This post is from October 2004. Facts and links may have changed since. See more from that month

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Bushehr Update

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.

Jeffrey Lewis

Writing on ACW 2004–2026

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk.com. He is the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. His also a non-resident affiliate at Stanford's Center for Security and International Cooperation and a Contributing Editor to Survival.

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