All you need to do is crush the encapsulated UO2 and expose it to fluorine to get it back to UF4 or UF6. It’s not rocket science, just basic chemistry. Again, the fuel has already been purified and enriched to 5%. Once the Hex has been collected, it can be fed into cascades.

No, the worry is that Iran could take Russia’s “clean” LEU fuel meant for the Bushehr reactor, downconvert it to UF6 and then quickly enrich it to weapons grade. What’s not commonly understood by layman is that 5% enrichment actually represents about 80% of the separative work required to enrich to weapons-grade. In other words, going from natural (0.7%) to 5% is a long, tedious process, but going from 5% to 90% is a much shorter one.

The Bushehr reactor does not represent a significant plutonium threat. First, Iran has no reprocessing facility. Secondly, making sufficiently pure quantities of Pu239 free from Pu-240 contamination is difficult in a LWR like Bushehr. The heavy-water reactor Iran is building at Arak is where any plutonium will be produced. The reactor design mirrors Pu production reactors in Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea among others – in short it is tailor-made to support plutonium production. But even so, Iran will still need a reprocessing facility and so far it appears they haven’t begun construction of one yet.

We don’t really know what happened to the North Korean enrichment program. It’s a closed country and the IAEA was booted out. It appears they tried to set a program up, but found that enrichment was a lot more difficult than they thought. The US discovered it and, judging by the lack of recent information, it appears to be abandoned. We won’t really know until the North opens their facilities for inspection however and allows access to the requisite documents and facilities.

Here is some info from GlobalSecurity.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/nuke-fac.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/bushehr.htm

So what do your arms control wonks have to say about this abc comment?

This sounds like the Sanger/Miller story at NYT, that Libruls paper.

Go to ACW and read for yourself. Jeb’s new coblogger also talked about this here at TMV.

1) The Iranians cant convert yellowcake to clean UF6. The feeder stock is supposedly from China.
2) 1300 centrifuges in a room isn’t a true cascade. The cascade needs to run 24/7, not 20% of the time under limited conditions. Will the Iranians overcome the engineering problems(probably)?
3) The Iranians make exagerated claims, the actual technical accomplishments don’t match their rhetoric.

So timelines are really dependent upon a scenario. Two years is really a “worst case,” but it also represents the point at which Iran will have the technical capability to do what it wants. That’s why the focus has been on slowing down or stopping Iran from getting that technical capability through Iranian suspension. After another two years, it won’t really matter anymore.

Although, this report might make McCain’s singing of old Beach Boy songs a bit more popular now.

The IAEA report became public today. Read it for yourself:

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/IAEAreport23May2007.pdf

So what do your arms control wonks have to say about this abc comment?

The covert action plan comes as U.S. officials have confirmed Iran had dramatically increased its ability to produce nuclear weapons material, at a pace that experts said would give them the ability to build a nuclear bomb in two years. 

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/05/bush_authorizes.html

Americans have been on the same path (albeit more slowly) since the Nixon years. Our free press and relatively open society makes it seem like it would be impossible for our government to lie to us every single minute of every day, but that’s what’s happening.

This is a problem of our own creation, and just stresses how badly the war on terrorism has been managed.

President Bush on Tuesday declassified intelligence showing in 2005 Osama bin Laden planned to use Iraq as a base…

¿ 2005 ? This is a joke… right?