I haven’t been blogging much recently but I hope to make up for that today with some remarkable material on Syria that Jeffrey and I were given in the last 24 hours.

A source summarized for us some of the information the IAEA has that didn’t make its recent report on Syria as well as its working hypotheses. Specifically, it appears that the uranium found in Syria may have come from fuel imported from North Korea. But, all in good time…

I will try to be very clear in differentiating between what I was told and my own further speculations and musings. Two general points first, though.

Number one, our source stressed that the composite overhead imagery the IAEA has of the site is very good, both in terms of its resolution, frequency and reliability—five states apparently contributed images.

Second, there appears to be little momentum behind following up the salt mine story, which is making some rather unhappy.

Onto the uranium…

Is the uranium contamination significant?

In a letter to the IAEA, reported in GOV/2008/60, Syria states that “[i]t is necessary to draw attention also to the fact that the result of the analysis of one sample points to three uranium particles, whereas the results of four other samples taken from the same place within a 30 metre range contained no uranium particles.”

According to our source, the reason for the difference between the samples may be that the site at which uranium contamination was found was outside the area that Syria scraped clean, whereas the sites showing no uranium contamination were inside the “scrape zone”. Our source also emphasizes that three particles is a “significant” level of contamination.

I note that the BOE was about 50 m across and, based on these images from ISIS, the scrape zone is a little larger. On that scale, 30 m is a significant distance; it is not remotely “the same place” as Syria tries to claim.

When Jeffrey blogged about this subject, the enrichment level of the uranium contamination wasn’t clear. In GOV/2008/60, the IAEA reports that it is unenriched but “anthropogenic”. Our source says that the IAEA believes it is probably from nuclear fuel. This leads me to conclude the particles must be metallic uranium as this is what’s used in magnox fuel.

Magnox fuel is so called because of the magnesium-aluminium alloy used to clad the fuel. No traces of the cladding have been found. I speculate that this is probably because magnox alloy, being non-radioactive, is harder to detect than uranium. As Vitaly Fedchenko explains in this excellent article environmental samples are first screened by the IAEA using high resolution gamma ray spectrometry to detect radioactive particles—and that ain’t much help in looking for magnox alloy.

This would be a major development, since the US intelligence community has stated unequivocally that the reactor “was destroyed in early September 2007 before it was loaded with nuclear fuel or operated.”

According to our source, the IAEA is also speculating that one of the three installations it has asked to visit—the one that was subsequently subject to “landscaping activities” or what Jeffrey is churlishly calling the “old Imam Hossein University try“—was a fuel storage facility. Remind anyone of Iran’s attempts to remove uranium traces from the Kayale Electric Factory?

Where did the fuel come from?

Most intriguingly, our source informed me that there is speculation within the Agency that the fuel came from North Korea. In a report of a January 2004 visit to North Korea, Sig Hecker wrote this:

They [the North Koreans] stated that have one more charge of fuel for the reactor fabricated now. The fuel fabrication facility is partially operational and partially under maintenance. They are in no hurry to fabricate more fuel since the two bigger reactors under construction are not close to operation.

We did not have the opportunity to visit the fuel fabrication facility. However, these comments are consistent with previous U.S. estimates. In previous years, the fuel fabrication complex was reported to be making fuel elements containing about 100 tonnes per year of uranium. The complex is believed to have produced enough fuel for the initial loading of the core for the 50 MWe reactor under construction. Moreover, the nominal capacity was appreciably larger.

So what happened to all, or some, this fuel? No prizes for guessing the IAEA working hypothesis.

Our source said that some in the IAEA are even going so far as to speculate that North Korea was “flipped” by the US and admitted that it had shipped the fuel to Syria. The US then told Israel who… you know the rest.

In fact, this is not at all as far fetched as it might sound to some of you (and this is me speculating now). The IAEA is responsible for ongoing verification activities at the Fuel Fabrication Plant in Yongbyon. It must know whether the fuel is present and given its theories I’m assuming it knows that the fuel isn’t there (although it is remarkable this information hasn’t leaked). Presumably when the IAEA first discovered the fuel’s absence it must have asked North Korea where it was, possibly forcing it to ‘fess up.

Incidentally this might also explain why North Korea is having kittens about permitting environmental sampling at Yongbyon. The IAEA (or US) could potentially prove and publicly confirm that the fuel in Syria came from North Korea if both have a similar “fingerprint” of trace elements. Even if North Korea has privately acknowledged the sale of fuel to Syria (and that is far from clear) it might not want to give the US the means to publicly embarrass it.

Why would North Korea sell fuel to Syria?

My reasoning runs something like this…

We know that the fuel in question was in North Korea when Hecker visited in January 2004. If it has been shipped out, it had to have occurred before July 2007 when IAEA verification resumed. This window corresponds to the nadir of US-North Korea relations. Maybe North Korea felt the prospects of extorting aid from the US were low then, so it decided to sell the fuel to Syria instead.

Jeffrey reminded me of this story from 2002:

At one point, the North Korean official, Li Gun, pulled aside the top senior official, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, and in effect told him: “We’ve got nukes. We can’t dismantle them. It’s up to you whether we do a physical demonstration or transfer them.”

Maybe Li Gun actually threatened to transfer fuel and was misunderstood or misquoted. Maybe North Korea thought it too risky to transfer a weapon but wanted to make clear their threats were credible so decided to transfer fuel instead (as well as conducting a test). Either way the sale of fuel to Syria is not quite the bolt from the blue it might first appear.

So, will there be a request for a special inspection?

No, according to our source, at least.

The IAEA Secretariat feels it would be entirely justified but questions its utility. Apparently, they are concerned negotiations would take too long and slow the process down. (See Andreas Persbo’s post on this subject.)

Personally I think this is bunk (I strongly suspect that the resistance to a special inspection stems right from the top). The IAEA already has to negotiate with Syria over access. Calling for a special inspection would probably not affect the pace of these negotiations.

It would, however, be the start of a process of “normalizing” this key inspection tool (as I have written repeatedly in past publications). Jeffrey has also made the case for this and he’s spot on. Look at is this way, if the IAEA doesn’t call for a special inspection now, how could it do so in other situations, where the justification is less clear cut?