of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It uses placeholder centrifuges meant to represent Iranian equipment — an assembly that including centrifuges once belonging to Libya's disbanded nuclear program.
  
  Scientists there are dedicating themselves to figuring out technical formulas that could stop Iran from developing a weapon.
  
  It's possible that the Times article is based on administration-authorized leaks of classified information — Ernest Moniz, the Secretary of Energy, is quoted in the article, as are a range of named and anonymous scientists from US government laboratories.
  
  But it's thin on the details of how the replica facilities were used to reach the one-year breakout determination.
  
  Scientists apparently proposed redesigns, centrifuge cascade configurations, limits on types of centrifuges, and other fixes that they believed would keep Iranian breakout at under a year. Eventually, they reached an equation that the Iranians could accept.
  
  The Obama administration has premised its arguments for a nuclear deal with Iran on the claim that for a period of 10 years, limits imposed on the Islamic Republic would make it nearly impossible for the country to build a single nuclear weapon in less than a year without the international community learning about it and formulating a response.
  
  
  
  AP ImagesA worker rides a bicycle in front of the reactor building of a nuclear power plant, just outside the southern city of Bushehr, Iran.
  
  
  
  The Times doesn't go into much detail as to what those fixes actually consist of, but reports that government scientists reached a high level of confidence that their formula could keep Iran at a one-year breakout.
  
  For instance: "The question was whether a proposed design of Natanz [Iran's only uranium enrichment facility for the first 15 years of an envisioned nuclear deal] that allowed more than 6,000 centrifuges to spin would still accomplish the administration’s goal of keeping Iran at least a year away from acquiring enough enriched uranium to make a bomb," the Times article states. "The answer was yes."
  
  Some outside experts aren't so sure.
  
  In a report issued on April 11th and authored by a group of scientists that included physicist and former International Atomic Energy Agency expert David Albright, the Institute for Science and International Security noticed a curious aspect to the administration's breakout estimates: they didn't seem to take into account Iran's supply of 20% enriched uranium, fissile material has undergone around 90% of the revolutions needed to reach weapons-grade.
  
  Iran oxidized half of its 20% stock (and down-blended the other half to a lower level of enrichment) under the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action signed between Iran and a group of 6 countries led by the US.
  
  As the ISIS report explains, in leaving the oxidized 20% stocks out of its breakout estimate, the administration seems to believe that reconverting that 20% to a state where it can be further enriched and weaponized would be such a time-consuming, intensive, and obvious process that Iran's 20% stocks simple don't need to be factored into weaponization scenarios.
  
  The ISIS report is skeptical. It says Iran could render its 20% stocks usable in just a few months and that it's hugely relevant to any breakout scenario.
  
  "The near 20 percent LEU stock, unless largely eliminated or rendered unusable in a breakout, could be an important reserve in reducing the time to produce the first significant quantity of weapon-grade uranium (WGU) and rapidly producing a second significant quantity of WGU," the report states.
  
  
  
  REUTERS/Evan Vucci/PoolU.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (L) and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif discuss seating arrangements for a meeting during a new round of nuclear negotiations in Montreux March 2, 2015. Kerry and Zarif held the first of what could amount to three days of meetings in Montreux about restraining the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.
  
  
  
  According the series of fact sheets released after the Lausanne, Switzerland nuclear talks concluded, Iran would be allowed to keep a stockpile of 300 kilograms of uranium enriched to 3.67% under a final deal. Even a small amount of uranium at 20% enrichment would far surpass this stockpile in weaponization potential: "a rule of thumb is that 50 kilograms of near 20 percent LEU hexafluoride (or about 33 kilograms uranium mass) is equivalent in terms of shortening breakout time to 500 kilograms of 3.5 percent LEU hexafluoride," the report says.
  
  And Iran has plenty of convertible 20% on hand — around 228 kilograms of uranium mass of near-20%, which would come out to 337 kilograms of near-20% if it were "converted back to hexaflouride form."
  
  Much of the 20% is "in forms where the LEU could be recovered in a straightforward manner." But the report found no proof that the 20% had been included in the administration's breakout estimate, and concluded that "the US evaluation requires greater scrutiny."
  
  That isn't the only ambiguity surrounding the administration's breakout claims.
  
  As Bloomberg reported on April 21, the administration only declassified its actual breakout estimate — which states that Iran is currently between 2 and 3 months away from building a single nuclear weapon, if it chose to do so — on April 1st, the day before the series of announcements that marked the conclusion of the Lausanne, Switzerland round of nuclear negotiations. Ali Khadery, a former advisor to US Central Command and the US official who spent the longest time in Iraq during the American military campaign in that country, suggested on Twitter that an approximate 2-3 month breakout estimate dated from as early as 2009.
  
  The New York Times article gives an idea of the scientific infrastructure the US is using to evaluate its breakout claims. It's now know that there are scientists using a mock-up of Iranian nuclear facilities to produce conditions for reaching a one-year breakout time.
  
  The methods they're actually using for reaching those conclusions, and the relationship between the administration's public breakout claims and Iran's actual timetable under a final deal, both remain as vague as ever.

 

[Daneshmand]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/us/in-atomic-labs-across-us-a-race-to-stop-iran.html

Atomic Labs Across the U.S. Race to Stop Iran

The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. A secret replica of Iran’s nuclear facilities there has helped scientists devise estimates of Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. CreditNational Nuclear Security Administration, via Reuters


WASHINGTON — When diplomats at the Iran talks in Switzerland pummeled Department of Energy scientists with difficult technical questions — like how to keep Iran’s nuclear plants open but ensure that the country was still a year away from building a bomb — the scientists at times turned to a secret replica of Iran’s nuclear facilities built deep in the forests of Tennessee.

There inside a gleaming plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation were giant centrifuges — some surrendered more than a decade ago by Libya, others built since — that helped the scientists come up with what they told President Obama were the “best reasonable” estimates of Iran’s real-life ability to race for a weapon under different scenarios.

“We know a lot more about Iranian centrifuges than we would otherwise,” said a senior nuclear specialist familiar with the forested site and its covert operations.

The classified replica is but one part of an extensive crash program within the nation’s nine atomic laboratories — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore among them — to block Iran’s nuclear progress. As the next round of talks begins on Wednesday in Vienna, the secretive effort remains a technological obsession for thousands of lab employees living the Manhattan Project in reverse. Instead of building a bomb, as their predecessors did in a race to end World War II, they are trying to stop one.
A Simple Guide to the Nuclear Negotiations With Iran
A guide to help you navigate the talks between Western powers and Tehran.


OPEN GRAPHIC
Ernest J. Moniz, the nuclear scientist and secretary of energy, who oversees the atomic labs, said in an interview that as the Obama administration sought technical solutions at the talks, diplomats would have been stumbling in the dark “if we didn’t have this capability nurtured over many decades.” Although Mr. Moniz would not discuss the secret plant at Oak Ridge, parts of which date to the American and Israeli program to launch cyberattacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, he said more generally that the atomic labs give the United States “the capacity to carry through” in one of the most complex arms-control efforts in history.


It has also changed the labs. In the bomb-making days, the scientists largely kept to their well-guarded posts. But anyone traveling to the Iran talks over the past year and a half in Vienna and Lausanne, Switzerland, saw the Energy Department experts working hard as the negotiations proceeded, and heading out to dinner after long days of talks.

It was over one of those dinners in Vienna last summer that several of the experts began wondering how they might find a face-saving way for Iran to convert its deep-underground enrichment plant at Fordo, a covert site exposed by the United States five years ago, into a research center. That would enable Iran to say the site was still open, and the United States could declare it was no longer a threat.

“The question was what kind of experiment you can do deep underground,” recalled a participant in the dinner. By the time coffee came around, the kernel of an idea had developed, and it subsequently became a central part of the understanding with Iran that Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Moniz announced this month. Under the preliminary accord, Fordo would become a research center, but not for any element that could potentially be used in nuclear weapons.


Sometimes, during negotiations in Switzerland, a member of the scientific team would dump a bowl of chocolates on the table and rearrange them to show the Iranians how a proposed site rearrangement might work. “It was a visual way,” an official said, “to get past the language barrier.”

But much of the work was done back at the labs, where specialists who had become accustomed to more 9-to-5 days found themselves on call seven days a week, around the clock, answering questions from negotiators and, at times, backing up the answers with calculations and computer modeling.

A senior official of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Kevin Veal, who has been along for every negotiating session, would send questions back to the laboratories, hoping to separate good ideas from bad. “It’s what our people love to do,” said Thom Mason, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It can be very rewarding.”

Given the stakes in the sensitive negotiations, the labs would check and recheck one another, making sure the answers held up. The natural rivalries among the labs sometimes worked to the negotiators’ advantage: Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the mountains of New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, was happy to find flaws in calculations done elsewhere, and vice versa.

“A lot of what we did was behind the scenes,” said Charles F. McMillan, the Los Alamos director.

A prime target of the effort was redesigning Iran’s still-under-construction nuclear reactor at Arak, a sprawling complex ringed by antiaircraft guns. The question was how to prevent the reactor from producing weapons-grade plutonium, a main fuel of atom bombs. Iran insisted the reactor was being built to produce medical isotopes for disease therapy.

Last year, when the Iranians proposed a way to redesign Arak, the job of assessing the plans fell to Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, one of the world’s most experienced developers of nuclear reactors.

The lab refined the Iranian idea, making sure Arak’s new fuel core would produce no pure bomb-grade plutonium. Eventually, the Iranians signed on. It is one of the few elements of the provisional nuclear deal between Iran, the United States and five other world powers that looks like a permanent fix because in order to produce weapons fuel, the whole reactor would have to undergo an obvious overhaul.

In lauding the deal announced early this month, Mr. Moniz put the redesign of Arak at the top of the achievements list, saying it “shuts down the plutonium pathway.”

At other times, scientists were on tight deadlines to come up with solutions.

Late last year, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was traveling by train to visit his children when a call came in that his team had to immediately reassess Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment plant. There in a vast underground bunker mazes of centrifuges spin around the clock to purify uranium, another bomb fuel.

The question was whether a proposed design of Natanz that allowed more than 6,000 centrifuges to spin would still accomplish the administration’s goal of keeping Iran at least a year away from acquiring enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. The answer was yes.


William H. Goldstein, the director of the Livermore lab, said the required turnaround for answers “was hours in some cases.”

Fordo, the most troubling of Iran’s many nuclear sites, was another major challenge. The enrichment complex there is buried so far under a mountain that Israel fears it could not wipe out the site and its nearly 3,000 centrifuges with airstrikes. The United States has only one bunker-busting weapon that might accomplish the job.

Over the dinner last summer in Vienna, the scientists and American negotiators discussed how to turn the mountain fortress into a peaceful research center.

The answer lay in the deep-underground nature of the site, which made it excellent for an observatory to track invisible rays from cosmic explosions, opening a new window onto the universe. (The rocky strata of the site would filter out extraneous signals.) Another idea was to use the installed centrifuges for purifying rare forms of elements used in medicine rather than for uranium.

In early March, Oak Ridge in Tennessee got a call from the negotiators. They needed to learn more about the idea of purifying elements, to make sure that it was possible and that the equipment left in the mountain could not be easily turned to producing nuclear fuel.

An Oak Ridge team went into action, working Friday night into Saturday. That afternoon, Mr. Mason, the Oak Ridge director, was able to send a report to Washington, which was then delivered to Mr. Moniz.

“The answer was ‘yes,’ ” Mr. Mason said. “It was feasible.”

In the interview, Mr. Moniz said he spoke to his lab directors last week and asked them to think hard about other uses for the Fordo complex, an issue that will be on the table when negotiators resume their talks this week.

The world of science, Mr. Moniz said, has lots of peaceful projects that would help move the mountainous fortress off the pathway to atomic bombs.

“We’re going to be thinking,” he said, “about other directions.” The question is whether, in the last weeks of the negotiations, the Iranians will go along.

 

[Daneshmand]

So, after all, it is not only Iranians who are reverse engineering American goodies.

Americans are reverse engineering whole Iranian FACILITIES.

I guess IAEA inspectors have been of much help in this regard to Americans.

 

[Shams313]

Americans are reverse engineering whole Iranian FACILITIES.

......

 

[Oldman1]

So, after all, it is not only Iranians who are reverse engineering American goodies.

Americans are reverse engineering whole Iranian FACILITIES.

I guess IAEA inspectors have been of much help in this regard to Americans.

Americans tend to reverse engineer from foreign countries. For example Osama Bin Laden's compound.

 

[Hack-Hook]

Americans tend to reverse engineer from foreign countries. For example Osama Bin Laden's compound.

You knew copying that building for the sake of attacking fordu is a little pointless unless you knew exactly what sort of material is used in its building .

 

[rmi5]

Sorry for the language, but another typical kos.sher thread by Daneshmand.

PS. @Abii what is the polite word for kos.sher?

 

[Abii]

Sorry for the language, but another typical kos.sher thread by Daneshmand.

PS. @Abii what is the polite word for kos.sher?

kososhermand specializes in these garbage threads.

polite terms for kososher=sher-o-ver, charand, cherto pert.

 

[Oldman1]

You knew copying that building for the sake of attacking fordu is a little pointless unless you knew exactly what sort of material is used in its building .

Well it looks like it worked as advertised. Course you know the U.S. always test new things on bunkers made of metal and concrete and other materials as well as thickness, etc.

 

[SQ8]

Its called training like you fight.. just as the replica of the OBL house.. or mock runs at a rail bridge by the first LGB attackers that resembled the dragons jaw before it was dropped.
The Israelis do that as well, they had a replica of the Iraqi reactor, and purportedly built one of Kahuta..

 

[Thəorətic Muslim]

You knew copying that building for the sake of attacking fordu is a little pointless unless you knew exactly what sort of material is used in its building .

Mock runs.

Most Spec Ops mission work as this: HQ sends mission & objectives, each team in the group devises a plan, the best plan is chosen by HQ and that team goes forward with it.

Then there's ST6 & Delta that get the High Priority missions. (The CIA uses their own Special Activities to by-pass the Pentagon, but these tend to be high priories for the CIA).

So, after all, it is not only Iranians who are reverse engineering American goodies.

Americans are reverse engineering whole Iranian FACILITIES.

I guess IAEA inspectors have been of much help in this regard to Americans.

Every country reverse engineers. We did it with the MiGs and SU's and the soviets did it with our F fighters, B bombers, and Nuclear designs.

 

[Hack-Hook]

Well if you use fortified concrete it's itself useless as the mountain over the facility is several time harder .
If you want to pull out something like you tried in the hostage crisis and send commandos then you must add some other factors there if the base for any reason go dark when as a matter of fact it's sorrounded with some millitary barrack and I guess what happen next will not be elegant .

That base is made to be as resilient as possible .

 

[Donatello]

Its called training like you fight.. just as the replica of the OBL house.. or mock runs at a rail bridge by the first LGB attackers that resembled the dragons jaw before it was dropped.
The Israelis do that as well, they had a replica of the Iraqi reactor, and purportedly built one of Kahuta..

Why didn't they go for Kahuta?

 

[CheGuevara]

USA just get be a "strong" country with stolen ideas from other countries