That analogy comes from a nuclear engineer – sorry, I take his layman explanation over yours.

NPP on March 20, 2007 at 12:41 PM

Im not an expert but I think the ping pong ball analogy there is totally flawed. Color is not a good analogy. Imagine you are trying to remove ping pong balls that have a 1% difference in weight and are otherwise identical. As you remove some balls it becomes harder to differentiate them. You can’t just look at them. You could be continuing to operate the centrifuge and it fails to make any progress to remove any more.

Two thoughts:

1. Infiltrate an anti-war protest with an anti-Busheher sign and see if anyone knows it’s not against Bush

Considering the dung-throwing monkeys are violent, should they figure it out, it would get very dicey.

2. Send Tehran news clippings about Chernobyl to see if they even knew about it, and if they already did, make them think something is leading up to another meltdown and this is the reason that the Russians are pulling out(like the Iranians know the true science about this either).

- The Cat

MirCat on March 20, 2007 at 1:41 PM

You’re assuming the Islamokazis that run Iran give a flying shinola about the health of anybody other than themselves.

Whoever pissed in Putin’s cereal, Thanks!!!!!…

Allah owes me a new keyboard.

1. Infiltrate an anti-war protest with an anti-Busheher sign and see if anyone knows it’s not against Bush

2. Send Tehran news clippings about Chernobyl to see if they even knew about it, and if they already did, make them think something is leading up to another meltdown and this is the reason that the Russians are pulling out(like the Iranians know the true science about this either).

- The Cat

Iran just blocked U.N. nuke inspectors and China just became a little more Capitalistic. Any connections there?

I was going to say that we need to keep tabs on China. If the Russians have, in fact, cut Iran off, then Iran’ll turn to China for supplies of nuke fuel. Since China’s been growing so much, they need more oil from the ME. I’m sure Iran’d be more than happy to cut them a deal.

We need to keep our eye on the ball.

In fact, it was impurities with Iran’s UF6 that caused a crash in one of their cascades last year after they successfully enriched some pure Chinese UF6.

Here’s why the Bushehr fuel is potentially dangerous. Copied from here:

The vast bulk of the separative work (and the time it takes) is done going from the natural uranium (at 0.7% U235 content) to Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) at 4.4% U235 content.

The remaining work to go from LEU to HEU may be done extremely rapidly with a large number of centrifuges, or proportionately longer with a smaller number of centrifuges (using a hidden array of machines or subset of the full set of cascades).

Let me give a crude explanation of the counter-intuitive process.

Imagine a bowl with 1,000 ping-pong balls in it. 993 of the balls are green. 7 of the balls are red. The balls are at “0.7% Red Enrichment.”

Now imagine reaching in the bowl and pulling out unwanted green balls. You are doing “separative work”. You will be leaving the red balls in the bowl.

Remove 840 green balls, a long and tedious job.

Now you have 153 green
balls and 7 red balls.

You are now at “4.4% Red Enrichment”

Last step. This time remove only 152 green balls.

This leaves 7 red balls and 1 green ball or an “88% Red Enrichment.”

So note: It took EIGHT-FIVE percent of the work to go from 0.7% to 4.4%!

That is why “Peaceful” enrichment is a fraud, and selling someone LEU for their “civilian” power plant is nutzy if they have even a miniscule and crude enriching technology – centrifuges, calutrons, whatever.

Emphasis added.

my grasp on the science is tenuous,

This is why I miss Steven den Beste.

I can’t help but wonder if the recent defectors from Iran aren’t providing some information that might be changing Russia’s opinion of Iran … for example, if it turns out that Iranian operators were involved in the June 2006 killing and kidnapping of Russian embassy employees in Iraq to stir up tension between Russia and the US.

As for why Russia might suddenly have decided to put the screws to Iran, I honestly have no idea.

The Surge…….? The defectors……..? Dirty little secrets…….?

Iran just blocked U.N. nuke inspectors and China just became a little more Capitalistic. Any connections there?

As for why Russia might suddenly have decided to put the screws to Iran, I honestly have no idea.

This is why.

I love TCS Daily.

Putin’s not stupid. He knows the true pathway to power is through economic, not military, strength, and he’s trying to keep pace with the industrious Chinese, and the best way to do that is to control the energy the Chinese get.

So Putin is doing what he knows best– get the Iranians “pot-committed”, where they’ve put so much stock in a nuclear program that they have to go “all in” now with the Russians or risk losing their investment and get stuck holding the bag. (Look at what the nuclear pursuit has done to the Iranian economy– to get nothing from essentially bankrupting their country will look very, very bad.)

Putin knows this, and he’s now putting the fuel squeeze on Ahmadinejad and his Ayatollah cronies. If the Iranians don’t agree to Putin’s terms, and I’m thinking a severe discount per bbl of oil shipped to Russia and a limit of fuel sold to China, then he’ll just withdraw the fuel the Iranians need to make their bombs.

I’d like to see him in a “World Leader Texas Hold’Em” Tournament.

Iran is suffering a fiscal crisis and can’t pay the bills. Why else would Russia stop dealing with them?

Follow the money Allah baby…

Never trust a Ruskie.