Via the Corner, Major Garrett tweets from a briefing by a senior administration official: + deets: Iran facility NOT operational, had abt 3K centrifuges & cld produce 1 or 2 warheads if run to produce highly enriched uranium. Significant. It takes several thousand centrifuges running for approximately a year to produce enough enriched uranium for a single bomb. On August 23, the IAEA reported that Iran was forced to retire a signficant stockpile of their P-1 gas centrifuges due to disrepair. Gas centrifuges used in the enrichment process are highly sensitive to seismic events, if an earthquake or signficant vibration occurs during the gas separation process, the P-1 model breaks easily. Iran — which lies on several active fault areas — has been working on a new model of centrifuge that’s quicker and provides for a greater resistance to cavitation. Though this morning’s revelation was certainly bad news indicating that non-proliferation efforts are going nowhere, I’m somewhat hopeful that Iran’s P-1 centrifuges have been breaking due to a rash of major seismic events over the past decade. This is all tea-leaf reading, but that would explain why Iran built a new model of centrifuge and a brand new underground facility (one that’s also further from a likely Israeli ingress route over the northern Saudi desert).
