Andreas Persbo has a great post up marking the 10th anniversary of India’s 1998 tests of several nuclear weapons. He has Google Earth placemarks and everything, so check it out.

I will humbly note my recent post on India’s aborted 1994 nuclear test.

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Here’s a silly post about Russia’s new Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. There are some serious posts in the works, I promise!

The President of the Russian Federation website has been quite dramatically updated with information on Dmitry Medvedev in the last few days. For the Russian speakers, the Uznai Prezidenta update is quite priceless. However, for the English speakers, I want to specifically point out Medvedev’s Photo Album and the section About Myself. The quote below is how Medvedev describes his choice of career…

“To be honest, I didn’t give much thought as a child to what I would like to do when I grew up. I liked being out and about, playing games, playing sport, but later, as I grew a bit older, there were several professions that interested me. I wanted to go into chemistry (I really liked the chemistry experiments we did in school), and I also wanted to become a teacher.”

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As you may have heard, Kiriyenko and Burns signed the Agreement for Cooperation in the Field of Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy today in Moscow. (RIA Novosti) I’ll update this post with more links later on. For now, here is the corresponding Rosatom press release.

The White House also issued a press release stating that the “President is pleased” at the signing of the 123 Agreement, which

“will provide a framework for potential commercial sales of civil nuclear commodities to Russia by U.S companies… [and] pave the way for further cooperation under both bilateral and multinational programs and initiatives on nuclear energy and nonproliferation, such as the July 2007 U.S.-Russia Declaration on Nuclear Energy and Nonproliferation and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).”

Check out the Presidential Determination 2008-19, which states…

“I have determined that the performance of the Agreement will promote, and will not constitute an unreasonable risk to, the common defense and security. Pursuant to section 123 b. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2153(b)), I hereby approve the proposed Agreement and authorize the Secretary of State to arrange for its execution.”

Also, chew on a great Nuclear Threat Initiative issue brief on the U.S.-Russian 123 that a CNS colleague wrote some time back.

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The Acronym Institute has some neat reporting on the PrepCom that should be checked out by all. Day One seems to have been quite exciting…

At the end of the day, Syria exercised its right of reply, saying it regretted Canada’s “misleading allegations of nuclear activities” in Syria, which it called a “falsification of the facts… totally undocumented and untrue”. Noting that these allegations had also been taken up by France and Japan, Syria blamed the US administration and said it believed that the purpose of such allegations was to influence the Six Party negotiations on North Korea. It called on the US to “be wise enough to stop creating further crises in the Middle East, which is already suffering a lot due to the confusion and mistakes of US policy”, and suggested that if Canada really wanted to contribute to peace it would call on Israel to join the NPT and dismantle its nuclear weapons and facilities.

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The reactor featured last week in that video had a production capacity of 1-2 SQs of Pu per year, according to CIA director Hayden. This is apparently based on the assessment that the reactor was the same size as the Nork reactor at Yongbyon.

The reactor was of a “similar size and technology” to North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor, Hayden said, disputing speculation it was smaller than the Korean facility.

“We would estimate that the production rate there would be about the same as Yongbyon, which is about enough plutonium for one or two weapons per year,” he said.

Too bad there isn’t some international agency with the capacity to provide an independent assessment of this sort of thing…

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Since “rogue states” are not my area of day to day focus, you’ll have to forgive my seemingly out of touch postings. I’ve been doing long overdue homework on Russia’s BN-800 fast neutron reactor today and thought I’d pass along a link to the very useful IAEA Fast Reactor Database. Even though the FRDB appears to not have been updated for some time, it’s still probably the neatest clearinghouse of information for technical newbies (like me).

The BN-800 (IAEA FRDB backgrounder) will be used in dispositioning of a substantial portion of the 34 metric tons of Russia’s excess military plutonium, as has been articulated in this U.S.-Russian November 2007 MoU. Russia plans to operate the BN-800 (or Beloyarsk-4), expected to be launched in 2012, as a burner and not a breeder of plutonium.

This Argonne Lab overview and map of Soviet/Russian fast reactors is a bit dated, but useful as well. Finally, here is a paper with pretty cool visuals that explains some of the basics of MOX fuel manufactured by the vibropacking method, which is an option considered for the BN-800.

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In early February, the State Department responded to some Questions for The Record about the six party talks and North Korean denuclearization. You can download their response, but I want to highlight the portion discussing the state of the Yongbyon facilities. (AKA, the place with the reactor that was disabled without anyone bombing anything).

You may have heard that the facilities were at the end of their useful life span when the North Koreans shut them down this past summer. State, however, says that such is not the case:

U.S. experts currently overseeing disablement activities at Yongbyon have stated that in their view, if the site had not been shut down and sealed under monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the facility could have remained operational and would have continued to produce additional fissile material. Indeed, the 5 MW(e) reactor was in operation and producing plutonium up until the date of its shutdown, and several areas of the fuel rod fabrication facility were also in operation until mid-July. Although the reprocessing plant was not in operation at that time, it had operated as recently as 2005 when the DPRK unloaded and reprocessed its previous core load of spent fuel.

If the core facilities had not been shut down in July 2007, the DPRK could have produced enough additional plutonium for several more nuclear weapons. Department of Energy experts found no indications that the site was at the end of its operational life.

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You can find it here or download it.

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That’s what it looks like in this AFP story.

I had thought of most of the official’s arguments, but this one jumped out at me:

A nuclear physicist close to the United Nations atomic watchdog cast doubt Saturday on the veracity of US intelligence which claimed that Syria had been building a secret atomic reactor.

“When you look at the (US intelligence services) pictures, they show only raw construction,” an expert close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told AFP on condition on anonymity.

“It was just the shell of a site, and the walls did not look like the ones needed for a plutonium reactor.”

Walls of a plutonium reactor “need a lot of piping, there was nothing like that on the pictures,” he added.

Still trying to wrap my head around this, in between doing other things.

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I think a list of people in the community who have not been associated with ACA, Monterey, or CSIS would be pretty short.

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