00:00For years now, there has been speculation among diplomatic and defence circles that
00:22Iran is secretly building a nuclear bomb.
00:26This speculation surfaced once again when the US struck Iran's nuclear facilities
00:31in June, including Natanz, Isfahan and Fodo.
00:37Natanz and Fodo are Iran's uranium enrichment sites, and Isfahan is the site that provides
00:43the raw materials.
00:45Now, even though Iran has repeatedly claimed that all its nuclear programmes are peaceful
00:51in nature, even the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, has refused to guarantee
00:58the same.
01:00Here it becomes important to understand what uranium enrichment actually is, and how it
01:05can ultimately be used to create a nuclear weapon.
01:09First, we need to understand what it means to enrich uranium.
01:14And to understand that, we need to know about uranium isotopes and about how an atom splits
01:19in a nuclear fission reaction.
01:22We all know that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.
01:28Uranium has a fixed number of protons, 92.
01:31But there are different varieties of uranium, all with 92 protons but different numbers of
01:36neutrons.
01:38These different versions of the same atom are what we call isotopes.
01:43Now there are broadly two main isotopes of uranium.
01:46One is uranium-238, which has 92 protons and 146 neutrons.
01:53And the other is uranium-235, with 92 protons and 143 neutrons.
01:59Of these two isotopes, uranium-238 makes up 99.27% of all naturally occurring uranium, while
02:08uranium-235 is just 0.072%.
02:14And this is where the main challenge lies when using uranium for a nuclear program.
02:19Nuclear power reactors and nuclear weapons work only on the uranium-235 isotope because
02:27it's the only one that can sustain a chain-fission reaction, the process that produces energy.
02:33This is where enrichment comes in.
02:36Uranium enrichment basically means taking naturally found uranium and increasing the proportion
02:42of uranium-235 by removing uranium-238.
02:46For what we call a peaceful nuclear reaction, just 3-5% uranium-235 is enough to sustain a chain
02:53reaction and produce electricity.
02:56But to make a nuclear weapon, uranium-235 needs to be enriched to at least 20%.
03:03This is called highly enriched uranium.
03:07Coming back to Iran's nuclear program, the IEEA says Iran has already enriched large quantities
03:13of uranium to 60%.
03:15And from this point, Tehran can relatively easily go up to 90% enriched uranium, what
03:21we call weapons-grade uranium.
03:23This is why Iran is considered at extreme risk of producing nuclear weapons, keeping the entire
03:29Middle East, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, and even the United States, in a constant state
03:35of tension, fearing that Iran may soon emerge as a nuclear weapons state.
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