Word: urenco
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...metallurgy. After finishing his studies, he threw himself into the burgeoning field of nuclear science in the Netherlands. With oil prices soaring, interest in harnessing nuclear power for civilian energy was high. In 1975, Khan took a job at the Dutch branch of a European nuclear-research consortium, Urenco, which specialized in uranium enrichment. Khan soon recognized that the centrifuges Urenco had developed to enrich uranium for civilian use were powerful enough to produce the fissile material needed for a nuclear weapon...
...Ernest Piffl, managing director of the German firm Team GmbH near Stuttgart, received a three and half year prison sentence for illegally exporting thousands of centrifuge components to a Pakistani nuclear laboratory. An expert at the trial testified that Piffl had in his possession a classified drawing of a URENCO component...
...plan meets federal approval, the consortium will eventually install enrichment machines at the New Mexico site worth over $1 billion, nearly all of which would probably be built in Europe to URENCO specifications. The company has said its centrifuge technology will be subject to the strictest safeguards, and has denied authorizing the leaks of any of its technology to rogue states. LES has described the link between URENCO and nuclear proliferation as "long ago and far-fetched at this point...
...first supposed leak of URENCO technology occurred in the 1970's and involved Pakistan. Since then, components associated with URENCO technology, consultants or sub-contractors have been said to have turned up in Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Last week, for example, the United Nations nuclear agency said it found undeclared components compatible with advanced uranium-enrichment centrifuge designs in Iran. The components were compatible with a so-called "P2" uranium-enrichment centrifuge, a Pakistani version of the URENCO "G2" centrifuge. The P2 can be used to produce material for nuclear weapons...
...Febraury 1986, components en route to Pakistan were seized by Swiss authorities that had apparently been manufactured from URENCO designs in West Germany...