Iran's Fuel Fabrication: Step closer to energy independence or a bomb?

Yesterday, on Iran’s national Nuclear Technology Day, President Ahmadinejad announced the country’s latest nuclear advances, which seem to have become an important source of national pride and international rancor. April 9 marks the day when Iran claimed to have enriched its first batch of uranium in 2006. Yesterday, Ahmadinejad inaugurated Iran’s Fuel Manufacturing Plant (FMP) at Isfahan and announced the installation of a new “more accurate” type of centrifuge at the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz.
On one hand, the inauguration of a fuel fabrication facility is good news. This means that Iran really is trying to produce reactor fuel and this brings legitimacy to their enrichment claim. Moreover, a fuel fabrication plant in itself has no dual use if viewed a separate part of the fuel cycle. Scott Kemp from Princeton mentioned not too long ago that if Iran converted its UF6 to UO2, this would act as a safeguard. If Iran started the fuel fabrication process for a LWR, turned most of the LEU stockpiled at Natanz into uranium oxide pellets and locked it away in zircalloy tubes, this would greatly reduce the possibility of batch recycling the LEU to bomb-grade uranium.

However, if the FMP produces nuclear fuel for the heavy water reactor in Arak this is bad news. Heavy water reactors might be of interest for a nuclear power program because they do not need enriched uranium. Canada, for example, operates only heavy water reactors (known as CANDU) domestically and has sold these commercially. But heavy water reactors are also ideally suited for producing plutonium that can be used in a nuclear weapon. Once again, Iranian moves can be interpreted as moving toward energy independence or toward a nuclear weapons capability, or both.

FAS