Another colleague who saw the same unclassified-but-not-publicly-available Livermore briefing on Bushehr “came away with the same sense – the reactor, in large part because of its mixed design heritage is a piece of garbage. It is, of course, true that Pu will be produced as is the nature of fissioning uranium. That said, the reactor chemistry is going to produce really, really nasty fission products. It would not be overwhelmingly difficult to separate Pu from the spent fuel coming out of Bushehr but the bother to worth ratio is extremely high – you are going to get a lot of ‘bad’ Pu for very little ‘good’.”
We need to get a damn copy of this briefing.
