Registan.net, May 9, 2007:
Kazakhstan and Russia are supposedly in talks to establish an official bank in Siberia that will serve as an international repository for enriched uranium… For a situation like Iran, this could prove a useful out. Iran is looking to expand economic ties with Turkmenistan in part because its own oil and gas production facilities are so dilapidated they will be functionally useless in less than a decade. This is also a big reason behind their push for nuclear energy: spending a few billion dollars on nuclear power plants is far less expensive than reinvigorating their entire oil supply chain.
Indeed, Iran has repeatedly said it only wants to enrich uranium for its power plants. The joint Kazakhstani-Russian uranium bank would give Iran a way of acquiring uranium without irking Europe and the U.S. by being two steps away from building nukes. In such a scenario, it is even conceivable that the U.S. (under a different administration, obviously) could offer Iran an India-type bargain, in which it either froze or renounced further weapons research in return for collaboration in building non-breeder reactors, thus side-stepping the weapons issue.
The Boston Globe, June 8, 2009:
As part of a new strategy to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, President Obama plans to seek the creation of the first-ever international supply of uranium that would allow nations to obtain fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but limit the capacity to make bombs, according to senior administration officials.
“We want to give the Iranians an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to peaceful nuclear energy and serve as a new model,” said a top administration official involved in crafting arms-control policy. “What we can do is create a system of incentives where, as a practical matter for countries that want nuclear power, the best way to obtain their fuel and to handle fuel services is through a new international architecture.”
I am in no way associated with the Obama administration. I’m just saying. What’s odd is, I got that Globe link from this WPR blog entry, which seems weirdly unaware of Russia’s and Kazakhstan’s years of effort at creating a world uranium bank. Go figure.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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November 7, 2005:
The bank idea is great for uranium-producing countries, because they make big money off of it, and good for the U.S., because their irrational fears of Iran can be assuaged. But for Iran, there’s no reason to forego a national capability, especially because they have tied the idea of the Islamic Republic’s sovereignty with a native enrichment capability (think the space program in the 1960s in America–imagine if someone told Kennedy or Eisenhower that the U.S. wouldn’t be allowed to develop its own missle boosters for the moon program, but instead would have to borrow from an international consortium). Whether Moussavi or Ahmadinejad comes out of this the winner, that attitude surely won’t change, and it will be a huge concession on their part if they acept an international uranium bank.