Arab nations vie for nuclear power, leading to jitters over Middle Eastern A-bombs
Part of:
Nuclear energy
Iranian women form a human sheild at the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility – a response to US and Israeli threats of military action against the Islamic Republic’s burgeoning nuclear efforts . Tehran’s aggressive nuclear programme in the face of western opposition is seen at the bellwether of Middle Eastern nuclear development.
photos.state.gov
- MEP Harms slams nuclear expansion in Europe and disregard for the 'insider threat' at Swedish nuke plant
- Norway announces $5 million contribution to realisation of a multi-national nuclear fuel bank
- Russia to boost staff at Iran’s Bushehr reactor, but Moscow’s head diplomat urges less fanfare
- Russian fuel delivery to Iran and promises to Libya puts Moscow on map as big Middle East nuke peddler
- Bush Administration actively pursuing strategies to attack Iran, according to Washington officials
- Confidential UN report says Iran’s nuke programme moving slowly
- French president warns Iran it could be bombed if it does not curb nuclear ambitions
- Candidate Clinton flip-flops, saying nuclear war is a viable option
- Russian construction of Iran’s Bushehr reactor in ‘crisis’
- US Congress pledges $50m to international uranium fuel bank - but what will this cost Russia's environment?
- ElBaradei: Attack on Iran would be ‘an act of madness’
- US and Israel table military action on Iran – Iran does not flinch
- International uranium enrichment plant in Siberia to attract more radwaste to Russia
- Russia delays completion of Iranian reactor, encouraging Washington
- Resurrection of 'atoms for peace' for the creation of an international uranium bank
- Diplomats Remain Split Over Iran Nuclear Question
- Iran Reports Huge Advances In Uranium Enrichment
- Israeli and Russian Official Hint Bushehr May Be Targeted During Iraqi War
Related articles
- Russia smacking its forehead over support for Iranian nuke programme
- Russian plans to complete Bushehr on time
- Russia sings on to build reactors, uranium centrifuges for China
- Midtøsten varsler storsatsing på atomkraft
- Putin and Bush have ‘common message’ for Iran, but differ on US nuke missile shield plan
- Iran calls on Russia to help resolve nuclear loggerheads
- Russia disappointed by Irans uranium enrichment
Related news
The new aspirants to “peaceful” nuclear power are Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Libya. All have outlined broad plans to bring nuclear energy onto their national grids.
On Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed that France would aid Libya in its quest for nuclear energy, casting his decision as a preemptive strike against the eventual class war he predicts will break out if western nations deny “poor” Arab countries the “energy of the future,” AFX news agency reported.
On Sunday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II urged that country’s Higher Committee for Nuclear Strategy to accelerate its atomic power efforts, Al Bawaba news agency quoted him as saying. Jordan is seeking a nuclear programme “geared toward electricity production, and that it will be a completely transparent, according to the criteria established by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."
Last week, Yemen announced that it will purchase its first energy reactor, according to the Yemenite news agency. And Egypt, late last year, said it intended to resume its nuclear programme. Departing from Cairo’s traditional secrecy, the government said it intended to build four nuclear reactors within 10 years.
But a worried Israel – itself a nuclear power with well-established weapons-making capabilities – has questioned why those nations, which sit on an estimated 25 percent of the world’s oil wealth, would need nuclear reactors for power.
Yet Israel itself - as the beneficiary of huge and largely classified cash infusions from American into its military might - is another possible spur to nuclear fever in the Middle East. The country’s underground plutonium-producing reactor at Demona, and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, is an ongoing irritant to its Islamic neighbors.
US presidential candidates lighting nuclear fuses
While the US State Department, reached Friday by Bellona Web, would not comment on this new trend in the Arab world, it is something that is squarely on the radar screens of most US presidential candidates – many of whom have been publicly weighing hypothetical nuclear attacks on Middle Eastern countries like Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan.
 |
| Senator Barack Obama, who is contending for the Democratic presidential nomination, is the one candidate who has ruled out the use of nuclear weapons. |
| barackobama.com |
With the exception of Senator Barack Obama, a pretender to the Democratic presidential nomination, other candidates have, across the board, determined that they would not take the option of a nuclear strike against perceived rogue nations “off the table” – a sign of a bi-partisan loss of faith in US diplomacy following nearly eight years of unmitigated warfare under the Bush Administration.
George Bush’s would-be successors are therefore more inclined to discuss the unthinkable scenario of nuclear war – a change in the western political climate that is not lost on the Islamic world.
Nuke power chicken before the atomic bomb egg
Many experts – most notably Russia’s Alexei Yablokov, Boris Yeltsin’s former environmental advisor and an outspoken scientific critic of nuclear energy – have hypothesized that obtaining nuclear energy know-how inevitably leads to the creation of a nuclear weapons programme.
This has been proved by the development of nuclear power in almost every member of the so-called nuclear club – those nations that have nuclear weapons programmes - and a thesis that many western nations insist is being played out in Iran.
France – another country whose progress in nuclear power culminated in its explosion of an atomic bomb in 1968 – will be supporting Libya and the United Arab Emirates in their quest for nuclear energy.
Speaking to reporters Monday, France’s Sarkozy defended his government’s decision to back a Libyan nuclear programme, casting it in the light of a class struggle between western haves and eastern have-nots.
“The greatest risk to the world today is the clash between western and eastern civilisations. When the east no longer has gas and petrol, it must have development. If they are destitute, there will be terrorism,” said Sarkozy, according to AFX news agency.
'If we take as a premise that they (Arab states) do not have a right to the energy of the future, nuclear energy, how would you avoid a war between civilisations, a war between the world of the rich and the world of the poor? Naturally, they must be allowed to progress to nuclear energy.”
The Sarkozy administration has indicated that this could be only the beginning of a major nuclear sale and supply effort by France to Arab states, diplomats told Bellona Web Sunday.
And, while the State Department may not yet be willing to say so, the problem of more fissionable material floating around in more countries – particularly many that are considered hostile to the West – is seen by many as an obvious security threat.
‘Dirty bombs’ more likely?
A crude nuclear device, or a dirty bomb that spews radioactive debris, is everyone's nightmare. The scale of the potential problem is getting clearer, and not only in the Middle East: 31 countries already operate large nuclear-power reactors, and some of those will be adding more. Since 2005 at least 15 more governments have said they will obtain a reactor.
What is troubling in the new Middle Eastern nuclear rush is the rhetoric that countries employ to describe their ambitions. In recent months, officials from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – a somewhat estranged member of the US-controlled NATO - have mused aloud about the possibility of a “strategic” nuclear option.
Algeria, for its part, has always been worryingly secretive about a nuclear research reactor discovered in that country by international authorities in 1991, and that it surrounds with air defences.
Nuke Technology more available
France’s laissez-faire attitude toward helping Libya and the United Arab Emirate go nuclear supports an op-ed piece published last week in the International Herald Tribune by Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress and his Israeli associate, Utri Leventer, a Harvard University Graduate student.
The two writers postulate that, threats from Israeli and the United States aside, the overabundance of atomically developed nations who are willing to compete in pedaling their nuclear wares and know-how abroad are simply too many for Middle Eastern nations to ignore. Simply put, it is a seller’s market for nuclear reactor producers – and who are vendors, like France, to question demand?
Bellona says western nuke nations irresponsible
Bellona experts agree, and think that the bull market on nuclear power technology is fueled by the irresponsibility of nations on the look out for a quick $1 billion - the average cost of a nuclear reactor - at the expense of geopolitical security and environmental safety.
Any decrease in the worldwide nuclear security and environmental threats will therefore be the fault of the same wealthy Western nuclear nations that are ostensibly working, with the help of UN sanctions and threats of military action, to contain perceived nuclear threats in Iran and elsewhere.
“If rich countries want to use nuclear energy, then they have to be prepared to share,” said Bellona nuclear expert Igor Kudrik.
“If they don’t want to share, then they have to scrap it altogether at home and ban it around the world - or, make clear regulations on how a country can obtain nuclear fuel.”
 |
| The Bushehr nuclear power plant being constructed by Russia. Moscow has claimed Tehran is behind on payments in an apparent recognition that Iran poses a nuclear weapons threat. |
| photos.state.gov |
Russia and Iran an instructive lesson for reactor peddlers
This applies especially to Russia’s special nuclear relationship with Iran, and Moscow’s construction of a 1,000-megawatt light-water energy reactor in the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr.
Aside from his antic threats “wipe Israel off the map” and his refusal to halt uranium enrichment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right about one thing: As a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty, the Islamic Republic is well within its internationally protected rights to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
The chaos currently characterising the nuclear relationship between Moscow and Tehran is a cautionary tale for other nations queuing up to sell reactors in the Middle East – notably for the French.
“If the French just go in and build nuclear power plants without thinking of nonproliferation and the like, this highly irresponsible behaviour, which we say with Russia and Iran,” said Bellona’s Kudrik.
The deal over Bushehr, which is scheduled to go online next year -but had been scheduled to be operational this year - has been fraught with disputes over fuel deliveries from Russia to Iran and accusations from Russian contractors that Iran is missing payments, something Iran strenuously denies.
US observers have commented that the supposed payment arrears of which Moscow accuses Iran are a smokescreen to disguise that Russia - long an apologist for the Iranian nuclear industry –finally understands the dimensions of Tehran’s alleged intentions. But the perceived cash crop in fuel sales to Iran leaves Moscow in a dilemma.
“Russia is now trying desperately to come out of the situation with Iran, thinking of schemes about how to deliver fuel to Iran and look nice in the eyes of the international community,” said Kudrik.
One wiggling attempt to do this, noted Kudrik, is Russia’s hasty plans to build an international uranium enrichment centre and fuel bank in Angarsk, Siberia for countries with nuclear power plants but no indigenous uranium supply.
Endorsed by the International Atomic Enery Agency (IAEA) and the United States as a way to ensure “terrorist” nations have no access fresh uranium, the proposed centre opens a radioactive can of worms for Russia – which will be obligated to repatriate the spent fuel the centre sells.
But Iran does have an indigenous uranium supply – though it is dependent at this point on Russia for the first two tons of fuel Tehran needs to bring Bushehr online. Russia has so far hedged about whether it would exclude Iran from its list of uranium bank clients.
Moscow is therefore in the embarrassing position of having to offer Iran money to take back spent fuel burned at Bushehr to ensure it is not reprocessed by Tehran for weapons purposes, said Kudrik.
“It just shows that Russia did not think of any of these things before going into the project,” said Kudrik.
“It remains to be seen what France will do” in Libya and the United Arab Emirates.
Monitoring the new plants
Not all the supposedly “civilian” nuclear plans now being laid will come to fruition. But some will. Yet a detailed two-year study by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Centre (NPEC), a Washington-based think-tank, has uncovered troubling flaws in the internationally approved verification and monitoring procedures for safeguarding nuclear materials against diversion or theft.
In a new report, NPEC's director, Henry Sokolski, argues that UN nuclear inspectors from the IAEA have too little money for the job they are asked to do. Not only that, but the yardsticks by which the IAEA measures its own safeguarding success are woefully out of date. Indeed, some of its supposed safeguarding, the NPEC report argues, is inherently undoable.
According to the NPEC study, the amount of potentially weapons-usable nuclear material—either highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium—under inspection has increased far faster than the funds available for safeguarding it.
The NPEC report suggests more real-time remote-monitoring camera’s to address shocking discoveries by IAEA monitors of current camera “blackouts” at various nuclear facilities that lasted for more than 30 hours on 12 separate occasions. The lapses were discovered when IAEA teams visited the sites and downloaded the camera data, as they do every 90 days.
This is more than enough time to divert nuclear material and wreak havoc. The IAEA-fixed the measure of a militarily “significant quantity of highly enriched uranium is set at 25 kilograms and 8 kilograms for separated plutonium.
But these figures were arrived at 30 years ago, notes the Economist magazine - and what was considered dangerous at the early days of the atomic age is far less in the era of the terror of dirty bombs.
If monitoring is impossible, stop spreading nuke know-how
Though more observation cameras would be crucial, the IAEA budget is tight and increasingly relies on donations from, primarily, the United States and Russia to fulfill even its current monitoring capacity.
The NCEP therefore concludes that, absent, new technologies, increased and more effective monitoring is nearly impossible.
IAEA Director General Mohamad Elbaredei’s suggestion of international fuel centres - like the one currently under consideration in Angarsk, Russia - to prevent abuse of fuel technologies would seem to offer some solution to the monitoring problems that are beyond the IAEA’s means. But centre’s like this will require safeguards and monitoring as well.
Bellona therefore suggests that it would be far easier- and cheaper - to stop the spread of such fuel making technologies throughout the world.
Copyright © Bellona -- Reprint and copying is recommended if source is stated
