S8 Ep689: 14. NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION RISKS AT BUSHEHR REACTOR GUEST: Henry Sokolski Henry Sokolski discusses the security risks at Iran’s Bushehr reactor, which contains 210 tons of spent fuel with weapons-usable plutonium. He stresses the urgent need for real-time
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 5 minutes
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14. NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION RISKS AT BUSHEHR REACTORGUEST: Henry Sokolski Henry Sokolski discusses the security risks at Iran’s Bushehr reactor, which contains 210 tons of spent fuel with weapons-usable plutonium. He stresses the urgent need for real-time monitoring to prevent the diversion of nuclear materials. (14)
AUGUST 1930
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel with my colleague Henry Sikolsky of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center. |
| 0:20.8 | Henry, what is Boucher and what's there that we need to worry about? |
| 0:24.7 | Boucher is a reactor that started off being built by Germany and was completed by Russia. |
| 0:30.4 | It came online. |
| 0:32.0 | It's one gigawatt of electrical capacity, roughly, and it came online in 2011. |
| 0:38.2 | In Iran. |
| 0:39.4 | In Iran, at a place called Bouchier, where there are a good number of people who live. |
| 0:45.8 | And the plutonium risk of any reactor you've taught me to be cautious about. |
| 0:51.2 | What is the consideration of a regime that violates routinely |
| 0:54.9 | the NPT? What about the rods at Boucher? Are they secure? Okay. Now, it's operated since |
| 1:04.0 | 2011. The Russians said they would take the spent fuel out because the spent fuel, about 1% of it, contains |
| 1:13.1 | plutonium after it's been in the reactor. |
| 1:16.2 | Plutonium is a weapons material. |
| 1:18.0 | You can make a bomb out of it if you chemically strip it out. |
| 1:21.3 | Well, guess what? |
| 1:23.3 | They never actually took any of the material out. |
| 1:26.6 | And the Russians admitted in a recent article |
| 1:28.5 | that there's 210 tons of spent fuel there. Okay, do some calculations conservatively. That's over, |
| 1:40.6 | it contains over 200 bombs worth of weapons usable plutonium. Now, you have to filch the spent |
| 1:50.7 | fuel rods out of the spent fuel pond. You have to take them someplace where you can chemically |
| 1:55.8 | strip out the plutonium from all the other byproducts, then you got to convert that to oxide, |
| 2:01.4 | then you got to convert that to metal, then you got to machine it. So, okay, it's not right |
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