Iran website: Tehran should make nuclear ship fuel
Source: Associated Press
Iran should enrich uranium to new levels close to weapons-grade to produce fuel for proposed nuclear-powered oil tankers, a conservative Iranian news website said Monday.
Iran currently has no such ships. The commentary by Mashreghnews.ir, which reflects the views of some Iranian hardliners, comes after a parliamentary committee prepared a bill that would require the Islamic Republic to design nuclear-powered merchant ships and provide them with nuclear fuel.
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"To reach nuclear propulsion, the country's nuclear industry inevitably has to upgrade the level of nuclear enrichment to the average level needed for new marine reactors, and that will be 50 to 60 percent," Mashreghnews.ir said.
The website said this will be an "effective step to thwart sanctions and make them ineffective."
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Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jxjBaiXFNUlXhAQQn960RomeVDVw?docId=570956340200440b95ef61fba1a3031e
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)What could possibly go wrong?
muriel_volestrangler
(101,311 posts)No country has ever produced a nuclear-powered tanker. It's not worth it. It's more or less an oxymoron - oil tankers, by definition, go where fuel oil is easily available, and it's not as if you can say "we're stopping global warming" when you're transporting oil. Many ports might ban the ships (for instance, in Britain, there is discussion about what would be done if Scotland gained independence, and threw out the nuclear submarine base at Faslane. One geographically suitable site is Milford Haven, but people point out it's already a major tanker port and oil refinery, and they don't like the mixture of that and nuclear). The only civil ships that have kept with nuclear propulsion (as opposed to a couple of experimental ones) are Russian ice-breakers, and their role has justification - voyages of unknown duration, far from refuelling ports.
For regular ships, nuclear power isn't worth it. But they've noticed that naval propulsion typically uses highly enriched uranium. This is the kind of move that says "yea, we are developing nuclear weapons, but just need the tiny final fig leaf before we've announced we've perfected them".
As an example of the status of nuclear-powered ships, consider the only one the Russians are still running:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
When popular protest kept a Soviet ship out of ports in the Soviet Union, you know that there'd be protests about any Iranian one.