But it applies all over the place.
"The JCPOA would have stopped this!" Unless of course it wouldn't.
It depends what state they store it in.
Take cerium, for example. You look at the price of cerium per ounce, you'll get weird results--even when they say just "cerium" they mean cerium oxide. The oxide isn't useful; you need the metal to make the alloy.
Same for UF6, what they get out of the centrifuges (and what they put in). They heat the UF6 and centrifuge the gas. Take the heaviest fraction and separate it out. And the U is enriched. They let it cool to room temperature and it's a solid. But it's pretty useless because of all the fluorine.
Next step is to make it into a metal. This is where you risk "teasing the dragon" or whatever they call it at Alamo in the '40s. Get too much of that enriched metal in one place it will start to undergo a chain reaction, glow, produce gobs of radiation. That's bad. Get more in one place and it'll start to heat up and maybe meltdown. That's worse. It's safer to store the U as UF6.
So it's stored as UF6. But until you remove the fluorine--which will result in anything from a lump to a lot of microfine U-235 powder, depending how you let it condense back down to a solid--no bomb in the offing. (That's the point being made. It sublimates above any temperature we'd want to try to survive, but below water's boiling point.) Whether they can do that is a different point, but a valid one. Why?
Because all the reports are that they could resume *enriching* uranium in a few weeks to a few months--depending on what we don't know. "Enriching" is bad, but doesn't automatically later that afternoon allow something to be placed in a bomb, unless it's just a dirty bomb and you want to spread U-235 all over the place.
= new reply since forum marked as read