If President Donald Trump decides to use the largest conventional bomb in the United States to destroy the Nuclear Enrichment Center of Fordo Fordo de Iran, the colossal force of the explosion would probably cause victims among workers or any other person even on the site.
But it would not trigger a nuclear explosion or a generalized radiological or chemical spill, according to former nuclear officials and experts.
Sitting south of the capital of Iran, Tehran, the Fordo plant is used to enrich uranium for the production of nuclear energy or, potentially, a pump. But although this uranium and its chemical by -products can be harmful to ingest or touch without protection equipment, they will not create a broader explosion or regional pollution, analysts say.
That would only be the case if Fordo housed nuclear or eyelets, which the international rangers say and experts is not the case.
“If you are down there and bombarded, you are full,” Hamish of Bretton-Gordon, former officer of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment of the British military, to NBC News, said Thursday.
“But that is because it is a head of 2,500 kilograms (approximately 5,500 pounds) that we are talking about here,” he said, referring to the massive of mass artillery GBU-57 (or MOP), the largest non-nuclear non-nuclear bomb in the world, which only the United States has.
Less than one bunker-buuster and more than a mountain bowl, this is perhaps the only conventional artillery in the world that could do the work if Trump decided to bombard Fordo.
“But if someone thinks this would be like Chernobyl, absolutely not,” said De Bretton-Gordon. “To exploit uranium will not create a nuclear explosion; that is a very complex science, so it is so difficult to make nuclear bombs.”
There are also a few possibilities of a wider escape or spill that affects the surrounding area, according to Mark Nelson, founder and managing director of Radiant Energy Group, a Chicago -based research consultancy.
This is because “nuclear substances in Fordo are very weakly radioactive,” he said. If this is a nuclear plant or missile site, there could be “fission products”, the things in which uranium breaks down during a nuclear reaction, which can cause a broader catastrophe.
However, the scrutiny has sharpened in Fordo when Trump Delibera if he joins Israel’s attacks against Iran.
Iran’s most advanced enrichment center, Fordo was refining the Uranium at 60%, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That is much more than the 3-5% necessary for electrical plants, and much closer to the 90% required to build an eye.
Until 2018, Iran had been fulfilling a historical agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan, which offered Tehran billions of dollars in relief of sanctions in exchange for accepting its nuclear program.
The agreement was sealed by President Barack Obama in July 2015, together with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the United States, Russia, France, China and the United Kingdom, as well as Germany and the European Union. Most independent observers said Iran’s nuclear program was successfully limiting.
That collapsed effectively when Trump moved away from the pact three years later.
Iran had talked to Trump again when Israel began bombing last week. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had no other option because Iran was running towards the construction of a bomb, something that the international atomic energy agency says he has not been able to confirm.
However, the Guardian dog has been worried about Fordo, where the form naturally extracted from uranium becomes a gas and turns at high speed within centrifuging. That separates its heaviest isotope, Uranium-238, from the lighter uranium-235 that can be used for civil purposes or otherwise.
Iran says that Fordo was designed to maintain 3,000 of these centrifugators, a “size and configuration” that is “inconsistent with a peaceful program,” Obama said in 2009.
Observers as from Bretton-Gordon say that the huge MOP pump in the United States could be powerful enough not only to destroy this installation, but indeed if it is under the collapsed mountain. That could produce a similar effect with the sarcophagus built around Chernobyl after disaster in 1986, Bretton-Gordon said.
While the Chernobyl protective enclosure is 40 feet thick, “in Fordo we would be talking about a 200-foot thick sarcophagus,” De Bretton-Gordon said.
That does not mean that the risk of contamination is zero.
If uranium gas is released, it decomposes in part in hydrofluoric acid, a deadly substance that causes deep tissue burns if it is touched without protection equipment and potentially fatal problems for the heart, the lungs and the nervous system if they are inhaled.
“It is an unpleasant chemist to be close without the correct security equipment and procedures,” Nelson said at Radiant Energy Group. He said that any explosion survivor, or rescuer without the necessary security team, would face “extremely severe” consequences, but warned that “you have to really be close and really unprotected.”
There is also the possibility that the radioactive material can be filtered in any water source that is going through the mountain. But probable radioactive levels would be low, detectable instead of harmful, both Nelson and Bretton-Gordon.
Ultimately, Nelson agreed, all these risks pale compared to the threat posed by the MOP pump, whose payload is upward with 5,500 pounds and weighs a total of 30,000 pounds.
“The danger on the beach of salt water ingestion is real, even a few liters could kill you,” he said. “However, this danger is relatively small compared to drowning.”
