The goal was never to destroy the gas-enriching centrifuges at Fordo(which does the enriching to 60%), but to bury the final step at Isfahan which enriches it to a weapons-grade 90%. The article even says “… the senior Israeli official did not express concern about the assessment that some of the stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium, stored in casks, had survived the attack”. In the words of Seymour Hersh: “No enrichment, no Iranian bomb.”
Of course every bit of it survived. U-235 has a half life of over 700m years.
Whether it’s yellowcake or UF6, it was merely dispersed within the facilities and has not been mobilized. Recovery would consist of chemical processing of debris using common chemicals.
Fissile materials like enriched uranium and plutonium can only be neutralized by secure disposal or (nuclear) burn up.
When the USSR fell, US nuclear weapons specialists assisted former Soviet republics with securing the tunnels in which many weapon cores were vaporized by subcritical weapon testing, where a weapon core is imploded in such a manner that reactivity is limited below the level needed for low or high order nuclear detonation.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 23.2 ms ] threadROTFL, we were just talking about Orwell in another thread. I guess not many things have changed in 100 years.
Whether it’s yellowcake or UF6, it was merely dispersed within the facilities and has not been mobilized. Recovery would consist of chemical processing of debris using common chemicals.
Fissile materials like enriched uranium and plutonium can only be neutralized by secure disposal or (nuclear) burn up.
When the USSR fell, US nuclear weapons specialists assisted former Soviet republics with securing the tunnels in which many weapon cores were vaporized by subcritical weapon testing, where a weapon core is imploded in such a manner that reactivity is limited below the level needed for low or high order nuclear detonation.