BRAZIL ANNOUNCES EXPANDED URANIUM ENRICHMENT PROGRAM.
The Brazilian government has stepped up its uranium-enrichment capacity in an effort to increase its self-sufficiency in producing fuel for its nuclear industry. The move to increase uranium enrichment parallels efforts in Iran to do the same, efforts that the US says are a cover for the production of nuclear weapons. Brazil's government says that its program pertains only to commercial use of nuclear fuel, not military use, especially since the Constitution bans producing nuclear weapons. Brazil's announcement of increased enrichment activities may also signal an attempt to become a more powerful player on the world stage and within the UN.
Enrichment center to cut out European intermediaries
Brazil inaugurated a uranium-enrichment center capable of producing nuclear fuel for its power plants earlier this month. The center will save millions of dollars the country now spends to enrich fuel at Urenco, a European enrichment consortium, Science and Technology Minister Sergio Rezende told the government news agency Agencia Brasil on May 6.
Brazil has the world's sixth-largest uranium reserves with important deposits in the northeastern state of Bahia, but has been unable to use the material for energy without shipping it to and from Urenco. Rezende stressed Brazil's commitment to the peaceful use of nuclear energy at a ceremony May 5 at the plant built on a former coffee plantation in Resende, about 60 km northwest of Rio de Janeiro.
The government-run Industrias Nucleares do Brasil SA (INB) has been conducting final tests at the enrichment plant, which is set to open this year. With its opening, Brazil will join the world's nuclear elite.
Brazil says its plant will be capable of enriching natural uranium to less than 5% uranium-235, an isotope needed to fuel its two reactors. Warheads need ore that has been enriched to 95% uranium-235, a material Brazil says it cannot and will not produce.
"If you can enrich to 5%, you're decades away from enriching to 90%," Odair Dias Goncalves, president of the Comissao Nacional de Energia Nuclear, told the Associated Press. "You need a whole new technology that we don't have."
But David Albright, a former UN inspector who runs the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said he worked with Goncalves at the Brazilian Physics Society on a project to show that the Brazilian centrifuges could be used to produce highly enriched uranium, even if that was not their intended use. "Centrifuges are very flexible,"...
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