“What Brian is saying is preposterous. I would never bluff anyone, and I am perfectly peaceful. The beefy guy on the left is on his way to pummel the pure peace of Islam into Brian, just to prove how peaceful I am!”Allah reports that it’s very lik…

I disagree with you for a couple of reasons. The first being that if a centrifuge broke down or stopped for some other reason, it’s very likely that valves would automatically shut, locking the gas in. So when the problem was resolved, all the centrifuges would need to do is come back up to the right temperature and speed for the valves to reopen, and the process would continue where it left off. The gradient is a result of the spinning centrifuge (centrifugal force), so bringing it back up to speed would recreate the same gradient rather quickly.

And second, because I see no reason to believe that Iran would have any trouble keeping 3,000 centrifuges running. They are a simple device, and Iran has excellent engineers, many trained at our finest engineering schools.

I agree that production would stop when centrifuge 1287 fails (although imo material transfer between all centrifuges would have to be put on hold until it was fixed if you wanted to run in steady-state; 1288 would immediately fall out of sync with no feedstock if it kept feeding 1289), but that’s true of any steady state chemical production. Iran has a proven ability to run steady-state plants, such as their oil refinery. It just doesn’t seem like much of a difficulty to overcome. Hope I’m wrong.

To be fair, I am assuming that centrifuging gaseous UF6 is similar in theory to typical liquid-liquid or liquid-solid centrifuging, since I have no experience in working with either uranium or gas centrifuges.

If he (Mymood Iminajihad) came out tomorrow and told the world that his farts smelled like roses, they would print it as fact! They would eat it up, and stand in line to make the confirmation.

No doubt they are trying to build nukes, but how productive can you be when you have to pray five times a day, attend local rallies and endless “Death to America” marches, all the while trying to sneak your family out of the country?

When the centrifuge is running, it creates a density gradient through the centrifuge. When its been running to the point of reaching a steady state, the most enriched part is slowly siphoned off and used as starting material for the next centrifuge. If the centrifuge is turned off, the gradient is lost and you have to start over.

Once the second centrifuge has enough starting material (the slightly concentrated material from the first centrifuge), it can be fired up. The partially purified material from this stage is then fed to the third, and so on. Matrerial flows in one “end” and a slightly purer material flows out the other -its a continuous flow. It takes a veerry long time to get all 3000 up and running, and they have to all be running for a long time after that to make enough purified material for use in a bomb.

Now these are high tech centrifuges with very tight tolerances, otherwise you would need more than 3000. That also means quality is a real issue. Let’s say centrifuge 1287 fails. You can’t just save the output from centrifuge 1286 while its being repaired (I don’t rember exactly why that is). That means all the centrifuges ahead of that have to be stopped. I’m not sure, but I think you can keep centrifuges 1288 and up running, but they’re just marking time and wearing out waiting for more material. So you fix or replace centrifuge 1287, then start up #1 and work your way back up the line again. A lot of time is lost and the chance another centrifuge will fail has just increased.

Its like the trick where the person has 30 plates spinning at the same time, if one plate falls, the jig is up. Except its 3000 centrifuges.

A majority of Europeans apparently think that’d be a fine idea, just so long as they don’t have to contribute.

That sounds about right. Whine, moan, complain, shout out, “Somebody has to do something!”

Then the US does something and they start complaining about how the US didn’t do it right…

If the MS-13 gangbanger down the street keeps threatening to kill me, my Jewish neighbor, both our entire families and burn down our houses:

Before we take steps to negate the threat, do we really have to be absolutely certain that he has the three thousand rounds for his AK and five gallons of gasoline that he claims; when we know that he 1000 rounds and two gallons of gas (and a Bic) that we KNOW for sure that he has???

Personally, I think Iran is even further ahead in their nuclear weapons project plans than they are indicating. And what they can’t build, they can buy.

But given whom Iran chose to retaliate against recently in their standoff with the U.S., and given whom other terrorist groups like AQ have focused their attentions on since 9/11, Europe’s along for this ride whether they want to be or not.

Nah. None of these “signs” of aggression have fazed Europe. Well, with a correction. It has helped Europe turn tail and retreat even before the real fight begins.

America alone, my friend. America. Alone…

UN inspectors?

Anyone?

What does it get them in the West except sanctions and a potential war? This announcement only increases the sense of urgency and increases the likelihood of being attacked. It’s like Hitler turning East before he was finished in the West, a strategic error. If anything, you’d want to keep your progress a secret so you can reduce the sense of urgency and increase the chances of success.

So why lie? A better deal? What deal? They want the bomb, not some bribe.

Maybe they are just braggarts? Maybe they want to be attacked because they already have a bomb(s) they purchased and are itching to use them? Maybe they think they have the conventional forces to win a war against the West and are trying to instigate an attack so they can counter-attack with some sort of legitimacy? I don’t know. Lying just doesn’t seem to make strategic sense unless you want a fight and you want it sooner rather than later.

1) Making a centrifuge ‘operate’ only requires a motor to spin it. I doubt this would hold them back.
2) Putting them in cascade only requires a pipe connecting the effluent of one to the influent of another. I doubt this will stop them either.
3) That doesn’t sound right. If you only run it for a short time, then you should be left with slightly enriched uranium, which you can run through again at a later date to complete the enrichment, right?

Ian Malcolm: I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it.

- The Cat

anyways:
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP115106

Aghazadeh (Channel 2 on 4/13/2006): “In the early stages of our work we realized that our centrifuges had many malfunctions. We could not determine the reason, because there were no references or books we could consult to solve this. After considerable effort, we noticed that when our experts assembled the centrifuges, they did not wear cloth gloves. We realized that if you assemble the centrifuges with bare hands, a little bit of sweat from between the fingers may transfer to the rotor, and increase the mass. When the rotor spins, it becomes a problem, which completely unbalances the centrifuge, causing it to explode. When I say that it explodes, it doesn’t merely explode, but turns to powder.”