Reuters wants us to react to this:
U.N. investigators have found traces of uranium at a Syrian site Washington says was a secret nuclear reactor almost built before Israel bombed the target last year, diplomats said on Monday.
…
"It isn’t enough to conclude or prove what the Syrians were doing but the IAEA has concluded this requires further investigation," said one diplomat accredited to the IAEA."It was a man-made component, not natural (ore). There is no sign there was already nuclear fuel or (production) activity there," another diplomat told Reuters.
Let’s determine the validity of this.
This news is obviously not an IAEA finding but something someone planted with Reuters. The information was leaked by diplomats and "The International Atomic Energy Agency and Syria had no immediate comment."
The IAEA has such fine instruments that it can detect artificially altered, i.e. man-made, Uranium atoms about everywhere in the world. Thanks to the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945 and lots of open air nuke testing in the following years the existence of man-made components of uranium is inevitable and meanwhile provable anywhere on this planet.
The alleged reactor in Syria was supposed to be a copy of the North Korean Yongbon type which is a copy of the UK’s Magnox reactor.
That type uses natural uranium to breed bomb-quality U235 and plutonium. To moderate the process such a reactor needs tons of graphite. If the alleged Syrian whatever was loaded with natural uranium or graphite, lots of such would have been found in detectable traces in the nearby environment.
As there is no leak or factual report that points to increased levels of
natural uranium or graphite in the samples the IAEA took around the site
after the Israelis bombed it, one can only conclude that the Syrian
installation, if it was a reactor at all, was not a filled reactor near operational capability.
Instead some diplomats, i.e. Israeli, U.S. and U.K. operatives accredited to the IAEA in Vienna, now leak that the IAEA found some traces of man-made Uranium around the site.
That might well be correct. They would have found such in my living room too. But that fact would neither prove that my toaster is a nuclear something nor does it prove that my TV was build with the intend of converting it into a reactor.
There is so far nothing, zero, nada that would prove that Syria had one or another kind of nuclear program at all. There was a "Box on the Euphrades" that some Israeli bombers hit for whatever reason. There is zero believable prove that the site had to do with WMDs or other nefarious things.
The Reuters story will sell well. The journalist who was used as propaganda tool by some diplomats will be lauded by his bosses because the news
s/he created will be printed everywhere. There is no reason for Reuters
to verify the basic physics as it will make a nice profit with the
involved scare-mongering.
The whole motive behind this scare is an Israeli plot to maneuver
Syria into a corner where it is seen as a WMD proliferation danger.
That tactic, bare of facts, has worked well with regard to Iran.
Iran has an open and IAEA supervised civil nuclear program to create
energy on a self sustained basis. Such a program could at a point be
abuse for some tiny nuclear weapons program as could similar programs
in the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil and elsewhere.
But Syria does not even have the rudimentary infrastructure for a
civil nuclear energy program and certainly not for a military one.
Asserting otherwise may help the Zionist racist cause and Reuter’s profits. Don’t fall for it.