Iran Dismisses Inspector Concerns While Tripling Uranium

Iran tripled its production of enriched uranium and rejected the international concerns about its possible pursuit of nuclear weapons that a team of United Nations inspectors accepted to Tehran this week.

Amid rising tensions about its nuclear research, Iran “dismissed the agency’s concerns,” the International Atomic Energy Agency said today in an 11-page limited document obtained by Bloomberg News. “Iran considered them to be based on unsupported allegations,” according to the document.

The report, dispersed to IAEA member states, was published three days after inspectors’ talks with Iran broke down. The inspectors said Iran has enlarged the number of machines it’s using to enrich uranium at its Natanz complex by 14 percent and has begun enriching material at its underground Fordo complex close to the holy city of Qom.

Can using thorium instead of uranium make nuclear energy safer

Thorium, a naturally occurring radioactive element establish in abundance in the Earth’s crust all around the world, might well be a better fuel basis than uranium for nuclear power generation for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, just one ton of the silvery metal can make as much energy as 200 tons of uranium or 3.5 millions tons of coal, according to Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia of the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Another advantage is that it come out of the ground as a 100 percent pure, functional isotope.

Unlike uranium, which contains only 0.7 percent fissionable material, thorium doesn’t need enrichment to be used in nuclear reactors. Also, the spent-fuel waste beginning thorium fission cannot be re-formulated for nuclear weapons like plutonium, the waste product of uranium-based fission.Also, proponents say that thorium doesn’t need the high temperatures and mitigation equipment of uranium-based reactors. “The plants would be a large amount smaller and less expensive,” Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering, told the UK’s Telegraph last year.

“You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes since there’s no pressurized water in the reactor.” With no high temperatures, thorium reactors can’t “melt down” and liberate radiation.“Once you start looking additional closely, it blows your mind away,” adds Sorensen. “You can run civilization on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s basically free.” The advocacy-oriented Thorium Energy Alliance reports that there is “sufficient thorium in the U.S. alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years.”

US and Ukraine sign deal to remove uranium

The United States and Ukraine signed a deal Monday to take away the former Soviet country's stockpile of weapons-grade uranium by early next year.Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko represent their nations in signing the agreement to remove the stockpile, which could offer enough material to build several nuclear weapons.

The deal was announce last year at an international nuclear security conference hosted by President Barack Obama but was not dignified until Monday Clinton and Gryshchenko had hoped to sign the deal in July, but it was belated amid Ukrainian reservations, according to U.S. officials among other reasons, Ukraine wanted assurance that the United States would complete a $25 million nuclear research ability called for under the deal.

The research facility will be able to produce 50 different types of medical isotopes, using only low-enriched uranium and Clinton said the U.S. was fully dedicated to meeting the timelines for construct the facility so it would be up and running by 2014.