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Bushehr going online in october

By catdynamics on June 27, 2007.

Iranian news agency is reporting that the Bushehr nuclear power station is going online in October 2007

That is interesting.
It means the reports earlier that the fuel was delivered quietly by the Russians was accurate and they must be loading the reactor starting right now, if they want to be running in 3-4 months.

It also means that people who are paranoid about Busherh being used to breed weapons grade plutonium 239 from fuel grade low enriched uranium are going to get extra paranoid over the next 3-9 months. By november it would be dangerously late to "do" anything about Bushehr, and if the Iranian really were to try to do short burns in the Bushehr reactor and extract Pu-239 they could start to do so around christmas +/-

It would of course be wrong (and possibly moderately hard) for the Iranians to do so, it would openly break their IAEA committment and their contract with the Russians.
It would also give them enough Pu-239 for several bombs, were they to feel inclined to need to do so in a hurry, and IF they both built up the technical capability to extract the Pu-239 (messy but not too hard) and the managerial capability to not screw it up (which is harder than one might think, evidently).

Interesting times this autumn.

The "talkback" on the Jerusalem Post version of this story is interesting

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