Gchine analysis

Reading Jeffrey Lewis’s great post today, I have decided to share some preliminary analysis I wrote up a week ago or so, but never posted. I believe I come to a similar conclusion as Jeffrey. I should also note that I briefly discussed my findings with a person who does this for a living this week. This person could not comment on the analysis as such, since he or she hasn’t seen it. The analyst did, however, comment: “the tailing pond is filling up really fast - and it's a really big pond”. The figures are processed by a sophisticated piece of fuel cycle analysis software.

Gchin is mined by open-pit method. According to the Red Book, the ore grade is 2,000 parts per million and the mine contains about 100 tonnes of uranium. In other words, Iran should be able to dig up about 50,000 metric tonnes of ore before the mine is exhausted. The declared mining capacity is about 55 metric tonnes per day and the average mining recovery is declared to be somewhere between 85 and 90 per cent.

The ore is then shipped to the Bandar-Abbas Uranium Production Plant in southern Iran. Bandar-Abbas is own and run by the government. Its planned capacity is 21 metric tonnes of uranium per year. The facility is hence capable of treating about 48 tonnes of uranium ore per day. A simple mathematical operation (dividing the declared amount of ore with the planned capacity) shows that the mine is completely mined out in a little under three years. The entire mining and milling operation employs about 280 people, and is all carried out by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).This is all, again, according to the Red Book, which just states official Iranian declarations.

Bandar Abbas extracts uranium through acid leaching. Operating at full capacity, the mill would generate roughly 9,874 metric tonnes of tailings per year. What this equates to in volume depends on the density of the tailings. But it’s likely to be something like 5,000 cubic meters. The known factor here is sulphuric acid. The mill would require some 467 metric tonnes of acid per year (for the leaching). This is about 254 cubic meters. Assuming that density of the mined material is roughly equivalent to sand and gravel (it is a salt plug after all), the remaining 9.407 metric tonnes of waste would be equivalent to about 4,657 cubic meters.

However, the area covered with waste at the mill is 10,000 square meters (see the southernmost pond in this image). The depth is difficult to estimate, but appears to be around a meter. That equals, obviously, a volume of 10,000 cubic meters. That would explain why analysts in Vienna reportedly are quite surprised at the speed of which this new deposit area is filling up. It’s filling up too fast. Of course, this calculation is based on the declared capacity of the mill. Iran could have invested some money into making it capable of handling more ore.

How much weapons grade uranium can you then get out of Gchine if it’s working at a declared capacity? The answer to that question depends on what processes you use and what your loss fractions you have in the conversion process (that’s generally around 2 per cent). It also depends on how much enrichment capacity you have and how you configure your cascade. Finally, it depends on what your loss fraction is in the metal fabrication process (that’s generally around a per cent). Your assessment will vary wildly depending on your assumptions.

A Qom style facility, with 3,000 centrifuges, would, if tails are set to a wasteful 0.4 per cent, be able to produce some 57.7 kilograms of 93 per cent enriched uranium hexafluoride gas per year. If tails were set to 0.2 per cent, which is the industrial standard, the same facility would produce 43.29 kilograms. 57 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride gas is roughly equivalent to 38 kilograms of uranium metal.

But that’s all theoretical, of course.