Re: [Phys-l] dealing with the media +- evolution

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 12:46  -0500 4/6/08, cliff parker wrote:
> Where is the conjecture?  They have plenty of oil.  Why use nuclear power?
> Your interesting post which I appreciate reading seems to make my point
> (Pu-??? = nuclear weapons) and then calls it conjecture.
Just because a nation is using nuclear power doesn't mean that they 
are planning on using the resulting plutonium to build nuclear 
weapons. India did, but other nations have been using nuclear power 
for decades without building nuclear weapons--Canada for one, but 
there are others. Japan has accumulated several tens of ton of 
plutonium from reprocessing, but has not (yet) made any attempt to 
turn it into weapons.

I agree that having access to plutonium can lead to a great 
temptation to build nuclear weapons, and being able to enrich uranium 
yourself can be another inducement. Iran is quite likely to fall prey 
to both those inducements, but absent direct evidence of that, our 
belief remains conjecture.

I don't think having plenty of oil is necessarily an argument against 
them wanting nuclear power capability. their oil is clearly a great 
natural resource that is probably worth a lot more as an export 
commodity, than it would be for domestic use, so whatever they can 
save for export by generating their domestic electricity by nuclear 
power is probably to their benefit, at least as long as they don't do 
the arithmetic on the cost of nuclear power compared to the cost of 
generating electricity from domestically produced oil or natural gas.

If the somewhat nutty Iranian president hadn't made such a point of 
threatening to nuke Israel, his separate claims that they only want 
nuclear power might be a bit more credible. But what he says, and his 
nation does, seem not to be much in sync, so, as I said, we are both 
engaging in conjecture. I'm not arguing that Iran doesn't want 
weapons; quite the contrary. It's just that unless they test a 
weapon, or give some other concrete evidence, we are speculating, and 
we should acknowledge it as such.

Hugh
--

************************************************************
Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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