Article

2006-07-24 India-Pakistan

Pak building huge Plutonium production reactor

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by john 2006-07-24 08:07|| || Front Page|| [5 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Suddenly Pakistan can build a 1000 ME(e) heavy water reactor?
Looks like the Chinese have violated the NPT again...

Posted by john 2006-07-24 08:13|| 2006-07-24 08:13|| Front Page Top

#2 Way to go, A**Holes.

Posted by newc">newc 2006-07-24 10:23|| 2006-07-24 10:23|| Front Page Top

#3 Guess they must have finished taking care of all those desperate earthquake victims. Can't leave all that foreign aid money just laying around now, can they? Sounds like they need another major "earthquake" (induced or otherwise), real bad.

Posted by Zenster 2006-07-24 11:53|| 2006-07-24 11:53|| Front Page Top

#4 a 1000 ME(e) heavy water reactor

Correction, this is 1000 MW Thermal

Posted by john 2006-07-24 12:09|| 2006-07-24 12:09|| Front Page Top

#5 Guess they must have finished taking care of all those desperate earthquake victims.

According to the Pak physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, the aid money from the 1971 earthquake was diverted to fund the nuclear weapons program.

He warned last year that a repeat of this was possible.

Posted by john 2006-07-24 12:11|| 2006-07-24 12:11|| Front Page Top

#6 Thank you for confirming my worst suspicions, john. These Pakistani maggots are one of our major enemies.

Posted by Zenster 2006-07-24 12:16|| 2006-07-24 12:16|| Front Page Top

#7 Where are the Pakis getting that much heavy water? And why would they, since they can enrich uranium and therefore make more compact reactors? Or did John correct the article and say it is some other type of reactor, like graphite?

Posted by ed 2006-07-24 12:56|| 2006-07-24 12:56|| Front Page Top

#8 The article claims it is a heavy water reactor and implies they also have the ability to extract tritium from heavy water reactor coolant (something that only two countries - Canada and India are known to have developed the technology for).

Paks don't have a heavy water production plant so they will probably buy it from China, in violation of NSG rules.

The enriched uranium production at Kahuta is not commercial scale. It is enough for a small bomb program but not enough to fuel an entire reactor.

Posted by john 2006-07-24 13:36|| 2006-07-24 13:36|| Front Page Top

#9 Thanks.

Posted by ed 2006-07-24 17:06|| 2006-07-24 17:06|| Front Page Top

#10 Where 'ya been Zenman?

Posted by 6 2006-07-24 17:25|| 2006-07-24 17:25|| Front Page Top

#11 With that much plutonium..............

I really don't want to think about it.

But you know that when I was at the Prefix 5 class at Oberammergau back in the 70's I had a Brit Commander in the class that said one day when we were learning how to assemble a .75kT tactical nuke "you do know of course Major that one of these days one of those arab nutjob fanatics is going to get their mitts on one of these things and we are all going to have hell to pay for it"
Very Prophetic words that wake me in the middle of the night these days..........OFTEN

Posted by Sock Puppet of Doom 2006-07-24 19:37|| 2006-07-24 19:37|| Front Page Top

#12 Here is the link to the ISIS report with satellite photos.

Here is the money paragraph from the report:

Based on the apparent rate of construction, the reactor could be finished within a few years. However, nothing suggests that Pakistan is moving quickly to finish this reactor. The driving forces behind the reactor completion schedule could be a shortage of necessary reactor components or other parts of the weapons-production infrastructure, such as the rate of heavy water production, the availability of a sufficient fuel reprocessing capacity or, perhaps, the availability of sufficient modern tritium recovery and packaging facilities. For example, Pakistan may not have enough heavy water for this reactor, which could require about 100-150 tonnes of heavy water. The Khushab site has a heavy water production plant2 able to produce an estimated 13 tonnes of heavy water a year, a relatively small production capability. Pakistan may not be able to reprocess all of the anticipated irradiated fuel from this reactor. It is known to process fuel to separate plutonium at the New Labs facility at Rawalpindi, and this facility was expanded between about 1998 and 2002. However, this increase in capacity was believed to be associated with the smaller, heavy water reactor.

So are the Saudis cutting back on the funding? Is AQ Khan's network still too crippled to deliver the goods? Or are the Pakis just too corrupt and incompetent to finish it off?

Posted by 11A5S 2006-07-24 19:39|| 2006-07-24 19:39|| Front Page Top

#13 Prefix 5 class at Oberammergau back in the 70's
Any chance of banning the nic thief?

Posted by 6 2006-07-24 20:43|| 2006-07-24 20:43|| Front Page Top

#14 So are the Saudis cutting back on the funding? Is AQ Khan's network still too crippled to deliver the goods? Or are the Pakis just too corrupt and incompetent to finish it off?

The reactor and associated facilities require serious industrial infrastructure that Pak just doesn't have.
This is a country that is not able to make a high speed lathe, or a tractor.
It produces less than 50 PhDs per annum at present, in all fields.

During the first 40 years, all the universities and research institutions in Pakistan produced only 128 PhDs in scientific disciplines

According to Hoodbhoy
Although this country is home to 150 million people, there are perhaps fewer than 20 computer scientists of sufficient calibre who could possibly get tenure-track positions at some B-grade US university. In physics, even if one roped in every competent physicist in the country, it would not be possible to staff even one single good department of physics. As for mathematics: it is impossible to find even five real mathematicians in Pakistan. The social sciences are no better.

Posted by john 2006-07-24 21:17|| 2006-07-24 21:17|| Front Page Top

#15 This has really been a very counterproductive move by China. I am not at all sure that the US and India would be nearly as close were it not for radiant Pakistan. Likewise with their little Korean puppet cementing U. S. relations with Japan. Right there they've made enemies of one third of the world's population and GDP. I doubt this will help their demographic difficulties.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-07-24 21:30|| 2006-07-24 21:30|| Front Page Top

00:05 JosephMendiola
23:53 JosephMendiola
23:48 RWV
23:46 JosephMendiola
23:45 RWV
23:39 Swamp Blondie
23:38 Swamp Blondie
23:38 JosephMendiola
23:31 DMFD
23:31 RWV
23:13 gorb
23:12 Inspector Clueso
23:04 Thravirong Sloluling4860
23:03 crosspatch
23:03 Inspector Clueso
22:41 Shieldwolf
22:39 Griper Whegum8464
22:34 BA
22:27 Shieldwolf
22:20 Captain America
22:20 Griper Whegum8464
22:19 DoDo
22:08 Poison Reverse
22:01 Classical_Liberal