Alex Glaser and Scott Kemp (above) gave a talk on Gas Centrifuges and the future of nonproliferation at Tsinghua University, with Li Bin as host.
The talk was cool, but the diagram of the centrifuge is HOT, supplanting the very excellent diagram that Jandos Rothstein created for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Li Bin and Alex Glaser are both involved with the International Panel on Fissile Materials, which just released the IPFM Global Fissile Material Report 2006.
What is very high speed? 10k-25k rpm? Do they hold the gas any set time, or is it a spillover process and the gas just goes thru from unit to unit? Or is all that getting into the big ‘C’ on details???
read “The bomb in my garden” and it will give you some insight into the challenges Iraq faced in developing this capability.(they succeeded, with a little help from some ‘friends’)The centerfuge needs to rotate at much higher speeds to separate the isotope- above 50k RPM