White House says world can’t delay on Iran. Urgent problem. Mmm hmm.
I’m going to let this fine lady unpack this, because she is a chemist, and I am not:
Much as I hate to do so, because psychology tells us that repetition will help to fix the erroneous message in our minds, I will quote the most egregious statement of this “news.”
Iran has enriched sufficient uranium to amass a nuclear bomb – a third more than previously thought – the United Nations announced yesterday.
Ah yes. And if you live in Boulder, Colorado, or in Connecticut, or New York City, you have enough U-235 under your house (or perhaps block) to amass a nuclear bomb! Or, Kevin, all that sea water lapping up against the California coast has uranium in it too! I have a call in to the IAEA to inspect your homes!
The issue here is concentration. Mining uranium concentrates it from the ore. Purification and conversion to UF6 concentrates it further. The purpose of the enrichment centrifuges is to concentrate the fissionable U-235.
…The concentration of U-235 is 3.49% in the enriched uranium that the Natanz plant is turning out. The IAEA has found no evidence (Download Iran 0902) that any higher enrichment is being produced. 3.49% is not enough to make a bomb. Iran is not in a position to make a bomb, unless there is a bunch of hidden stuff that nobody has found, involving big buildings that can be seen by satellite surveillance.
Whaaaat??????? You mean, this is Not Urgent After All????
That’s right. It’s not. This is what we technically call in the blogging world a Giant Cock-Up. OK? OK. That’s it for today.
h/t Malcontent
#1 by Greg Bacon on February 24, 2009 - 3:46 am
IAEA: Iran Did Not Underreport Enrichment
Discrepancy Was “Inherent in the Early Commissioning Process”
Posted February 22, 2009
Much hay was made late last week over the allegation that the Iranian government had underreported the amount of urnaium it had enriched through November. The White House accused Iran of reneging on its international obligations, and called the nation an “urgent problem that has to be addressed.â€
Not so, says the International Atomic Enegy Agency (IAEA), which said the discrepancy between the reported and actual figures were “inherent in the early commissioning phases of such a facility when it is not known in advance how it will perform in practice.â€
They added that nothing indicates that Iran made any deliberate attempts to conceal the amount of uranium it had enriched, that Iran had been cooperating on the matter to improve future estimates, and that no nuclear material could have been removed from the facility.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/02/22/iaea-iran-did-not-underreport-enrichment/
How much of this is just another example of the USA being run by Israel and how much is just the constant background noise of wars and threats of war to keep people scared stupid and pliable?
#2 by A. Peasant on February 24, 2009 - 7:56 am
Indeed, and did they make any hay over Elbaradai’s saying that Israel undermines the NPT and is a major obstacle to global nuclear disarmament? No I didn’t hear that either.
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-38051120090216
“What compounds the problem is that the nuclear non-proliferation regime has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of Arab public opinion because of the perceived double-standards concerning Israel, the only state in the region outside the NPT and known to possess nuclear weapons,” he wrote.
Right down teh memory hole with that one…