The NYT is back to spread disinformation about a perceived U.S. enemy. NYT staff reporter Michael Slackman writes: Iran Opens a Heavy-Water Reactor
On Saturday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a provocative, if symbolic, gesture by formally inaugurating a heavy-water reactor. The Iranians say the plant would be used for peaceful power generation. But nuclear experts note that heavy-water facilities are more useful for weapons because they produce lots of plutonium — the preferred ingredient for missile warheads.
That paragraph hardly includes a relevant fact:
- Iran did not open a heavy-water reactor, but a plant to produce heavy water. It is building a heavy-water reactor, but that reactor will not open any time soon. The now opened plant will have a capacity of 16 tons of heavy water per year. The 40 megawatt research reactor to be build will need about 80 to 90 tons of heavy water to start operating. It will not be finished before 2009 and the needed amount of heavy water will only be available on an even later date.
- The experts claiming that heavy-water reactors are more useful for weapons than for electricity production should explain why all 18 operational Canadian nuclear plants are heavy-water types and why Germany and France do use heavy water research reactors as neutron sources for material science projects
- The perfect ingrediant for missile warheads is definitly not Plutonium. About 99.999+% of missile warheads in this world use non-nuclear explosives. Iran has neither the missile- nor the nuclear technology to produce any threatening guided rocket with a nuclear warhead.
Starting with headline up to the very end, the readers of the article are not informed about the issue but dragged into assumptions of an immediate danger.
Judith Miller would have been proud had she written that piece.