Uranium enrichment - what's happening today?

摘要

In common with used fuel reprocessing, uranium enrichment is a sensitive area of the nuclear fuel cycle owing to the obvious link to the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. If a plant can enrich uranium to the levels required by today's civil reactors (3- 5% U-235), it can equally be used to enrich to the higher assays required for a nuclear bomb (over 90% U-235). Much of the work (measured in SWUs) is required to enrich from U-235's natural level (0.7%) to 5%, and going beyond that is not so difficult. Hence a huge amount of comment and discussion about enrichment in recent years has been around Iran's nuclear programme and its alleged intention to use the facilities not just for civil purposes (as it claims) but also for a nuclear weapon. Resolving this issue has been agonizingly slow, with tough economic sanctions imposed, but some progress has been achieved. This has allowed some of the parties to fee rather more comfortable with the concept of Iran operating "civil only" plants.