What if I could lower your electricity bill by about 45 cents a month in exchange for helping Syria and one or two other countries acquire a nuclear weapons capability? How about it?
What, not so excited about that?
Ok, lets just say it increases the chance of the Syrian bomb by 10 percent over a decade. You’ll save $54 dollars over the same period. No?
Ok, what if it only increased the chance of Bashar’s bomb by 1 percent over the same period?
Whether your think I am being fair or not, there is a proliferation cost associated with the development of novel enrichment technologies, as AQ Khan demonstrated by his turn as the Johnny Appleseed of centrifugal enrichment.
Francis Slakey (aka Slake) has submitted a petition on behalf of the American Physical Society to the NRC requesting “that the NRC amend its regulations regarding the domestic licensing of special nuclear material to include proliferation assessments as part of the licensing process.”
It is now open for public comment. You can read Slake’s explanation here, which is the source of the 45 cent estimate.