Iran

Last night, President Trump presented his case for America going to war

against Iran. He insisted it would be “intolerable” for a regime like
Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. That’s why the United States and Israel
have bombed Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities and an incomplete heavy
water reactor system at Arak. What Washington and Jerusalem have yet to
fully acknowledge, however, is that Iran has an option to make more than
200 nuclear weapons from plutonium contained in spent fuel at the Bushehr
power reactor. ROSATOM, the Russian firm that built and has operated
Bushehr since 2011, says there are 210 tons of spent reactor fuel at the
plant. If you check the ROSATOM figure against International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) reactor performance logs, the 210 tons of waste contain
enough plutonium to make more than 200 nuclear weapons – as many or more
than SIPRI estimates Israel has. It would not take Iran long to remove
Bushehr’s spent fuel and chemically strip the plutonium out. In 1977, the
U.S. General Accounting Office evaluated leading U.S. nuclear chemist Floyd
Culler’s proposed quick and dirty method of plutonium chemical
separation. The facility Culler described was 130 feet by 60 feet by 30
feet (approximately the size of a standard basketball court). It employed
technology little more advanced than that required for the production of
dairy and the pouring of concrete. Such a plant could fit within a large
warehouse and would take no more than six months to build. Until the plant
was operational, it would send off no signal and could separate a bomb’s
worth of plutonium after only ten days of operation. After that, the plant
could separate a bomb’s worth of plutonium in a day.

 NPEC 3rd April 2026 

 https://npolicy.org/blocking-irans-other-option-a-plutonium-bomb-realcleardefense/