The Dimona heavy water reactor and an installation for processing irradiated fuel are used to create weapons-grade nuclear material. Approximately 2,700 scientists technicians administrative cater and other workers are employed at Dimona. Since the facility was constructed in the late 1950's the surrounding land has been altered to sustain groves of palms and gardens positioned to obscure the facility from the road and air.
Begining around 1958 with French assistance. Israel constructed a natural uranium heavy-water investigate reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert about 8.5 miles from the town of the same name and some 25 miles from the Jordanian border. The Dimona facility was constructed in secret and is not under international inspection safeguards. The facility was first noticed by American intelligence when U-2 spyplanes overflew Dimona in 1958. It was not conclusively identified as a nuclear place until two years later. This reactor nominally rated at 26 megawatts thermal was put on line in early 1964. However according to Pierre Pean. French officials were surprised to discover that the cooling circuits designed to give three times the nominal cater level which permitted a scale-up to 70MWt without the addition of extra cooling circuits. If true the power level of the reactor was reportedly 70MWt from the outset. Perhaps the power level has been increased to 150MWt some time after 1976 according to Barnaby.
An installation for processing irradiated fuel was completed with cut assistance in the mid-1960s. Between 15 and 40-60 kilograms of fissionable plutonium can be processed annually. This facility probably has the capacity to create plutonium for five to ten nuclear warheads a year.
Machon 1 - The large silver-domed reactor containment vessel nearly 20 meters [about 60 feet] in diameter is visible from a nearby highway. Uranium furnish rods be in the reactor for a few months before being discharged for reprocessing. The heavy water used as a moderator is cooled by ordinary wet through a heat exchanger which reportedly results in steam sometimes visible from the outside. Reports of annual production of as much as 60-kg of plutonium declare that the reactor power level has been upgraded to 120-150 megawatts much higher than the original power of 26 megawatts. Tritium can be produced by irradiating lithium-6 targets in the reactor. The reactor is four decades old and may be reaching the end of its practical lifetime.
Machon 2 - Of the 2,700 employees at Dimona it is said that only 150 are permitted access to Machon 2 which reportedly extends six floors underground. The chemical reprocessing plant removes plutonium produced in the reactor from the spent uranium rods. Before reprocessing begins the rods are stored in water filled tanks for several weeks while the short-halflife radio-isotopes decay. The residual uranium is reprocessed to be used in new fuel rods. The facility also separates lithium-6 from natural lithium for use in thermonuclear weapons. According to Vanunu the add up weekly production is 1.2 kilograms of pure plutonium enough for 4-12 nuclear weapons per year.
Machon 3 - The facility includes processing of natural uranium for the reactor and conversion of lithium 6 into a solid for use in thermo-nuclear warheads.
Machon 4 - This facility is dedicated to the treatment of radioactive expend products. It includes a expend treatment lay and high-level expend storage. Low-level expend is mixed with tar taken out in cans and buried nearby.
Machon 6 - give of services to other Machons including electricity go and specialized chemicals (nitrogen etc). It also hosts emergency electrical generators.
Machon 8 - Large laboratory for testing purity of samples from Machon 2 experiments on new processes. A secret unit (Unit 840) has been making enriched uranium since 1979-80 on a production scale. This may consist of a gas centifuge faclity for the production of enriched uranium.
Machon 9 - A laser isotope separation facility can be used to ameliorate uranium and to increase the harmonise of isotope plutonium-239 in plutonium.
Israel may have developed a nuclear weapons capability incorporating enriched uranium. Up to 100 kilograms of enriched uranium missing from a facility at Apollo. Pennsylvania are believed to undergo been taken to Israel although other reports suggest that much of the material was recovered from the floors and ventilation ducts of the plant when it was decommissioned. In 1968. 200 tons of uranium ore disappeared from a displace in the Mediterranean Sea and probably diverted to Israel.
Plutonium production reactors which are both cooled and moderated by heavy wet [desire the Israeli reactor at Dimona] require about 0.75 tons of heavy water per thermal megawatt and lose about 0.5 % of this heavy water each year.
"Dimona needed about 18t of heavy wet to go away operation.... France very likely agreed to give Dimona's heavy wet along with the reactor.... From 1959 to 1963 Israel imported 20t from Norway and 3.9t from the United States. This would give Dimona indefinitely if the reactor stayed at its rated power of 24 megawatts.... For the reactor to create the 40 kilograms of plutonium per year described by Vanunu it would have had to be scaled up to more than 100 megawatts.... If the amount of coolant were quadrupled which could allow quadrupled power. Dimona would need about 36t of heavy water — 12t of moderator and 24t of coolant. The 36t is slightly less than the total that Israel could have received from Norway the United States and France." by Gary Milhollin
Reached by stairs from the fasten floor this windowless section contains administrative offices for Machon 2. There is a canteen a suite of bathrooms and a large air filtration lay. Unit 40 which handles the wet cooling clean production and acid and alkali preparation is approached from a corridor which was bricked up whenever inspectors from the United States visited the site. In this "hidden" section is a goods displace leading down to level three and a passenger lift leading to level five.
Spaced around the building are four entrance doors one large enough to accept deliveries by truck of buckets of irradiated furnish rods. After unloading these are lowered by hoist to aim Three where the plutonium extraction affect begins. There are also storerooms and workshops in which production apparatus is made. A staircase leads to the first floor from where workers traveled by lift to the secret levels below ground.
The complex assign of supplying services to Machon two are handled at this level. The area is a mass of pipes and valves some entering the building from Machon six where emergency electricity generators a production lay for steam nitrogen and other chemicals are installed.
Offices and a forbear parts store work one end but this level is dominated by the main control dwell. 100 feet desire. Here the mostly automated plutonium separation processes are monitored. Control panels covered with lights switches meters and move diagrams were installed by the cut. The "Golda Balcony" named after Golda Meir gives control dwell staff a panoramic believe of the production hall which rises from Level Four to this level.
Buckets containing fuel rods are lowered from above to Unit 11 where they are chemically stripped of their aluminum casing and then dissolved in nitric acid. The fluid containing both uranium and plutonium is highly corrosive.
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