The Prague Post Online: Opinion: Iran: Of cool heads and hot reactors

July 7th, 2008

Endowment Fund Book of Lists ONLINE Reservations Classifieds Subscriptions

Iran: Of cool heads and hot reactors

Postview | Search restaurants | Archives

March 14th, 2007 issue

With the United States and Iran squaring off more and more, each preparing to make its case with renewed conviction, the pressure to make the next move wisely grows exponentially.

Iran has denied helping to arm violent radicals in Iraq in their guerrilla warfare against U.S. troops. It has also denied hiding key components of its nuclear fuel enrichment program from international inspectors and has pledged that this technology is only being developed for civilian purposes.

If there’s a single element that the Bush administration is most alarmed over, it’s this last question — and it’s a very good one.

A reasonable enough conundrum to outside observers is why Iran, with one of the world’s best supplies of oil and natural gas, would need to develop nuclear energy as a power source.

The country’s answer is telling: According to the game plan now being laid out by Iran’s leaders, fossil fuels should not be counted on to provide for the long term. By their projections, oil could run out in as little as 80 years and natural gas could be depleted in 200.

If these fossil fuels can be exported, however, and a different source of energy developed, the growing nation of 72 million will have a better ensured future, according to Iran’s energy minister, Parviz Fattah.

As Kamal Danashyar, head of Iran’s parliamentary energy commission, recently told the BBC, every 1,000 megawatts of electricity made from nuclear energy saves the country 10 million barrels of oil. By the schedule currently being followed, the country plans to supply 20 percent of its energy needs from nuclear power over the next two decades.

Impartial energy experts have pronounced this plan sound — indeed, many a nation in the European Union, including the Czech Republic, is making the case these days for renewed development of nuclear power to wean us off of greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels.

But it’s the question of the source of Iran’s nuclear fuel that causes the real contention: Relatively cheap good-quality supplies are available worldwide, even to a nation such as Iran, which is vilified in much of the West.

Iran has little interest in that option, however, instead choosing to make massive, long-term investments in the technology to create its own fuel by enriching uranium. Because enriched uranium is a key component in nuclear bombs, a threat that is foremost in the minds of U.S. security authorities, this policy has the Bush administration up in arms.

Why would Iran continue to risk this kind of wrath rather than import its nuclear fuel? Because imports are subject to supply problems and could be cut off if more powerful nations choose to set up an embargo.

It comes down to suspicion and mistrust, in other words: To be reliant on anyone other than yourself is to be at risk. Such a mentality is understandable in a nation that’s been, like the Czech lands, invaded scores of times over the centuries because of its location at the crossroads of diverse and sometimes opposing populations.

That suspicion and mistrust has grown in the United States, too, since Sept. 11, and for similar reasons.

Let us hope, then, that motivations other than these drive the next critical move in this standoff.

Be the first to add a comment!

Most e-mailed articles
Czech entomologists arrested in India Brno companies hunt for tech workers A healthy break from mediocrity

Related articles
Bush in Prague Heroes' welcome Letters to the Editor U.S. warns of Iran threat Life or death

Most visited in Book of Lists

The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.