ISIS has published the full text of the new DG Report on Implementation of Safeguards in Iran.
Eight cascades were operating and being fed on May 13, but don’t seem to be linked into a single unit:
Since the Director General’s last report, Iran has fed approximately 260 kg of UF6 into the cascades at FEP. Iran has declared that it has reached enrichment levels up to 4.8% U-235 at FEP, which the Agency is in the process of verifying. On 13 May 2007, eight 164-machine cascades were operating simultaneously and were being fed with UF6; two other similar cascades had been vacuum tested and three more were under construction.
260 kg since of UF6 is a more reasonable amount. Probably not full operation (I have to sit down this afternoon and make some educated guess about when the cascades came online). But Iran does seem to be making steady progress toward continuous operation of their centrifuges—maybe more than half the time, from a colleague’s back-of-the-envelope calculation.
marley | May 23, 2007
given that at least two or three of the cascades have been operational and tested for quite some time, why do they seem to be delaying linking at least a few of the cascades? My impression has been that the operation of the linked cascasdes will be the real challenge – seems like they are moving very slowly in that regard for a country which could be on the receiving end of a few GBU-28s or BLU-118s not to mention that RNEP that Cheney keeps under his desk..just in case of course :)
yale | May 23, 2007
Linking cascades is not strictly necessary. Batch processing is quite sufficient for weapons production (and confers some advantages).
In any event, if the Iranians do link arrays, they may be waiting to build out the FEP in order to minimize the number of linkage steps (which are touchy)
yale | May 24, 2007
Looks like Elbaradei still does not get it.
He needs to do the math…
Copying my post from TotalWonkerr.com