Patrick Moore, co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy) was a guest on today's edition of E&E TV. Here's an excerpt from the transcript where Moore talks about nonproliferation issues:
Patrick Moore: It's unfortunate that a lot of activists insist on making us connect those two things as if they're one and the same, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, but it isn't true. First thing, you don't need a nuclear reactor to make a nuclear weapon. With the new centrifuge technology you just enrich uranium. That's what Iran is suspected of doing. So there's no nuclear reactor involved in that. They aren't even connected in that sense, because it's easier to make a nuclear bomb with centrifuge technology than it is to use the plutonium from used nuclear fuel after you've had to build a nuclear reactor as well for billions of dollars. Secondly, do you think that if we shut down all the civilian reactors on this planet, there's over 440 of them, that the generals would give up their bomb making reactors? Because the plutonium and uranium that is being made for the military is not coming out of the civilian reactors. That's coming from special reactors and enrichment plants that belong to the military in the various nuclear capable countries.There's plenty more, be sure to check it out now.
Comments
Apparently Moore is not familiar with India's nuclear program, where civilian and military applications, including fissile material production, are inextricably interwoven.
Also, they got the Pu for their 1974 test from a research reactor supplied by Canada, which was moderated by heavy water supplied by the US.
Also, the Iraqi nuclear program that the Bush administration went to war over was a civilian program which hid a (pre-1991) covert Manhattan Project.
Tritium for the US nuclear weapons program is now generated at Watts Bar nuclear power plant. So there is one direct link in the US thermonuclear weapons program.
Moore is less convincing because Iran's justification for building the enrichment facility is "peaceful" purposes, namely power production. In fact, the NPT provides its signatories to enrich there own uranium for "peaceful" purposes. In fact, North Korea generated it nuclear weapons materials as a signatory to the NPT.
So the same claim is now coming from Israel, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bhrain, Kuwait and on and on it goes. Under the guise of "peaceful" use, the Middle East arms race would begin both vertically(number of weapons) and horizonally (number of nation state possessors). Same is true for accelerating the Asian arms race.
gunter, nirs