Word: uranium
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Proliferation invokes atavistic fears and uncertainties because it involves arcane and highly sophisticated technologies: breeder reactors, plutonium reprocessing plants, uranium-enrichment facilities.* Says Leonard Weiss, an expert on the U.S. Senate staff: "Proliferation is a set of symptoms with a number of causes. It is both a political and technical problem. Therefore no single cure, or set of cures, will work...
...capacity to build them. All told, about 345 commercial nuclear power reactors are in operation in 26 countries, and some 52 nations have nuclear research facilities. At least eleven nations possess facilities for the reprocessing of nuclear fuels, all yielding varying amounts of plutonium. Large enrichment facilities to turn uranium into nuclear fuel, or bomb-grade material, exist in the U.S., the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, France and China. Commercial reprocessing plants to extract plutonium from used reactor fuel are located or planned in France, Britain, West Germany, Japan, India and the Soviet Union. Programs involving breeder reactors are under...
...rate of proliferation could grow rapidly worse. Small, easily concealed new technologies for producing nuclear explosives are becoming available in world markets. Among them: high-speed centrifuges and still experimental laser systems for enriched-uranium production. Such systems could be engineered to produce the explosives needed to build the Bomb. Says Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington-based think tank: "History demonstrates that in the nuclear field, any technology ultimately is exported -- and Third World countries will...
Another candidate for bomb-in-the-basement status, South Africa, announced in 1970 that it had developed a new process for uranium enrichment. Since then the government in Pretoria has fiercely protected its putative breakthrough from virtually all curious foreign eyes. In 1977 the Soviet Union, apparently acting on evidence received from one of its spy satellites, notified the U.S. of an installation in South Africa's Kalahari Desert that resembled a nuclear test site under construction. Washington used one of its own satellites to inspect further. Four months later, under pressure from the U.S., South Africa stopped work...
...program developed rapidly along several fronts, some evidently peaceful in intent, others less so. By 1973 the country possessed a Canadian-built commercial nuclear reactor fueled by natural uranium. At about the same time, Bhutto entered negotiations with France for a commercial-scale plutonium- reprocessing plant. It would be capable of extracting from spent fuel more than 300 lbs. of plutonium annually, enough for as many as 30 atom bombs and far more than necessary for Pakistan's peaceful nuclear program...