Wampum

During the current artificial¹ crisis I'll keep this as a running note.

In November Iran wanted 20 centrifuge machines for "research and development ".

Some fundamentals:

• cost, schedule and performance data are critical before any business (or state) begins construction of a $1 billion to $1.5 billion commercial plant, in the States or in Iran, with or without ex-Sov HEU/Pu stocks, or post-Sov financing and technical assistance,
  
• TC12 technology (Urenco's current) produces about 40 SWU/year/machine. I'll have to dig up the numbers for the TC21, and of course, the wicked evil P-series technology (Iran's current) machines,
  
• $1 per barrel hike in oil prices translates to a $1.4 billion increase in Russian revenues,
  

In comments to my prior post Jeff Lewis writes:

David and Corey, at ISIS, did a thorough analysis on the Natanz facility, drawing on commercial satellite images.

A later article, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, has some additional information.

The introduction of UF6 is to master the process of enriching in a cascade. The Iranians are still some years away from starting up full scale operations and churning out bomb grade fissile material.

I'm inviting Jeff Lewis armscontrolwonk.com and John Pike globalsecurity.org to co-blog or do something similar, and in any event, I encourage anyone interested to read widely (where is Kim Jong Il today?) and carefully and send me anything you think useful.

¹ Natural crisis being events like unplanned famine, fire, disease, storms, earthquakes, etc.